i'll be traveling for a good chunk of july

Not that a hiatus note is that necessary at this point, since I've unintentionally been on one for over a month now....but anyone who actually checks here regularly...I will be in NYC July 6-11 and traveling around Israel July 12-24. I'm sure at least the latter with spark some writing, which hopefully I can transfer onto here in a timely fashion upon my return. Until then...

isla del tesoro

By mid-March studying abroad began to stress me out, as I never expected to have to actually study. So for the first weekend since I arrived in Madrid in January, I stayed put to get some work done. On that Saturday my roommate, Lisa, and I decided to go to Isla Del Tesoro, a vegetarian restaurant, for lunch. Around two in the afternoon we headed over there in anxious anticipation of a healthy meal. After two weeks of an unwelcome chill in the air, my face appreciatively soaked in the fickle sun. Inside, the restaurant’s blue ceiling had a hanging fishnet tangled with twinkling lights that made me feel like I was underwater. The food was excellent. All was peaceful. Then we went to leave.
BANG!
“Yeah, that was a door,” Lisa said to me after I ran face first into the clear glass. Within the 30 minutes it had taken us to eat lunch I had forgotten that there were two doors I needed to open before returning outside.
“Ow! I seriously think I just broke my nose,” I said as I stumbled out the second one. I put my hand up to my face and took it away. Red. “Shit!”
Lisa pointed out a farmacía across the street. I had both hands over my nose, every few seconds removing them to shake them dry. The beginnings of rain fell, and a polka-dotted mix of blood and water Jackson Polluck-ed my shirt. The look on the pharmacist’s face was enough to make me want to avoid seeing the damage, but she led me behind the counter to the employee bathroom and told me to wash myself in the sink. I saw my reflection in the mirror and, horrified, looked down and shoved my hands under the faucet before splashing my face several times. The nice lady handed me a paper towel and gave me a piece of gauze to press on the small cut on top of my nose. “Esta roto?” I asked her if she thought it was broken, and she said she didn’t know but that I needed to go to a hospital. We walked back to the front of the pharmacy. “Muchas gracias,” I said, embarrassed, as she bent down to wipe a ruby spot off the floor.
Lisa and I hopped in a cab that was parked right outside. I started laughing as I slouched against the car door, thinking about how I am, generally speaking, a klutzy individual, but this takes the cake. A few minutes later my whole face started throbbing, and I forgot what was funny. I closed my eyes, absorbing every bump in the road.

At the hospital I sat in a chair, while Lisa went into a different room to register my name with the receptionist. A man came in with his wife, and I watched through the window as he tried to reason with the same woman Lisa was talking to behind the Plexiglas. The receptionist repeatedly told him to wait in the other room. The couple pushed through the swinging doors and the woman sat in the chair next to mine, while her husband’s concerned face looked from his wife to a security guard.
“Feel her heart beat!” I guessed he said. Reluctantly, the other man did, but told him he was not a doctor.
I hoped I didn’t have priority over her just because I arrived two minutes prior. Our names were called at the same time and we parted ways at a fork in the hallway. I sat down, still holding the bloody gauze on and the paper towel under my nose. Lisa contemplated the English translation of the sign next to the large entranceway: OTORRINOLARINGOLOGIA.
“Can you smell that?” she asked me.
“Smell what?”
“Oh you’re lucky you can’t. It smells like shit.”
Only briefly did I panic that I might have lost one of my senses because it was then a man in blue scrubs called my name and saved me from my paranoia. I followed him through the entranceway and into an examining room. With a practiced mix of sign language, Spanish, and English I explained to the doctor at the desk that I ran into a door and made myself laugh a little, avoiding eye contact. A sympathetic smile crept across his face as he jotted some notes and two minutes later sent me back into the hall. He walked close behind me and told Lisa, who was acting as my translator, that I needed to go to Radiology to get my face X-rayed.
Lisa and I rounded a few corners and came to the third waiting area. A family stood somber around a bed on wheels, a man in the bed covered with tubes looked from person to person. Once we made eye contact. I couldn’t stand still and got really fidgety. I hate hospitals. I opted to sit down with my back to the family. I’ve been in their position too many times and know that it doesn’t help to have people with fewer problems watching you. From the other direction, a young man rolled in a wheelchair in which an ancient, shriveled woman sat uncomfortably. She looked like a skeleton trapped in a thin layer of brown skin. Her frail hands trembled beneath multi-colored gloves.
“Alyse?”
I jumped up and went into the X-ray room with the girl who called my name. She tried to tell me to do something, but in Spanish, and I looked back at her, confused. She pointed to where I should stand, then physically turned me to the side, put a magnetic board in my hand, and pushed my elbow up until the board was next to the side of my face. She took the picture then told me to wait outside. A few minutes later she brought out the developed image.
Back in the previous waiting area I got to examine the X-ray of my skull for a minute or two. “I can’t decide if this is neat or creepy,” I said to Lisa. “But it’s funny how far my lip sticks out past my teeth…Oh and there are two of my fingers where I was holding the board!...I hope I get to keep this. Best souvenir ever… ” A female nurse came and took the picture from me—it served as my golden ticket in to see the doctor.
Now what was I supposed to look at? Every two minutes a man with a bandaged nose and a protruding potbelly hobbled to the garbage can in the corner, made a nauseating hacking sound in his throat, and proceeded to spit up a downpour of blood into the neon green plastic bag.
“Look at that guy’s hair,” Lisa whispered and directed me with her eyes.
An older man stood beside the row of chairs across from us. The only hair he had grew like folded gray wings on the sides of his head, while some sprouted out his ears. The remaining bald top reflected the florescent lighting, and his worried eyes watched his seated wife; her nose was busy ruining a pink hand towel. The man next to her sat with his head back, holding an ice pack to his bloody nose. There was so much blood flowing in that one small hallway, I imagined all of us paddling out of the hospital in a red river on a voyage to find the world’s biggest Band-Aid.
I need to get out of here, I muttered under my breath.
And like an answered prayer, my name was called. I trotted into the same room with the doctor from earlier. He had me sit in a large examining chair, then stuck his head out the door to call down the hall for Lisa to resume her job as a Spanish-English dictionary. With gentle fingers he squeezed the sides of my nose. This made the wound reopen, but that aside, he repeated “Buena nariz” to me several times. I never considered my nose to be “good,” but I hoped that meant it wasn’t broken.
“Tranquila,” he said in response to my flinching, as he came towards my face with a miniature metal speculum. He stuck it up each nostril for one final check, then looked over the X-ray briefly.
While the doctor walked across the room to retrieve an array of bandages, the man with the winged hair appeared in the doorway and stuttered that his wife was waiting to be seen with the same problem. I looked at him and tried to apologize with my eyes when the doctor told him he had to wait his turn. Sometimes I don’t want to endure getting old, I thought.
I drew my attention back to the medic as he approached me with his handful of goodies. First he put a piece of medical tape horizontal over my cut, then a white thin spongy strip running vertical, making a cross. Then the best part—a huge contraption that doubled as a nose brace and a bandage. No need to go on a search for the world’s biggest Band-Aid anymore—it was on my face!
He sat down at the desk and explained everything to Lisa. My nose was not broken. Amazing. I was to keep the bandages on for four or five days and take 400 mg of Ibuprofen every eight hours. No problem. That I understood. My mom’s a pharmacist, but with all the drugs she deals with, her cure-all has always been Ibuprofen, He handed Lisa the prescription, a sheet explaining the signs of a possible concussion, and the X-ray of my skull.
“The X-ray,” Lisa began, pointing to the three items. “How do you say ‘keep’?” she turned to me and asked. I shrugged. “Guardar!” she declared. She asked if I could keep the X-ray. He said everything was mine. “You get to keep it!” she said excitedly.
As we gave the receptionist my release form to be stamped, I glanced down at the little information Lisa had given her an hour prior. My name, my birthday, the address we were currently living at…
“Sexo: Male?!” I exclaimed.
“The ‘M’ stands for ‘Mujer’ dumbass!” Lisa scolded.
“Or Moron,” I added.

