Spain: Living in past glory

When I first landed in Madrid, Barajas airport, it reminded me of the airports in India without those automatic sorters and luggage manually thrown into the conveyer belts. But, I had to go to another terminal to take a flight to Paris and that terminal by all standards was very modern. Then after coming back to Madrid, I took the subway to my hotel and had to hop between two trains only to find out that Madrid has an excellent metro system and the trains were much better than the ones in Paris or Chicago. Also all the buses are the low floor ones, air conditioned and not once I had to wait for more than 5 minutes to take the bus to our school that is in the outskirts of Madrid. In summary, Madrid city has an excellent infrastructure (transit system to be specific), kind of Utopian.

A little on Spain’s history. Spain was very prosperous until the late 19th century with many colonies in Latin America, Africa etc. However, the negligence of common public’s need led to a civil war and general Franco ended up being the president of Spain. He was a dictator who supported the Nazis during the world war. There wasn’t any great development in his rule and people were once again unhappy. But, he only gave up power on his death. Upon his death, the Royal family took power and allowed democracy to prevail. Today most Spaniards don’t like speaking about Franco and are happy or thankful to the King for allowing democracy. Sooner, the new government brought in reforms mostly populist reforms that made the people very happy. In mid eighties, Spain joined the European Union. In EU, the funds were allocated based on the basis of lower per capita income. And Spain, then, had the least per capita income. So, they got a lot of funds from EU to develop airport, metros or bus systems, remember these funds were from the tax payers of other EU members.

Today, we speak to anyone in Spain, people talk about crisis. Spain is one of the top three countries were the economic crisis hit the worst. Spanish economy is based on consumption model and is heavily dependent on service industry, specifically, tourism. The interest rates were lowered quite a lot and people started buying real estate. Now there are over 3 million houses in Spain that cannot be sold to fellow country men. Secondly, Spain’s policies were populist in nature and sometimes ignored its consequences. For instance, Public heath care system, were the government is taking care of the health care. And like in US there is social security. Because the government took care of almost every need of the people here, people didn’t have any incentive to work. Neither people found any incentive to conceive children. Today, like many countries, Spain is facing the problem of aging population. The problem is aggravated in Spain because the government has overpromised and now the tax payers are less and the beneficiaries are more. The government is trying to increase the retirement age from 65 to 67 to address the problem. Everybody is aware of the crisis but seems like they are all waiting for the government to do something.

Moving away from political and economic matters, Spain has, may be, the most good looking people on earth and on top of that people are extremely fashion conscious. It almost seems like a crime to be not fashionable in Madrid and to me it has been a wake up call. Most of them, if not, all of them are in very good shape, I mean, I hardly saw obese people, despite heavy drinking and unusual eating habits. I only learned in Madrid that Spaniards eat their lunch only after 2:30 pm and eat their dinner only after 9:30 pm. In fact, the restaurants in Madrid only open at 2:30 pm and the dinner is only served from 9pm in the restaurants. And no meal is served without meat or hot chocolate. They are healthy, I think, because of the kind on food they have. One it is cooked in olive oil, two there is not very high intake of carbohydrates, mostly consists of proteins and also they eat lettuce a lot and three, may be (because its my theory), because they eat rare meat, it might consume a lot of metabolic activity. One of problems I had in Madrid restaurants is that the meat would by default be ‘rare’. Every time I had to specifically mention that ‘I want the meat well done’. Its funny because many waiters here didn’t speak English and I had to show them all sorts of signs to explain what that meant. Then I had a translation written for that and I always showed that piece of paper to the waiter. Anyways, I must say that meat ‘well done’ is still ‘rare’ when compared to our Indian standards.

One other thing in Madrid is that people don’t speak English at all. Only few, may be, youngsters can speak some English. The thing is that many words are similar to English but the pronunciations are totally different. In this country its very difficult to survive with just English. In fact, I would say that foreigners could survive in India much easily than in Spain. It was again a government policy that didn’t encourage people to learn English. Anywhere we go we asked ‘Heblula Ingles’ (speak English) and anytime someone comes to us with a brochure or trying to sell anything to us, we would simply say ‘Manyana’ meaning tomorrow. We found English speaking crowd only in Irish bars. On St. Patrick’s day, most of the people, ex-pats from England and Ireland, I talked to, were telling me that they were teaching English. But in Spanish, I really liked the way they address men as ‘senior’ and women as ‘senorita’. Our conversations starts with Hola (Hello) pronounced as ‘ola’ (‘h’ silent) and ends with gracious (gra as in grand not as in grape, ci as letter ‘C’ and ous as ‘us’), meaning thank you.

And drinking habits, oh my god, these people drink till 6 am in the morning almost every day. I mean the bars are full and are open till 6 am on Mondays, Tuesdays or any day, not necessarily on a Friday night and Saturday night alone. But, on a serious note, drinking is pretty much part of their culture. One of our lecturers told us that if we order good meat and not order wine, people will think that we are crazy. If we order meat and coke, may be the waitress may not say anything to us but will definitely talk about us in the Kitchen. I didn’t find a single restaurant that didn’t serve alcohol. In fact a chain of restaurants known as café’ and te’ also served alcohol. In fact Spain has the highest per capita bars in the world. Because people cannot accept any restaurants without alcohol, makes Spain, may be, the only country were Mc Donald’s sells beer.

Lastly, its incomplete if  I don’t mention sports. Spaniards unanimously love Rafael Nadal. Grand Prix is also popular here, thanks to Alonso, but they don’t love Alonso as much as Nadal. I don’t know much about the bull fighting or teasing, whatever it is called, although I tried to understand it watching it on TV. But it was very cruel the way they Kill that Bull. The country is divided into various football fans. It again has links to history. During the civil war era, when survival was difficult, people found a lot of relief or pleasure in discussing football. In fact historically they say, those who belonged to left wing supported Barcelona and the right wing supported Real Madrid. Real Madrid and Barcelona are clubs that have highest revenues in football clubs and yet high expenses. Many times their debts were written off by the government because the country cannot survive if any of these two clubs close down due to bankruptcy. Our instructor, who showed us the Real Madrid club told us that the club had to sell off prime real estate to pay Zidane, Ronaldo, Beckham etc.

Going back to where I started, Spain with a huge real estate bubble bust, raising unemployment and a negative GDP growth coupled with the consequences of populist polices of the government that brought in cultural changes such as lack of benefactors for the government, poor English speaking abilities, lack of innovations etc. seems to me like quite a lot of challenge for Spain to bounce back. Spain has had a prosperous past and a dream like last 25 years, reaping the benefits of joining EU, but now, the road ahead is not very bright. In fact, most of the people I met itself aren’t any optimistic.