Tag: Madrid

Letters from Madrid – The Paperwork is Done

Timothy Price18 Comments

The first letter from Madrid left the us worn out from crisscrossing Madrid trying to finish up the paperwork for our residency cards. The saga continues with us looking for flamenco classes, a description of where we lived and Tristan’s schooling. She was 9 years old when we moved to Spain.

18 April 1996

Madrid, Spain
With the paperwork out of the way, Laurie and I went off in search of flamenco classes. Of course finding dance classes was not difficult and Laurie is taking class every day for two hours, and is looking into adding some other classes. I got lucky, and found an excellent guitarist, Miguel Rivera. who has taken me as a student. He was recommended by Pablo’s old teacher, Angel Torres. Miguel is a superb player, fast and clean like Paco de Lucia, very tasteful and very knowledgeable. He is constantly on tour with flamenco groups, so I get lessons when he is town for a couple of days between shows. He is performing in northern Spain, Italy and Poland for the next three weeks. He has me playing some very difficult material plus he has exercises for every technique and fingering I am deficient in (which is about everything). The style is very different from what I have played and is taking a lot of getting used to. I’m slowly adjusting and my speed and clarity is improving already. I am very excited about the guitar right now.

We live in the barrio called Chambari, in a small, but comfortable, fairly modern apartment. As it turns out, Chambari is a fairly upscale area, and this is the best priced apartment we have found so far, especially considering it has central heat and air-conditioning (Heating is not standard in apartments, and air-conditioning is rare) included in the rent. We are central to everything and right on a metro stop. There is a nice playground/park up the street from us where Tristan goes to play in the evenings. There are a lot of families in this area and Tristan has made several friends. There are real grocery stores fairly close by, a nice market down the street, a great book store around the corner, and the main branch of the public library up the road a bit. After looking at several apartments in the areas we like, we have come to the conclusion we are in the least expensive apartment we can find, so we are staying put at the moment.

Tristan is being home schooled, which is not something normally done in Spain, as most people don’t understand the concept. The Spanish schools are in session until the end of May and then have a break until the middle of September. We might put Tristan in School in September. Classes run from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Monday through Friday here. Tristan doesn’t even want to consider it at the moment. She has just finished a fourth grade math book and moved on to a fifth grade math book (she is a third grader). She is reading regular novels in English (middle to high school level), plus the Bible and some easier history, horse and bird books in Spanish on her own. Laurie is reading Don Quijote and Greek Myths in Spanish to her. Tristan has to do handwriting exercises and write at least a page, plus she has to write letters and post cards to friends and family. I work with her on Geography and Geology from a couple of very good, generally middle school level, text books. She has an Explora science book that she is reading and doing experiments on her own with. We go to the museums regularly so Tristan is getting art, art history and Spanish history. As she has learned from looking at the classic paintings, you have to know history, the Bible stories and mythology to understand many of the paintings. She is reading the Bible and discovering many of the stories in the paintings. She is also starting to understand and see a lot of the mythology and history in the paintings also. She is actually getting somewhat of a St. Johns College curriculum in her home studies.

We have not done a lot of site seeing outside of Madrid. There is so much to do here that it is tough to get out. We are what I would call micro tourists. We are getting to know an area of about 36 square kilometers in the center of Madrid very well; and that is a very small area of the city. We are finding all kinds of great museums and seeing great musical performances, learning the history of this wonderful city, and how to get about in it.

More to come…

While I did not take many photos the first couple of years we lived in Spain, I did find videos of Miguel Rivera, the guitarist I studied with in Madrid. Although the videos where posted on Youtube only in the past 5 years, some of them go back to the the 1990’s. The last one below that is very recent.

Flamencos de la Feria – Suite Sevilla Obra de Rafael Riqueni por Miguel Rivera y René Mora  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5rBpcCFSCM (Miguel is on the right side of the screen)

El Real – Suite Sevilla obra de Rafael Riqueni por Miguel Rivera, René Mora y David Vázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6WaVEGjRx4 (Miguel is on the right side of the screen)

Bulerías – Miguel Rivera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r51aSk7fDOI

Así suena el genial Miguel Rivera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63H-1EW9e_8 (Miguel in 2014)

 

 

Letters from Madrid – Residency

Timothy Price16 Comments

While searching through my archived files recently, I found letters I’d written home from when we moved to Spain in January 1996. The letters are compiled from the daily journals I kept at the time. I did very little photography when we lived in Spain, so you have to form mental images from my descriptions of people and events. 

I am going to publish the letters in pieces as they where very long and detailed.

 

18 April 1996

Madrid, Spain
Warning this is a form letter. Sorry I have had to resort to this, but this seems to be the only way I’m am going to be able to share some of the experiences, and observations of Spain, Madrid currently, with everyone I want to. Since I record my observations, impressions and experiences on a daily basis, this letter contains very detailed descriptions of them. If you don’t like to read or don’t have time, I won’t be offended, just pass it on to someone else. I am not inclined to photograph much of anything while I am here, so you will have to form your own images from the words on these pages. I am including what I think are the more interesting aspects of Madrid, and my experiences, thus far, taken from my journal and edited from letters I have sent to mainly family. The letter is long, so I am labelling the broad subjects with headings so you can easily skip any part you may not be interested in. I hope you enjoy it, and you can at least feel somewhat relieved to know that it will be months before I compile another form letter.

General Welfare of the Vagabond Price Family
We are all well. We got our paperwork completed and in the hands of the authorities during our first six weeks in Madrid. This was very trying on our patience as we made our way through the seemingly never ending gauntlet of bureaucratic inconsistencies, misinformation, and off-the-cuff rule making. We patiently filled out forms, walked here, waited in line there, got an address, opened accounts, bought insurance, got more photos, more copies, got official letters, got official inscriptions, got everything stamped by the right stamper, dated with current dates, and signed by ourselves and official parties, and, after five weeks of it, turned the bundle over to the authorities. The not so pleasant lawyer, who had the final say before the papers could be shipped off for processing, got it in his head that we had not suffered enough. He looked at the date from the letter from the bank on the status of the accounts we opened, and said “this date is ten days old! You will have to get another letter.” We were to say the least shocked at this, but he would not have anything less. We had already walked back and forth about 10 kilometers that morning tying up the final details of the paper work, and were a little out of patience; however, we walked 3 kms. to the bank and requested another letter (the bank officials were, I think, more surprised then we were at this request) and went home. We got the letter the next day from the bank, delivered it, got the final approval, and now we wait up to six months for our residency cards.

To be continued…

Sayre’s Barn at Sunset

Timothy Price5 Comments

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I went out to check the status of water in the ditch (not running) and got photos of our neighbor’s barn at sunset, the best view I can get of the Sandias without breaking the law, a photo of the law and a nice reflection of the standing water in the ditch. I did see an big, old, finned Cadillac on the way home. The car was so big that with two lanes between us on Coors Road, it barely fit in field of view of a 55mm lens. Seeing an old Cadillac on the road reminded me of Loquillo’s song “Cadillac Solitario” where he is singing about being drunk in a Cadillac while parked under the three crosses on a hill overlooking Barcelona after his girlfriend dumped him. We discovered Loquillo in 1996 when we happened upon one of their concerts in Plaza Mayor during the San Ysidro festival. The crowd was huge, and the performance and sound was amazing. We learned later that Loquillo was a huge star in Spain with 25 records/CDs on the market at that time. We went to at least one more live performance by Loquillo while living in Madrid, and brought back several of his CDs.

TheCadillac

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