We took a cab back to our apartment and tried to sneak me past Maria, our Señora, so she wouldn’t freak out and start speaking speedy Spanish. We successfully got me into our room and shut the door.
And then the inevitable: Knock, knock.
Lisa had already climbed out the window to smoke a cigarette on the balcony, so I opened the door a crack.
“Don’t look at my face,” I told Maria, attempting to hide the monstrosity with my hand, and let her into the room.
Her concern lasted only momentarily before she went on to rant about how every Tuesday she is going to clean our room and it doesn’t matter that we’re students, we still need to live in an orderly fashion. Then she looked at my face and laughed. I rolled my eyes. Nice to know what she takes seriously.

Jackie, our other roommate, and I joined Lisa on the balcony. They lit a joint to share.
“Man, if I was going to smoke pot any time, it should probably be now.” But I didn’t. Instead I gave Lisa a thank-you hug and left the apartment to call home and tell my parents another tale about their clumsy older daughter.
“Were you drunk?” my mom asked.
“No!” I said, offended at first. “Actually…I wish I had been. At least that’s an excuse! But hey the good news is, apparently all urgent care in this country is free. So we don’t have to worry about insurance or anything like that.”

That night I reached to turn off the lamp next to my bed and realized my X-ray was still on top of it. I had put it there to protect it from clumsy feet, but forgot about it when I turned the light on to read an hour earlier. I grabbed for it only to find a large brown circle where the heat had almost burnt a hole through the film. I managed to destroy the only thing worth showing from the whole adventure. A perfect ending to an imperfect day.

Epilogue:

A week later Lisa returned to Isla Del Tesoro.
“You are never going to believe what they did,” she said to me when she returned from lunch.
I had no guesses.
“They put a fucking Bull’s-eye on the door!”
And sure enough, next time I walked past there I saw the large red, white, and blue circle, and it was exactly even with the tip of my nose.

madrid--day 3

March 18, 2007

Last night I couldn't sleep, so I laid in bed reading out of two different books and completing the crossword puzzles in the back of two People magazines until 3 in the morning. I told my mom to wake me up at 8:30 because Sheri was supposed to be at our hotel at 9:30. She didn't show up until 11, so I took advantage of her procrastination and got an extra 90 minutes of rest.

We went to el Rastro, the huge Sunday morning flea market. When I lived there three years ago I bought myself peacock feather earrings, a giant poster of flamenco dancers, and a suitcase to bring all my accumulated European treasures back home. This time around all I could think about was leaving. It was unbearably crowded, and this older man with a giant lens on his camera kept turning around and taking pictures of my face. I think he thought he was being sneaky, but it's hard not to notice something like that. My sister got mad when I pointed him out, took my camera out of my hands, made sure the man was looking at us and took pictures of his face, the whole time with a defiant look in her eye.
Here he is:
And here is one of my favorite photos from the trip. I'm not sure if all pictures are worth 1,000 words, but I am sure that this one could provoke quite a conversation:

No one bought anything at this time. I think we were all anxious to get away from there. We hopped on the Metro and got off at the Bilbao to go to lunch. We went to Isla Del Tesoro, my favorite restaurant when I lived in Madrid. I approached the huge glass door cautiously this time, careful to not smack my face into it like I did almost exactly three years ago to the day. The bulls eye they put up a week after my accident was still there, although the red, white and blue cocentric circles had faded, and the thing as a whole looked rather weathered. It was still at the height of my nose. I guess I haven't grown.

[if you want to read the story of the mis-hap and see the original bulls eye, click here]
The food was just as good as I remembered, especially the bowl of chickpeas drenched in a thick, creamy garlic sauce. While we awaited our main courses, I borrowed Sheri's phone and went out on the street to call Maria Luisa, my Señora I used to live with. I had to psych myself up as the phone rang, preparing myself to not fully understand everything she was going to say to me in Spanish. At first she kept saying, "Quien??" I wasn't sure what else to answer besides my name, and my use of Spanish in the past tense isn't great, but eventually she figured it out when I explained that I used to live with her. "Oh bonita!" she exclaimed. She continued to tell me that she had a really busy week coming up and to call her in a few days to make a definite plan. "Bueno. Hasta luego."

