I thought Spanish Customs might take a while.  It didn't.  Here's how it went.  I waited in line for about 20 minutes at Terminal 4 of Madrid's Barajas airport after getting off my flight from Dallas -- it's a new, colossal terminal with a soaring roof and support beams that are each painted slightly different colors in a gradient, so I didn't notice the change as I walked but saw it when I looked back.  When I got to the front of the customs line, the agent behind a thick plate of glass asked me something in Spanish that I didn't understand, so I said, "Estados Unidos" and pushed my passport across the counter.  Without really looking, he flipped it open to a random blank page and stamped it, handing it back and motioning me past him.  I assumed there would be another desk or something where he pointed, but the hallway just led to the terminal exit and baggage claim.  The girl who had been in line behind me, also an American, caught up to me and said, "Welcome to Spain."  I asked, "That's it?"  She said, "That's it."

Who am I?  I'm a student at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, pursuing a self-created major comprised of communication studies, sustainability studies, and environmental sciences, policy, and management.  "Environmental Communication" is a fairly accurate way to summarize it.  It's the second semester of my junior year, but I'm on a semester-long leave of absence from school at the moment to do an internship in Spain with Adelante.  I'll be working at Taiga Mistral, a "green" business that invests in and helps develop wind farms in Poland and Spain.

My flights from the States had gone well -- an immensely quick hop to Dallas from Minneapolis, made even quicker by the fact that we had a medical emergency on board (a older gentleman in first class was having trouble).  We landed 44 minutes early on a flight that was scheduled to take only two hours and 40 minutes to begin with.  The paramedics met the plane at the gate, the passengers stayed seated while the medics worked, and when the older gentleman was able to stand and walk out with their help, the whole plane applauded.  Can't say it was an uneventful trip, but it was good.  The flight to Madrid was fairly uneventful, though I learned firsthand that American Airlines needs you to special-order vegetarian meals in advance, contrary to what their website seems to say.  But I ate a lot of salad and that was good.

And now I'm in Madrid, where it takes four keys to get into my apartment.  First the small square key to get in off the street, then the large square key to let me into the vestibule on my floor, then the triangle key for my apartment, and finally the small striped key for my room.  I've got this pretty well memorized now, but it took a few days.  The apartment is beautiful -- and quite literally 1000 feet or so from the center of Madrid, which is the center of the country.  It takes me 30 seconds to walk to the Puerta del Sol, which is a constantly-busy central plaza.  It feels like I'm in the middle of everything.  The apartment building is a couple hundred years old and very spiffy, especially the elevator, which is slightly larger than an old telephone booth but otherwise resembles one very closely.  It holds only three people at max and is in the middle of the staircase, which wraps around the open elevator shaft as it climbs to my apartment on the fifth floor, which is the top.  (In the U.S., we'd call it the 6th floor, but in Spain, the "first floor" is the first floor above the street level.)  It's a four-person apartment, it's full at the moment, and I like my roommates -- there are two ladies from Korea who are here to study Spanish and one guy from California who'll be doing an internship like I am.

The language school where I'm taking two weeks of Spanish classes is three blocks away.  I like it a lot so far -- the people are great and although they can't magically make us fluent in two weeks, we're studying grammar (mostly the subjunctive and commands) each day for the first two hours and having conversations for the second hour and a half, so I feel the time is really well-spent.  The professors and students are all having a great time -- we spent one day talking about liquor laws in all the students' respective countries (Austria, Japan, Korea, Brazil, France, Indonesia, and the U.S. are represented in my class of seven), another day comparing the relative merits and demerits of different countries' national airlines (which really became a discussion about which airline had the better stewardesses), and one day talking about weddings.  Other topics have been Spanish texting slang and WHY exactly Andy is a vegetarian in meat-loving Madrid. Fun times and a close-knit community of students and professors.

Revelations:  It IS possible to buy peanut butter here, and there are even different brands.  They don't refrigerate eggs in some of the grocery stores.  When you order coffee in a coffeeshop (unless it's an American chain like Starbucks), you get a cup so tiny that many Americans would laugh it off as doll-sized.  Two-euro coins are common (about $3), which is weird when you're used to the same size being 25 cents.  There's something to be said for carrying around a map when none of the streets really follow a grid pattern.  And the stores put everything on sale after el Día de los Reyes, which was January 6th, and the whole city seems to go crazy for these "rebajas."

People practically live in the street.  From mid-morning on until late late night, the streets are packed with people.  There aren't many cars in central Madrid because there isn't room for them -- roads are often one-lane and the street I live on is pedestrian-only except in the wee hours of the morning, when delivery trucks are allowed to swarm in to refill the stores.  Some of the classes I've taken at the University of Minnesota have talked about creating "vibrant public spaces" and "connections with the street," but Madrid does it.  I would not like to be a car driver here -- pedestrians definitely have the upper hand and cars sometimes seem big and out of place.  Stores are tiny and packed together tightly.  The stores also repeat really frequently, unlike many things in the U.S. with the possible exception of Starbucks (but really, the "a Starbucks on every block" thing is pretty rare when you think about it).  Here, though, some chains will literally have three locations within four blocks or so.  One, The Phone House, has two stores at opposite ends of a single block, along the same stretch, and two more locations a couple more blocks away.

Bottled water is really popular, as opposed to drinking tap water.  This is a little odd to me, since the tap water in Madrid is excellent quality and tastes great, like it's from a filter.  Preferring bottles is much more a cultural thing than a technical thing, I'm told, and the tap water won't make you ill.  But even in restaurants, if you ask for "just water," they'll bring you (and charge you a couple euros for) a bottle of water and a glass to pour it into.  Interesting.

Last note: they use timed light switches a ton here, which is really cool.  Practically everywhere you go (especially in semi-public spaces like bathrooms, vestibules, or stairwells), there's a light switch which you can hit to give yourself a few minutes of light, and then it cuts off to absolute darkness except for a little glowing dot on the light switch itself.  I'm not quite sure if this is even possible/legal in the U.S. the way it is here, but it's extremely energy efficient and I love it.  And yes, this WOULD be something I'd write about.

More to come,

Andy