September 9

My Spanish took quite a hit today, as did my English and most of my higher-level reasoning abilities, due to getting one hour of sleep last night and eating nothing all day As the sun started to set I decided that what I needed to remediate these issues was alcohol and tapas. Oddly, that turned out to make the problem even worse. But I did manage to make it back to my apartment.

Speaking of which, worked out well and is close to a lot of nice parts of Madrid. We also have a vegan cosmetics store and an artisinal florist on our block.

The place is also within really close walking distance of plenty of restaurants, plazas and other areas of interest, including the Parque de el Retiro, which I call "The place I'm going to go for runs over the next few days." Pictures below.

The park is especially beautiful when you ignore the police with machine guns patrolling the place.

It is across the street from the Prado, Madrid's art museum, where I took a class several times a week for several months 40 years ago. I don't remember a thing.

España, Chapter Dos

From high over the Atlantic Ocean, this trip is firing on all cylinders. So many great things so far:

1. The flight left on time, so I will have an extra 4 hours of trip this year.
   
   
2. The entertainment system has over 100 movies, very few of which have the words “inspiring” or “heartwarming” in the description, the elderly woman sitting next to me both has a cheery hot pink charging cable and doesn’t want to talk (win/win), and I paid an extra $100 to get a seat with 2.4 bonus inches of legroom, which means I can move any part of my body without cutting off the blood flow to any other part of my body.
   
   
   
3. I just learned that Madrid has self-service, pay-as-you-go electric assist bicycles stationed all around the city. They will be, assuming I don’t get flattened by a bus, a lot of fun.

Only concerns so far:

1. Being from the US, I will inevitably be associated with Donald Trump. Just this evening I have been quickly learning Spanish words for select body parts and high-impact action verbs so that I can assemble creative sentences as needed when the topic comes up.
   
   
2. It appears that while Spain did finally manage to get a president since I last visited (they hadn’t had one for over a year, and guess what? It didn’t make any difference), the country still hasn’t abandoned the ridiculous concept of “siesta.” So yet again, I will have to do all my eating and drinking before 2:00 pm and after 6:00 pm. Sucks for me.