The Rain in Spain

The small guidebook I had bought on Madrid said that one of the great things about it is that no matter the season, it is always sunny. I arrived to a gray sky which opened as the cabbie drove to the city. If I hadn't read that line, I wouldn't have felt cheated, but the writer had given me expectations.

Madrid looks so different than Italy. It still feels like a distant cousin, but visually it is not at all the same. Its buildings are tall and clean-looking, polished and white and ornate, and it seems all the ones on corners are round and not angular. They look grand, as my mother would say. Rich and new, compared to Italy's colorful but dark narrow streets and buildings that have dilapidated facades (which I find beautiful). Like New York, streets in Bologna and Florence and Venice have a gritty, busy, gray feel to them. Spain felt more like DC.

Other differences: Very few places on the street where you can dodge in and grab a panini, pizza, or pastry to eat en route (or even eat there), whereas in Italy they are every block or two. No bidets in the bathrooms. And no laws against smoking inside restaurants.

My hotel is hip, or at least is trying to be. The elevator only has a blue light in it, the kind that illuminates anything white that you are wearing, and nothing else. It is not as cool as they probably thought it would be when they designed it. When you are in an elevator, you want to be able to see things more clearly and it somehow makes it harder to think clearly too. Then you get out and are all blinky because regular lights are so much brighter.

My room has a long entrance hallway with a blue light at the end of it. Turns out it is a blue plastic sliding door to the bathroom, lit from behind. The closets are the same. Inside one closet there is a cardboard storage box I think I have seen at the Container Store. It has snacks in it; their version of the minibar. The bathroom has red accents, a very high tub wall (can't be good if you are very tired in the morning or not limber), and a purple shower curtain. The sink has double faucets over a long rectangular basin. The left one sprays directly upward and backward.

I have a terrace, which was exciting. It was cold and windy out there, but I was standing among the ornate Spanish building facades. I looked up and there were cherubs sculpted above me. Across the street was a stately structure with high ceilings. On the corner, a gorgeous rounded building with an enclosed glass space that looked like a capsule.

The truly cool thing about the hotel is that poetry is etched onto every landing and over every bed. I loved having it there. Unfortunately, it was mostly in Spanish. I asked the front desk if they had translations of them and the guy said I should copy the poems down with the authors' names and I could probably find a translation somewhere. I couldn't have been the first non-Spanish-speaking guest there. I'm sure they spent time choosing the poems. A booklet with translations would be a plus. However, I was on the only floor that had an English quote on the landing, so that was a nice discovery.

I had to keep remembering to say "Hola" and "Adios" instead of "Ciao". Other than that, I could only get by with my limited Italian because no one really knew English.

I know two people who hated the food in Spain and I had prepared myself for the same because it is so meat-heavy there. I decided to go to the supermarket and get things for late night, the plane, and also breakfast, since I would be up too early to eat it elsewhere. The supermarket had a huge cooler with containers of gazpacho in it, the same kind of containers you get with orange juice. Everything was little more than a Euro. I guess it's a staple here. I did think the food options in the supermarket were a lot more appealing in Italy. But the men were striking. As much as Italian men are attractive, Spaniards were surprisingly and extremely good-looking, uniformly. Or maybe just the cute ones go grocery shopping on Monday nights?

I had received two restaurant recommendations from the hotel, and had found about eight others in my guidebook. But I ended up going to a place I walked by that was no frills and had a lot of locals in it, as well as a sign outside that they had vegetarian options. I almost did not order the vegetable paella because the wait for any paella is 20-30 minutes. But I am so glad I did. My first paella, and it was fantastic.