Arriving

American Airlines Flight 68 Miami to Madrid

Flying into the sunrise on flight 68. The clouds look like a landmass and confuse my eyes. Is this continental Europe? Portugal? The mountain ranges appear, black and blanketed with mist. Beloved Spain, I am close to you now. I am awakening.

La Ochava, Calle Bustamante 27

As a fearful flyer, crossing the Atlantic is not easy. Those who share this fear understand the apprehension of setting foot on an aircraft: your fear is your freedom.

I’m sitting at the bar La Ochava, just outside Atocha. I have no idea how to move around in this city. In Madrid, at this moment, I am in completely unknown, unfamiliar territory. But two universal constants comfort me: one, a bar where you can have a caña and two, that unequivocal feeling of being at home.

The flight was not the greatest of my worries. This is precisely what I was afraid of, that I would come here, and fall in love again, fall in love with this place, with the accents words jumping playfully about me, tempting me to speak my truth, my life on these pages.

The bartender has just refilled my caña, although I had only taken one little sip, emptying just half an inch from the rim of the glass. Another set of constants: one, the power of cleavage, and two, woman sitting at a bar, writing, alone.

The relationship to wholeness is already here, a priori, as it should be. The sadness that enveloped me two days ago like an impenetrable fog disperses from my body and I feel that even though I am literally lost in this city, I am not lost at all.

Expatriate Writer

Bar El Brillante, Atocha 122

The famous bocata de calamares is simple yet delicious: large, tender fried calamari rings, lightly breaded and stuffed between two halves of a fresh, foot-long baguette. No condiments necessary.

After having read so many praises sung to the bocata on MadridMan’s message board, I literally stepped into this café without even realizing I was there!

I sit under the canopy of trees just off the street facing the Atocha station. The floor is strewn with cigarette butts and napkins. Cleverly avoiding the hurried footsteps of busy waiters, pigeons and finches pick scraps off the floor. You can have a 40 euro lunch at the Ritz just 10 minutes away, but it doesn’t get better than this -- a bocata and a caña one August afternoon in Madrid.

People stare at me: the men lustily; the women suspiciously. Yes, I’m a woman and I'm writing at this table, alone, sitting here quietly satisfying my hunger and my need to write all at once. I realize this afternoon that I am profoundly bored I where I permanently reside, that my soul must travel in order to feed itself, that the words I jot down in my journal will sustain me once I return home: anything eaten in a state of freedom and happiness tastes much better and the memory of this meal is just as satisfying.

Do the little finches consider themselves Madrileños? These magisterial pigeons who lord it over the sidewalks of the world, do they have a sense of nationality?