MADRID TAKES STAMINA

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Being There: Fiona Maharg-Bravo reports on life in a city that never sits down to a meal until it has to ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, January/February 2012

At first, the hardest thing about living in Madrid is making it through the morning. Most lunch meetings don’t start before 2.30, and they last a couple of hours. Then the tricky part is going back to work.

For outsiders, living in Madrid is like being forever jet-lagged. I was no stranger to the marathon days, having spent most of my childhood summers in a small village near Salamanca, where my mother was born. My family lived in Madrid for a year when I was 14, and my husband is Spanish. But moving here with my own family four years ago and adjusting to the rhythms of Madrid, after living most of my life in Chicago and London, was not easy.

Madrid is chaotic and orderly at the same time, its citizens caught in the slow and the fast lanes. There are at least four rush hours a day. The working day can often stretch to 8 or 9pm, and most restaurants don’t start to buzz until 10. Clubs get going much later than that, when everyone gets a second wind. “Nobody goes to bed in Madrid until they have killed the night,” Hemingway wrote, decades ago. It still rings true.

Commuters are in their cars as early as 7am, filling the air with a cacophony. Cars are still the preferred mode of transport, even though Madrid has a superb metro that is heavily subsidised and laughingly cheap compared with London’s tired tube. Well-heeled Madrileños are seldom seen on the metro, though they are a bit more partial to the bus.

To survive, a friend advised, you have to play by their rules. This means having a coffee and a nibble at noon. It means running errands at 11 on a weekday because most shops are still closed at lunch time, on Sundays and the various public holidays that are hard to keep track of. It means always running a little late. Ideally, it means going home for lunch and resting afterwards. Distances are short in the city centre, but many workers live in the sprawling suburbs. The siesta tradition, at least on weekdays, is nearly defunct.

Madrileños are sleep-deprived, but they may not know any different. Children are trained for it, from the time they can be pushed out of the door in a pram at midnight on a warm summer’s evening. My young children’s friends may not get to sleep before 10pm on a weeknight, and are up at 7.30 to catch the school bus. No wonder they tend to sleep in late at weekends, like their exhausted parents.

Living in Madrid requires a further type of stamina. The locals love to talk. I was having lunch with some American friends at a city-centre restaurant when one of them was struck by something about the next table. It was a table of five Spanish women, probably in their 40s, and they were all talking and shouting at the same time. And this went on for two hours.

The chaos is deceptive, however. Family homes tend to be orderly and clean. Lunch is always at least two courses, the table perfectly set. Everything is ironed—even sheets, socks and underwear. This is largely thanks to plentiful domestic help. Spain’s construction boom attracted millions of immigrants, mostly from Latin America, and many are employed in Spanish homes. They are the unsung heroines who grease the wheels of life for many families in Madrid. Cheap help allows both parents to work those long hours and still have a house that runs like clockwork.

Spanish children are as impeccably dressed as their parents: at weekends, you see siblings dressed in the same clothes, like the von Trapp family. The smarter shops make this easy by sorting clothes by styles, rather than size. Protocol is observed elsewhere, too. Children are insistently told to kiss everyone hello and goodbye, though parents seem to be more laissez-faire about other habits. Rare is the day that one of my children doesn’t come home with sweet wrappers from some event at school: sweets are seen as more of a right than a privilege. When getting out of a lift, you must say “see you later” even if you’ll never see the people again in your life. Yet for all these conventions, Madrileños are known for being abrupt, even rude—probably for lack of sleep. And the pavements, although cleaner than before, are still apt to be spattered with dog poo.

A few months after we moved in, our next-door neighbour, whom we hadn’t even met, doubled the height of the spiky steel fence between our gardens. Most suburban houses are surrounded by huge walls designed to keep others out. We live in Aravaca, just down the A6 motorway, but still technically part of Madrid. The contrast with my hometown in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, couldn’t be greater. Forget chats with loyal neighbours across picket fences. Here, it is all about how to plant a strategic tree so your neighbour can’t look into your garden.

Befriending a true Madrileño takes effort. Those born and bred in the city have extended family, plus dozens of friends from school, university and work, so they don’t have a lot of time for new people. And yet this is the most welcoming large city in Spain. There are plenty of Spaniards from other regions here who adapt quickly; it is easy to blend in. Madrid is a lot more cosmopolitan than when I first lived here in 1989.

Foreigners who spend time here mostly rave about it. I’ve known several American families who have passed through for a year or more to learn the language, and one mother tells me: “You come to Spain and you’re greeted with a kiss on both cheeks and a platter of Serrano ham. There is no comparison to France.” But other immigrants, particularly non-white ones, can expect rougher treatment. Racial tension, while tame in comparison with the Paris banlieues or the south side of Chicago, is undoubtedly there.