Post-lunch activity: trip to the Thyssen museum. One of my collarbones itched, right on the bone that juts out. "Ew!" my sister exclaimed. "There's a big white spot right where you're itching! That's so gross!" As I sat on a bench outside of the museum's entrance debating whether I wanted to go in, I took digital snapshots of my collarbone and then in playback mode zoomed into the white spot so that it took up the whole screen. That was a bad idea. Then I got paranoid that I was housing bugs inside me and had unbearable flashbacks of when I contracted Chiggers and my Señora thought her house was infested with fleas because of me.
I tried to ignore the bite and decided to join my family in the Thyssen, even though it didn't rate as one of my favorite places when I was here last. We saw the special exhibit: "The mirror & the mask: Portraiture in the age of Picasso," then we all went to the third floor to start checking out the permanent exhibits. Ok, I understand that religious art was pretty much the beginning of art, but I can only look at so many bloody Jesus-es before I start rolling my eyes completely uninterested and just plow through rooms like there's nothing on the walls. Which is exactly what I did. I saw all of this three years ago, and I still didn't like it. Second floor, impressionism and cubism...getting better. The ground floor, though, made the re-visit worthwhile. 20th century contemporary art. Still some of my favorite pieces to date.
My family couldn't believe how quickly I plowed through the entire museum, when they found me sitting on a bench in the lobby writing in my notebook. I told them I was exhausted, plus I'd been there before, so it was nothing new.

As we walked back to the hotel, I thought, This just isn't as exciting...maybe because I feel like I've seen everything already so it just seems as though I'm in any urban setting..and people just happen to speak Spanish.
We all took a nap before dinner. Then we met Sheri's best friend and roommate abroad, Stevie, as well as their new friend, Ashley, at an Italian restaurant. I ordered "vegetarian mash" pizza, which came with a runny egg oozing on top. Mmmm....not. Their version of sangria, which I got both my parents hooked on, was disappointing. All oranges, no other exciting fruits.

On our retreat back to the hotel, I tried calling Lindsay back home to wish her a happy 24th birthday, but the stupid pay phone cut me out right as I was about to leave a message. One Euro down the drain. "It's the thought that counts," my mom told me as I slammed down the receiver. But I'm usually not satisfied with just thoughts.

schools are sanctuaries

This week in April already marked the 12th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing and the 8th anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, CO. More than enough nauseating memories (this week also marks Adolf Hitler's birthday) to haunt us for the rest of our lives, yet before we could even begin to memorialize these atrocities, Monday happened.

I spent the majority of Monday at Fremd, my former high school, working on a project. As news spread about the shooting massacre at Virginia Tech, more and more teachers in the English office sat at the row of computers and watched video newsreel footage on cnn.com. At first I wasn't quite sure what had happened...people were clearly shocked about something, but I wasn't in close enough proximity to eavesdrop.

When I finally got to check my e-mail later in the afternoon, there were three CNN Breaking News updates in my inbox.
"9:31 a.m....one person has been killed and one injured..."
"11:24 a.m....at least 20 people were fatally shot..."
"1:36 p.m....the death toll rises to 31, including the gunman..."

When I was in fourth grade, a sixth-grader named Asher brought a gun to school. I don't remember most of the details, except that my friend Melissa's sister was also a sixth-grader and claimed that he threatened her with the weapon. I think our parents were required to pick us up from school that day. And I'm pretty sure the police reported that Asher's gun hadn't even been loaded. Nevertheless, the event and subsequent arrest caused quite a stir among our normally undisrupted neighborhood. Kids even started inserting his name into Aerosmith's song "Janie's got a gun" (a song, until doing research today, i always thought belonged to Nirvana's repetoire).

The Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995 occurred when I was in sixth grade. By the second half of the school year (early '95), my teacher and I had grown more and more intolerant of each other. One particularly awful day she kicked me out of the classroom for doing nothing. I stomped into the hall carrying with me a Teen magazine. After collapsing to the floor, my jaw clenched in anger, I ripped open the magazine. A story about a girl who took a gunshot to her leg while attempting to protect her classmates from a school shooter stared back at me. I thought about Asher and how different that day could have turned out. And I thought to myself that if someone was to come to my class right then with a gun, I'd probably do the same as the girl in the article--both to protect my friends and to get the h-e-l-l out of sixth grade.

April 20, 1999. I was a sophomore in high school sitting in our auditorium for Writers Week when we collectively heard about the shootings at Columbine. Flashbacks of this abounded as the Virginia Tech shootings reached the eyes and ears of the American public. As Wikipedia states, the shootings at Columbine caused "a moral panic in American high schools." Fremd definitely fell into that category. I don't think there was anyone--student nor staff--who didn't immediately recognize Columbine as a comparable school to Fremd. In P.E. class we had to break into small groups to discuss our fears and feelings. They told us we couldn't judge someone just because they chose to wear all black.

This is what bothered me on Monday. The media immediately turned on Virginia Tech, making the school into a scapegoat. I don't see how this event is in any way the fault of the school. The fault lies within Cho and his mental instability. He snapped and murdered over 30 people. The police even stated that a "lone gunmen out to kill himself is the hardest kind of criminal to catch." I don't think it's fair that the media has been blaming anyone but Cho, himself.

Before Cho's name and personal background were released, the news said they had reason to believe that the gunman was someone here on a student visa from South Korea. But before the details became known the following day, I worried that the repercussions of him being here on a student visa would, in the coming months and years, affect our already ridiculous immigration laws...that it might even affect general international travel. I believe this turned out to be false, that although Cho was a native South Korean, he was also a permanent resident of the U.S. Ironically, a lot of his victims happened to be international relations majors, keen on making the world a better place.

