Being stuck for three days in the general vicinity of the Madrid International Airport might be at the bottom of the list of things I would have liked to be doing during the last few days before Christmas, but alas, there I was. My flight to Boston via Zurich was canceled due to the ridiculous amount of snow clogging runways on both sides of the Atlantic, so Swiss Airlines ever so kindly put me up in a hotel to wait until the next available flight. I felt a bit like I was passing through a cultural halfway house on my way from my Spanish home to my American one.
Everyone in the hotel spoke English and Spanish, and thus all my conversations inevitably included both. But the hotel staff just switched back and forth with me as if this was absolutely normal (apparently Spanglish is the official language in this in-between place). Lunch was available between 1:00 and 3:00 pm, gracefully encompassing both the traditional American and Spanish mealtimes, and all instructions and pamphlets were also written in both languages.
The “meals” section of my bilingual hotel handbook included a list of the caloric and nutritional contents of most of the available dishes (for the “health-conscious traveler,” i.e. for Americans). It also included little symbols next to the meals that are “heart healthy,” low-calorie, or vegetarian. This is the first time I have seen such things in Spain.
I felt comfortable among these familiar American food neuroses (my mere existence as a girl in America’s culture makes this well-known territory), yet I also felt a new distaste for such unnecessary anxiety. I’ve never liked this obsession we seem to have about food, but now it seems just plain silly. How many books have been written entirely about food? I’ve spent four and a half months in a country where “splenda” is the mispronunciation of “espléndida.” Food is supposed to be a source of nutrition, not stress. You either take your coffee with sugar or you don't. How simple.
In my lovely three-and-a-half star halfway house, I found myself attended to with impeccable upscale, American-style service (except without the tips), yet not without a touch of that famous I’m-being-judgmental-for-your-own-good Spanish attitude. On the one hand the hotel staff were so polite and helpful that it almost made me embarrassed to ask anything of them, yet on the other hand the concierge (who should be the most obliging and least judgmental of all the hotel staff) just couldn’t seem to resist pointing out to me how much money I was spending on phone calls. For my whole time in Spain, I have just not been able to get my mind around the idea that someone working for a company would openly disapprove of and discourage a customer’s decision to spend money in a way that directly benefits the company (I hope that doesn’t make me a republican). It’s kind of like closing your store for the entire afternoon so you can take a nap. Do you not care that you’re sabotaging your own business? No, of course not. I equal parts love it and find incredibly frustrating.
On the second day I took an excursion to the airport to get cold medicine at the pharmacy, and I was shocked to see how much the situation there had deteriorated since the day before. Terminal 1 of Barajas was packed with people camped out on their carts of luggage, blocking so much of the check-in area that there was only space for a single-file line to pass in each direction. Women were sitting on suitcases nursing babies, children were sleeping curled up on coats on the floor, and several people held hand-made signs saying “¡Déjanos volver!” (“Let us go back!”). I felt like I had accidentally taken a bus to the refugee camp of exhausted and cranky travelers. And, in typical Spanish fashion, some of them were protesting. I wondered if any of them had considered that there really was no point in protesting against the weather, since there’s not a whole lot that even a non-bankrupt airline can do about a tundra in New England.
That’s another thing I don’t totally get about the Spanish: it certainly is a terrible thing to be spending an unspecified number of wretched hours living on top of your suitcase on the floor of an airport during the hectic week before Christmas, but it would never occur to me to protest. I would just do what I did, which was go back to my complementary hotel room, make expensive phone calls to the Swiss Air reservations department until they confirmed me on another flight, and then bill the phone calls to the airline. Efficient and effective – and no camping on suitcases necessary.
But what struck me about the situation at Barajas was the solidarity amongst all these weary travelers: let us go home – all of us camped out here on the floor in front of your desks. We all want to go home for Christmas.
It’s very interesting to see what role culture plays in how people handle situations like this. My first instinct is to figure out how to get myself home, while my Spanish counterparts decide to spend their time objecting to the principle of leaving hundreds of people stranded in an airport – for everyone’s sake. I guess they really are socialists.
Being at my hotel, I wasn’t really in Spain anymore (or I would have been slumped down on my duffel bag in Terminal 1), but I wasn’t in the US yet either. I spent three days in a sleek-looking, Spanglish-speaking in-between place with room service and a minibar.
Do I love Spain? Oh yes. Am I ready to be home? More than anything. But what I realized during my comfortable stay in this cultural halfway house is that those feelings are not incompatible. Madrid is dazzling, exciting, wonderfully different and thrilling to explore, but as a friend recently said to me, America is home – it’s where I’m from – and that makes it irreplaceable.
1 year ago
