Author: Ben

Check out this fine, spot on description of how to blend in with the Spanish. Can’t think of much else to add really!

(Thanks to Betty – whose blog url appeared in one of the nfs comments.)

Madrid’s sex scene doesn’t know whether it’s coming or going. The council has removed most of the prostitutes from the centre’s Calle Montera (they moved round the corner onto the emblematic Gran Via for a while, then headed en mass for the Casa de Campo park), and the city’s few ‘show centres’ do pretty poor business these days. Yet scandal reminiscent of the famous ‘Movida’ days of the eighties is set to hit the capital this weekend.

This Sunday, ‘Follartour’ (follar – def. – have sex, slang) is coming to La Riviera, one of Madrid’s biggest live music venues, for a 12 hour non-stop live sex show. The website blurb promises ‘a show that takes us to the end of our sensual limits,’ that includes ’35 mind battering sexual performances.’ This all sounds like a bit of an excuse for a giant swingers party to me, and there was I thinking that this sort of thing only went on in Paris. If it wasn’t for the 45 Euro ticket price for men (less for women), I might even be tempted to go and check it out – solely in the interests of journalistic research of course…

Mayor Gallardon has promised to plant 254,000 new trees in Madrid before the end of 2007. The plan is to cover the mess left by work on the M-30 ring road with urban forest parks, that will cover twelve times the area currently occupied by Madrid’s one and only real expanse of green, the city centre’s giant Retiro park.

Sounds great, until you listen to what the opposition has to say. Pedro Santí­n, the PSOE Environmental Director for Madrid points out that a new tree requires at least 50 square meters to survive, whereas Gallardons plans leave just 13 square meters per tree. “This means that in the space provided, the council can only plant 67,000 new trees with guarantees of survival”, said Santí­n, “if they plant 254,000 in two years, 95 percent will die due to lack of space”.

So will common sense win the day? A quarter of a million trees is such a succulent number, so appealing to the public imagination in a city with so few trees, that no doubt they will be planted anyway, water shortages will continue to prevail, and indeed many of the trees will die.

This is certainly the opinion of Rosa Villalba, a Retiro tree surgeon interviewed this week in 20 Minutos, who is fed up with seeing 40 year old trees ripped up and replaced by a dozen doomed saplings. “In 50 years we won’t see a single tree when we look upwards. We’ll just see empty sky,” she predicts, “the future is anything but green. In Madrid, at the rate were going, they’ll have to give us a bottle of oxygen to be able to survive. We’ll have to pay to breathe.” Now there’s optimism for you…

Princess Leonor is born to Prince Felipe and his once newsreading wife Letizia, posing an interesting question for the Spanish constitution… Looks like a promised change will now be rushed through allowing Leonor to rule as Queen one day – another victory for the women of Spain!

After Mayor Gallardon’s sterling efforts this summer to dig up every other street in the capital in time for the autumn return to work, a new plan is born to bring further agonies to the city streets in the New Year. This time, ironically, it’s more public transport that’s going to cause all the problems. The Metro will not be opening throughout the night on Fridays and Saturdays as had originally been hoped. A fleet of 109 buses will be following the exact route of the Metro lines and stops instead.

That should be interesting in the case of Line 3, whose stops pop up in some of the tightest streets of the old quarter. Driving a car past Lavapies Metro is hard enough, let alone a bus. And anyone who has sat in atraffic jam in a taxi on the Paseo de la Castellana at 3 a.m. on a Saturday morning will quickly spot the futility of this plan. The traffic in the early hours of a Saturday is as bad as it is at 9 a.m. on Mondays. Adding 109 more heavy diesel vehicles into the mix is not going to help, especially as the Madrileños are far too addicted to their cars to see this as an interesting alternative, whether they have been drinking or not.

The real question must be, however, what is wrong with the Metro? Why clog up the city streets by following these perfectly good underground routes, routes that would ease the overground chaos instead of exacerbating it? Perhaps it’s part of Mayor Gallardon’s secret plan to drive us all to hate our cars with such a passion that we eventually sell them all in exchange for bicycles. Yes! The suicidal pursuit of cycling in Madrid! Don’t get me started on that…