This immigration idea hearkens back to a movie I just watched two weeks ago, Children of Men, where any "alien" caught entering London (in the year 2027) was shoved into a cage and eventually killed or thrown into a ghetto. After watching an hour of news reports Tuesday morning, I made myself turn off the TV and all I could do was close my eyes and go back to sleep. Remnants of that movie, current events and influences from the post-apocolyptic novel I'm reading, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (which, incidently, won the Pulitzer Prize last week) meshed together...and I had a dream that I was walking around brightly-colored Chicago, and there were bumper to bumper cars lining the streets. And every one of them had a person standing so they were half out of the sun roof. All of them holding different types of guns. I walked with my hands over my head, afraid that at any moment I'd be gunned down. Everyone was shooting at random. And laughing about it. One woman kept putting a pistol to different sides of her head and playing a game of Russian Roulette, except that she was the only player. And every time the gun didn't go off when she pulled the trigger, she'd laugh a haunting laugh.
My dreams the rest of the week proved to be vivid nightmares, one revolving around my family and I somehow surviving a fiery plane crash.

On Tuesday evening I drove Max to his orchestra concert in Hyde Park. Before going to the theater on U of Chicago's campus, I had to drop him off at the front door of his school--the Lab School, a K-12 private school linked with the university--to run inside and get the required sheet music from his locker. He returned 30 seconds later empty-handed.
"Where's the music?" I asked while scarfing down a Potbelly's sandwich.
Max, who gets frequently exasperated with incompetent authority figures (just as I did when I was 12), complained, "The stupid cop wouldn't let me get it because I didn't have my school ID!"
"Do you usually have a school ID?" I asked.
"No! That's why this is so stupid!"
I couldn't help wondering if this extra bit of security had anything to do with what happened the day before in Virginia, briefly recalling how NYU became super-strict about us showing our IDs [as i proof-read this posting i realized i had accidentallytyped "ideas" here, instead of IDs. i thought that was noteworthy. possible freudian slip?] to get in any building post-9/11.
I offered to go in there with him and see if a babysitter's presence could vouch for the kid's good-student status.
Max defiantly said, "No. I'll just go without it. Whatever. They'll have to bring me back if they want me to get it."
"Well alright," I said, pulling away from the curb.
"What does he think i'm going to do??" Max continued, getting more defensive by the second. "I'm twelve! I'm not gonna bomb the school or something if that's what he thinks!"

Before the 7th grade spring concert commenced, the conductor thanked everyone for coming. "Also," she said, her voice dropping to a solemn tone, "we'd like to dedicate this concert to those who lost their lives in Virginia."

As the orchestra played their final piece--"Dia de los Muertos" (Day of the dead)--I thought about what the President had said in his speech at VA Tech earlier that afternoon. How he referred to schools as "sanctuaries." I thought about how back in the day one of the only things that protected someone from being drafted into the war was being enrolled in a school. The school acting as a protective barrier from the barracks. Yet now we have to beware of those wars infiltrating our classrooms.

madrid--day 2

March 17, 2007
My dreams were intricate and realistic--being introduced repeatedly to someone with same name as our waitress at the flamenco restaurant--interrupted several times throughout the night by incredibly loud sirens four stories down on Gran Via.
In the morning, or what I thought was the morning but was actually afternoon, my mom woke my dad and I up, informing us that it was after 12:00. I sat up, startled. With no alarm clock and electric window shades that make it impossible to determine whether it's anything but the middle of the night, I assumed that we were still within the normal sleeping hours. Good ol' jet lag, it'll get you every time.

We didn't leave the hotel room until after 1:00. Our first stop, Zara, a popular Spanish clothing store that sells cheap designer trend knock-offs. Now, I am not a shopper, nor did I feel like I came all the way to Europe to shop, but at the same time, I haven't--in fashion-conscious people's terms--"updated my wardrobe" in quite awhile. I'm not naming years here because I honestly couldn't tell you how long it's been. . My sister huffed and puffed her way out of los probadores to send in my mom after I requested a second opinion. One shirt--zero votes. Other shirt--one (mom) vote. (Votes only received from mom and sister....dad waited outside, but when I later, in the hotel room tried them on for him, his response was as follows: "Well they're not my favorite clothes you own...")Regardless, I bought them both. Correction, my mom bought them both for me. She's been insisting I get new clothes for years, and was so excited that I found something, that she also insisted on paying for it.

Sheri met us at Zara, and from there we headed to her place, stopping first for lunch at a little side-street restaurant called La Tortilla de Mamá, which was true to its name. Ever since I lived with Maria Luisa, I've bragged about how her tortilla was the best in all of Madrid...and I had my fair share of tortilla, seeing as I avoided all things jámon or del mar. But this place was comparable--still not quite up to Maria's standards--but definitely a notch above anywhere else I tried the dish outside of Maria's kitchen. In fact, the whole menu consisted of different kinds of tortillas. My mom and I shared one with cheese and tomato sauce, while my dad and sister shared one with chorizo. My dad marveled at how expensive a miniature bottle of Coke cost. Over 2 Euros for about 30cL.


After my parents had a tour of Sheri's host family's apartment, we decided to go to the Reina Sofia art museum, which is free on Saturdays. When we got out of the Metro at the Atocha stop, we saw a huge crowd of people taking over a main intersection. It was some sort of peace demonstration. A bunch of people had "PAZ" signs rubberbanded to their foreheads. There was a stage set up, with speakers on either side blasting the sorrowful song, "Mad World" (in English). The stage itself had a handful of photographers taking pictures of the crowd. Seeing the signs posted at bus stops about ending the war in Iraq and posters on sticking poking out of garbage cans that read, "U$A GO HOME" made me consider becoming an ex-patriot.

I'm glad I got to go back to the Reina Sofia, even if we only had an hour and a half to explore before the establishment closed. That place was one of my three favorite art museums I visited while living in Europe--the other two being the Tate Modern in London and the Musée D'Orsay in Paris. The Reina Sofia is famous for housing Picasso's Guernica, a painting found in every Spanish textbook back in the States. My dad approached me as we milled around the masterpiece, "I'll ask you this, since you're the most artistic in the family...How does someone come up with something like this?" I regurgitated the little bit of history I could remember about the destruction of a town in northern Spain by the same name. "I understand that. But how does he [Picasso] decide to paint people looking like that?" I looked over at the balloon-headed, yelping people portrayed in the painting. The only person who could really answer that question is Picasso himself. "It's just how he sees them in his mind," was all I could muster up.
In the temporary exhibition, "First Generation: Art and the Moving Image, 1963-1986," each room had various T.V. installations by several different artists. One room had a bunch of T.V.'s atop pillars, with black & white videos of transportation scenes around New York City filmed in the early 1970's. The installation was called Manhattan As An Island (1974) by Ira Schneider. A few of the videos revolved around the World Trade Center (as viewed from a boat), which at the time, must have been a brand-new, revolutionary addition to the city. I stood and stared at them for a few minutes. I saw those fall, I thought. I am standing in a building right across the street from where Al Qaeda blew up in 2004 the trains at Atocha, while standing here watching 30-some-year-old footage of the towers the same terrorist group demolished in 2001. And I have such strong ties to both cities.
You can read more about the exhibit here.

[reina sofia elevator shaft]

Unfortunately, we only saw a very small portion of the museum before we got ushered out by the museum staff 15 minutes before closing time. I suggested getting dinner at Isla Del Tesoro, a vegetarian restaurant near where I used to live. The hostess told us that unless we had a reservation, we couldn't get a table. So we went next door to some Asian place, where I couldn't really find anything on the menu that I wanted...this being after I attempted to order the vegetable dumplings only to find out they didn't have anymore. I had some sort of mixed vegetable plate instead, but it was of appetizer proportions and not nearly enough to fill me up.
So being the stereotypical fat American, I requested we stop at McDonald's before retreating back to the hotel. All three of us (we parted ways with Sheri underground at the Bilboa station) got chococlate fudge sundaes, and on top of that I also ordered a large patatas deluxe (like potato wedges), something I used to munch on because they're surprisingly tasty and only cost a Euro. Despite being the fast food instigator, I still felt embarrassed as we walked the block back to the hotel holding a McD's bag chock full of junk. I scarfed both foods down and went to sleep not just acting like a fat American, but feeling like one too.

[all of our sundaes]

madrid--day 1

March 16, 2007

Ah, el aeropuerto Barajas. Basically my second home when I lived here three years ago. Customs (which only involved getting our passports stamped) took no time at all, retrieving our bags only about 10 minutes. Then we waited outside about 45 minutes for the Hotel Atlantico bus. I put on a blindfold and posed like the pedestrian-crossing sign to humor myself. My dad made friends with a different bus driver while we were waiting for ours to show up. The man apparently said he hates our president, and I recalled my trip to Interlaken--the most peaceful place on Earth--and even there someone had spraypainted "KILL BUSH" on the wall of a building. If there's anything to look forward to politically-speaking, it's that Bush can no longer be re-elected, which is a blessing, seeing as he wasn't even elected in the first place. What a joke.

The ride into the city wasn't familiar because the only time I didn't take the Metro to/from the airport was the first day I arrived. And I was so jet lagged and overwhelmed at the time, I didn't take visual note of my surroundings.
Once we got into the city limits, though, and drove past el Parque Retiro and the Cibeles fountain and then down Gran Via, I felt like I had never left. My dad turned to me and asked in a mocking tone, "Did you learn any Spanish while you were here?" after I temporarily couldn't remember how to say "good morning" (buenos dias). I immediately became defensive and declared it preposterous that he would even ask that. In fact, I feel like as soon as I was once again immersed in the language, everything came rushing back to me.
Our room needed 40 minutes, so the concierge took our bags and directed us to the first floors (all ground floors in Spain are "0" not "1") to use the teléfono. We took the elevator one flight one flight up to call Sheri but got distracted by the complimentary breakfast. Desayuno ----> this way. When my mom and sister visited me they stayed in this same hotel, and I met them here every morning to take advantage of the free food.

My first cup of café con leche on 3 years! Amazing. The yogurt is better here. Freshly-squeezed orange juice doesn't cost extra. God, I love Spain. We filled our bellies (once again) until our room was ready. #414, right across the street from the same cine as the last time. It's a charming little room. We each have our own twin-sized bed, mine is up a step and in an alcove-type area. Love it.
I took about a three-hour nap, dozing in and out of real sleep. I woke up when I heard my parents talking about leaving to go to the tourist office at Plaza Mayor. They left. I took a long shower, and what a powerful one! I was just about to leave to walk around for a little bit when there was a knock at the door--Sheri! She said she had to go back to her place to call the restaurant to confirm our dinner reservation, so I went with her.
We passed la Plaza de España, where I used to sit by myself and read and once wrote a poem about pigeons on the back of a postcard...

2/28/04
For no reason an army of pigeons landed on Plaza de España
In rows they faced the fickle sun in a sleeping position--
heads held back, bodies inflated
When a gust of February wind intruded upon their siesta
They rotated in unison, a quarter turn
Resumed resting
Then one by one,
As though voices called them home
They took flight over the fountain

...and a travel agency I swore I'd been in before. She lives cerca del Parque del Oeste, though, which I'm pretty sure I never saw in the four months I lived here. The setup of her building's lobby--c/ Urquijo, 43--was similar to what mine had been. An old-time cage-looking elevator and an old doorman, named Juan, to match.
I understood most of what he said to my sister in his native tongue, except I thought he said "luna" (moon), when he actually said "lunes" (Monday). I kind of wish I hadn't so confidently replied because it ruined how poetic I thought he'd been. I thought he said, "The weather is going to change with the change of the moon (cambia a la luna), but in actuality he said "cambia a lunes" (change on Monday)...so when I said , "más frío mañana," they both looked at me strangely--
Sheri: No, Monday.
Juan: No, el lunes.

The elevator buttons lit up neon in a circular ring around the floor numbers. I commented how that was way more advanced, if not futuristic, than Maria's elevator buttons. The "apartment" she lives in is HUGE! I mean I guess it makes sense--2 parents, 4 kids, 1 dog. I met the 21-year-old sister, Fatima, and the 23-year-old brother, Yago. I had a hard time understanding both of them but did notice they were "atractivos" (I may have made up that word). I wanted the older brother, Eugenio (29), to be there, as he's all I ever hear about. No such luck. But of course their small black dog, Capri, took an instant liking to me and my lap. I succumbed to checking my e-mail--so much for giving up cell phones and computers for 10 days. Well, at least my phone doesn't work here.
Sheri gathered her change of clothes and we walked back to the hotel. Ran into one of her friends from her internship (at Club de Madrid) and her boyfriend on the street. I don't remember her name, but she seemed like a very happy person. Back at the hotel Sheri and the parents reunited, and we had about 15 minutes to get ready for dinner. Sheri wore a new dress, a silky thing that was probably meant to be a shirt. And no underwear. Ok, a thong doesn't count. This comes into play later.

We met Jordi, Alex, and Vicki beside the statue in front of the Palacio Real and walked from there to the flamenco place--Corral de la Moreria. We sat at a table for 8 (for the 7 of us) perpendicularly touching the front of the stage. We shared a pitcher of Sangria--ah, it's good to be back in Spain--and treated ourselves to fat American amounts of food. This confused our waitress (who's name, by the way, was Alina. Dad: Alyse meet Alina, Alina, Alyse.") because she kept telling us we were ordering too much.

The food was delicious--my favorite parts: my goat cheese salad and Sheri's dessert, which consisted of honey ice cream with chocolate dribbled on top. The flamenco dancers and singers danced and sang with an intensity you can't find in most performances. They leave you wanting to know what caused the pain behind their eyes and stomp the ground like the wooden floorboards killed their children. I remembered my señora, Maria Luisa, telling me that I would look "preciosa" in a flamenco dress. A giant bobby pin landed on my sister's empty dinner plate. Must have flown off one of the female dancers' heads. Then there was the one male dancer. He sweat so much that when he spun in circles the perspiration spiraled across our entire table, landing both on our desserts and our faces. Yummy.

We left during an intermission, as we were all getting pretty sleepy, the clock approaching midnight. As soon as we stepped outside the wind blew up Sheri's shirt/dress, causing her to inadvertently flash the sleazy Spanish men lingering around the front of the restaurant. I flew at her, my coat held open, and threw it over her shoulders, hugging her to me. "Next time, wear underwear," I advised.

We said goodbye to our dinner buddies, laughing about how it took coming to Madrid to meet up with our neighbors from back home. My family got in a cab, first dropping Sheri off at her apartment and then to the Hotel Atlantico for me and my parents.
I took some photos in the hotel bathroom because my dress looked like it was supposed to be part of the decor. Then I got ready for bed.

"Dad, can I use your floss?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Well cause it starts and ends with my vitamins. 100 of each."
"Alyse," mom interjected, "just use it without asking him."

I decided against flossing, despite how gross my teeth felt. Before I fell asleep I thought about how there was no phone to set an alarm on and no last-minute e-mails to check...I could get used to this, I thought.

en route to spain

March 15, 2007

The two headlines on the front page of this morning's paper:

1) Sept. 11 Suspect said to confess: Sears Tower a target, too, Pentagon says

2) Flying toward disaster? Near collision shows hazard in skies around O'Hare

This only seemed appropriate seeing as my last awake thought last night included falling out the tail end of an exploded plane. Out of superstition I wore a sold blue t-shirt I've owned since 7th grade, chosen because it's the same shirt I wore on my first ever solo flight, just three weeks after September 11 (2001), when I flew from NYC home to Chicago to surprise my dad for his 50th birthday. At the time I decided that if I made it to my destination sans terrorist action, I would always wear this shirt on future flights.

When we got to O'Hare a swipe of my dad's credit card wasn't enough to bring up our itinerary on the do-it-yourself computer screen. Of course he knew the record locator number by heart: Q...4...LBJ? And my parents already argued about something dumb, to which the Delta employee responded, "She's always right--haven't you learned that by now?" To which my dad responded, "A billion seconds."
"Sorry?"
"We've been married a billion seconds."
"And what does that translate to?" he asked.
"31 years and 8 months."
"Well congratulations!"
"Thanks!"
As the man weighed each suitcase individually, my dad bent over and peered under the counter, announcing, "and this one should be...." The man remarked how groups of retired men will turn this into a betting game--who can guess the closest to the actual weight.
"Times have changed," my dad said with a chuckle as he attached identity tags to each suitcase handle. "Cell phone and e-mail it asks for!"

Just past security my mom spotted the book she left at home with only 15 remaining pages to read. So she stood beside the kiosk and quickly skimmed the final chapter. The woman selling the books directed us to the Starbucks a few feet away and said they were giving away free cups of coffee. I had vowed I wouldn't drink anything, especially coffee, but I couldn't resist "free" (I've subsequently peed, I think, 6 times since then). In line we overheard the woman in front of us say she had both triplets and twins (actually 2 sets of triplets, but she "lost one"). So we started talking to her and we had to play the age-guessing game. She guessed "high" with 18, and her mouth dropped when I said 24. Before this, she had walked past and brushed her hand along my hair and said in passing, "Love the curls!" She, herself, had tightly-wound light brown ringlets.

We took a small plane to NYC's JFK airport and sat in 3 consecutive window seats. 9-11. Those numbers. Again. There are those brief moments where I hold my breath and assume we'll suddenly plummet or crash into a building. Instead the flight was fast and uneventful. The girl next to me read a thick book that I assumed was written in Polish. I might be the only person in the world who simultaneously reads The New Yorker followed by the fourth book of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series. I started with a fascinating article about spiders and reminisced about my former aspirations of "When I grow up, I want to be a/an.....ENTOMOLOGIST." And the Pants book obviously reminds me of my friends--the "Septembers" standing in for the Unit.


[my dad watching us ascend]

I waited to eat anything until we arrived at JFK. We went to a place called the Sam Adams Restaurant, and I ordered quesadillas. Safe bet, right? Wrong. I hardly ever have complaints about food, but that was one of the worst meals I've ever eaten. But I didn't want to be wasteful, so I at it all anyway. Afterwards we sat at gate 8 for about an hour. My dad sat next to me reading about Madrid. "I can't find anything about Franco, but he died November, '75...five months after we got married. Ha! So he's almost been dead a billion seconds."

Boarded the flight to Madrid. My parents shared row 36 A&B. I had been assigned 37A, a window seat, which was already being occupied.
"Do you want the window?" the man asked, tilting the cell phone away from his mouth.
"I don't care," I replied, as I carefully lifted my backpack into the overhead compartment.
"To the girl sitting down," the man said into the phone. "I don't know. She's a young girl."..."My girlfriend," he mouthed to me and pointed at "her" in the phone. I half-smiled politely.
"HOW OLD DO YOU THINK SHE IS?" my dad dared him in a loud voice.
"18."
"Ha! Just like the woman at O'Hare!" my dad laughed. "She's 40."
"This is a really fun game," my input dripping with sarcasm. "I'm 24," I said to the man.
"No way."
"Way."
"No you're not. Are you serious?"
"I'm serious." Why is this always a topic of conversation?
My mom turned around in her seat then and looked over the headrest--"And how old do you think I am?" she asked, her voice gleeful.
People always tell me I'll appreciate the young guesses when I'm older. Apparently my mom has reached that age. People usually express doubt that she's old enough to have not one, but two daughters in their 20's. She loves every second of it.

Another disappointing meal. I don't know what I was expecting being airplane food. Plus, the quesadillas are still taking up occupancy in my stomach. Now the salty pasta, wilted salad and two cans of Coke are piled on top of the gross lunch.

I was reading a good amount of the Pants book (there are at least 2 other girls reading the same one on this flight), and this baby has been persistently WAILING for almost an hour. Her dad keeps pacing up and down the two aisles trying to gently console her. I finally couldn't take it anymore--hence the journal continuation and the Amelie soundtrack blasting in my ears. I think I might attempt sleeping a little...they're showing Rocky Balboa, even though before take-off they announced it'd be Dreamgirls, which I actually would have watched. My dad is sitting in front of me whistling the Rocky theme for the third time, my mom just scolded him for the second time. At one point he punched both arms into the air in a forceful "V for Victory" motion.

NOTE TO SELF: IF YOU EVER HAVE KIDS, AND THAT'S A BIG IF, DO NOT TAKE THEM ON AN OVERSEAS FLIGHT UNTIL THEY'RE OLD ENOUGH TO KNOW NOT TO CRY UNRELENTLESSLY IN A PLANE FULL OF EXHAUSTED TRAVELERS!

Sleeping was virtually impossible. I had to incessantly crack my toes, and there was just no comfortable way to position myself. I maybe dozed off for an hour.

[photo taken by Mom]

We began our descent just as the sun began rising over Madrid. Topographical vocabulary started permeating my brain. That is a plateau boys and girls. As we touched down and pulled up to the jetway, music began playing overhead. Gipsy Kings? David Bisbal? Mána? Nope. A rousing sax-filled rendition of the theme song from Cheers. We landed over four hours ago, and I'm still whistling, "Where everybody knows your name...."

hiatus note

i am leaving today for a 10-day trip to spain to visit my sister. i will be gone march 15-25. not that i've been too diligent about updating lately, anyway, but just in case you're wondering where the updates are.....they will hopefully materialize in my journals overseas....i'll be back with a vengeance. until then...

my first gallery

"I don't know, Amy, it's looking grim," I said to my best friend on the phone, as I headed east down North Avenue, less than a block away from Coldstone Creamery. "Oh...oh...oh--there is definitely someone buying ice cream!" I screeched into Amy's ear. I grabbed the door handle, expecting my eternal bad timing to render me ice cream-less outside a locked door. But no. Nothing could ruin this evening. Absolutely nothing! I thought as I effortlessly pulled open the door.
"Are you guys still open??" I yelled, excitedly.
The two employees looked at each other, then back at me. The older one said, "We sure are."
I threw my arms up into the air. "You just made my NIGHT!"
Amy laughed in my ear, and I suddenly realized I was in public and not in a delicious dream. Yet, I was not embarrassed. In fact, I proceeded to approach the counter and say, well first to Amy--"Can I call you back after I get my ice cream?" and then to the boy, "Can I just tell you why you made my night?" He looked just like my friend Christopher back in New York, and Christopher is one of the only people in my life who would actually care to hear a follow-up to that somewhat rhetorical question. Therefore, I felt the look-alike would have similar sentiments. "Tell me," he said. "Ok, here's what happened," I started. "I just came from the opening of my first ever art show in a gallery down the street. And I'm driving down North Avenue, and all I want is some ice cream. I pass your store and see people inside and get excited that I will be able to fulfill my craving. But there's no parking anywhere. I don't live too far away, so I drive home to ditch the car, run upstairs to check your hours on the website. It says 10:30. It was 10:37. Well, I was so stir-crazy, that I told my friend on the phone I was just going to walk here anyway and see if by any chance you'd serve me. And sure enough, you're open!!"
"You lucked out," he said. "This is the first night we stayed open late since October."
"Really?? Wow, this night keeps getting better and better!" Order your ice cream and stop talking, my brain said. "Oh ok so I'll have sweet cream ice cream with a brownie and, do you have blackberries?" I hadn't had Coldstone in two years, but I still remembered my favored concoction.
"We have black cherries...but that's not really the same thing."
"What about raspberries?"
"Those we have."
"Awesome I'll have those too. Thanks."

While "Christopher" smashed up my order, a bunch of people came in, one boy declaring, "It smells like 10th grade in here!" I laughed because I think I was in the same grade when the first Coldstone opened near my high school.
As "Christopher" rang up my order, he asked how my art show went.
"It went wonderfully! Thank you!"



Thursday night I went to the gallery at 6:30 p.m. to hang my photographs. I anticipated this only taking about 30 minutes. At 7:50 I was still pacing back and forth, once in awhile pausing to stare at the big blank white wall. I didn't know we were all hanging our own work, so I didn't bring any of my own tools (not that I have any...), and the only ladder in the place was being occupied. Pamela, one of the other artists, saw me getting flustered and offered to help. She held my first frame "eye-level" while I attempted measuring from the floor with Tifanie's tape measurer. Once one was officially on the wall I felt a little more confident about finishing in a decent amount of time. The second picture ended up several inches lower than where I had imagined its placing in relation to the first one. I don't have the patience for perfection, so once that I happened, I decided to do things the Alyse way...whereever I hammered the next seven nails, as haphazard as they appeared, that's where the pictures were going. My way worked! I only had to slightly alter one of them. Even Collin, the owner, didn't mind how it looked, so I left relieved and ready for the next two nights.


My horoscope in Time Out Chicago read, "On Fri 9, you feel confident about your intellectual and creative abilities, but you also feel your domestic life needs improvement." I couldn't believe it! I mean not that I read my horoscope (Sagitarrius) religiously, if even more than 5x a year, but sister and I used to have a running joke about how mine were always so depressing--your best friend is stabbing you in the back, today you might get run over by a bus, the person you love is actually cheating on you....stuff like that. Even with the "but" attachment to this prediction, my horoscope finally said something not only positive, but in direct correlation with this evening's events.

After running some errands Friday morning, I stayed indoors the rest of the day, mostly to prevent any accident-prone events and to let my hair dry without submersing it in any kind of inclimate weather conditions. At 5:00 I ran out in sweats to pick up my Thai dinner down the street. Down came the rain. Bye bye protected hair. But, I wouldn't let myself dwell on that because although it was raining, it was WARM, and when I got up to the counter at Penny's, I noticed someone had put a pile of promotional postcards for our show right in front of the register! Part of me wanted to say, "I'm in that show!" to the girl working there, but I kept it to myself and walked out silently satisfied.

I shoveled down my spicy noodles with a remaining 13 minutes to fix my hair, put on some makeup, slip into my new dress, and drive to the gallery (which, luckily, is only 2-3 minutes away, depending on the one stoplight). I walked into the Blake Palmer Gallery, and the first thing I noticed: my name on the wall!! From that moment on, I don't think I stopped smiling until Sunday. Two minutes after I walked in, someone I knew came by to see the show, and after him, there was someone I knew visiting me in the gallery for the next four hours!! Friend's parents and siblings, former teachers, some artists I met at Around the Coyote a month ago, as well as a bunch of my friends...about 25 the first night. Not bad, not bad at all.


I didn't think Saturday could possibly get any better, but from start to finish, I had possibly one of the best days of my entire life. Possibly it had something to do with the fact that I straightened my hair and wore my second new outfit of the weekend, and for those who know me, this was a big deal...i don't even remember the last time i updated my wardrobe. Again, there was a HUGE turn-out! 32 people came, including Amy's 3-month-old niece, Ella. . My parents brought me flowers, which I hadn't received since my final dance recital in 2001, and the Josephs gave me an "I read banned books" bracelet, which is awesome. My namesake came (read two posts back about that story), a bunch of friends from high school who I hadn't seen in years showed up, and they even had a guy in the gallery playing the drums! I was elated, just soaking it all in.
Several people this evening approached me and asked if I was a dancer...my reply: in a past life...but secretly wished I could just say, yes. One man said, "You know how I knew? Because of your very large calves."...gee, thanks..."No, but I think defined calf muscles are very attractive on a woman." Great.
In regards to my art, I got a lot of praise, which felt wonderful, but I also got berated by a lot of people for not being a business-minded, money-hungry capitalist. "How much are you selling these for?" Oh, I don't know. "Did you sell anything yet?" I have no idea. The sellability of my work or how much money I was or wasn't making didn't even cross my mind, and I felt uncomfortable when people asked me questions regarding that. I honestly didn't care. All I cared about was that by the end of the second and final opening on Saturday night, there had been almost 60 people there who came all the way out to support me. That is what mattered.


After Amy and I hung up (after talking for 90 minutes!) that night, I thought about how ironic it was that after all the excitement, as usual, the night ended with just me and a bowl of ice cream. I couldn't get anyone to stick around, despite my energetic pleas. If any of the Unit had been there, I thought, I know they would have stayed, but, alas, we no longer live close enough to each other for them to even come. Every other artist and every other visitor those nights showed up with either a wife/husband/boyfriend/girlfriend by their side, which I found humorous. I was so high on life that that didn't even bother me, and instead I was proud that I could do something like this all on my own.

Bias aside, I honestly have never seen a strong and cohesive group show. I loved every artists' work, and that never happens. And I feel honored to be showing alongside such talented people.
"The New Breed" show at the Blake Palmer Gallery (1656 N. Bosworth) will be on display until April 27.

MORE GALLERY PHOTOS

revival of the writers week junky...again

Even though Writers Week is about words, I've decided to do another photo/video essay instead. (You can read my original posting about WW in the archives) My sincere thanks to the teachers who continue to bring this event to life...and who always let me camp out on the floor to soak it all in.


Brewner laughing in the wings


Sampson writing


Admiring Ted Kooser


Abby and Grace


Lounging Ted


Life Lessons



Writers are rockstars too.


The tribute.



The three retirees.


Paparazzi


Sampson's exit.


Teachers and students.


Big Boy in the center.


A true viking.

More WWXIII photos

Here is the preview or trailer, whatever you want to call it, for my documentary about Wyman, Sampson, and Brewner retiring at the end of this year. (The quality--both visually and audibly--aren't great compared to the DVD, but I think it's worth sharing.) Let it "buffer" a minute before letting it play.