I’ve got
culture shock again. I’ve just returned
to Egypt after spending weeks in America, visiting family and friends.
Azza met me
at Cairo International Airport on the morning of my arrival. Of course, I was very happy to see her and immediately
began telling her about my trip, especially about the flight across the
Atlantic and the days I’d spent in Madrid.
I recalled how I’d felt like yelling “hallelujah” as soon at the big
Boeing had touched down on the runway at Madrid-Barajas Airport. The ride across “the pond” had taken place in
the middle of the night, and about mid-ocean or thereabouts, hundreds of miles
away from the nearest land, we ran into a storm. With nothing but deep blue beneath us, the jumbo
jet buckled wildly for what seemed like forever. I’m not a good air traveler even during the
best of circumstances. When the
circumstances are the worst—I can’t imagine a more turbulent and scary trip
than the one I just had—I become an emotional basket case.
The three
days I spent in Spain’s vibrant capital were just enough to whet my appetite. Had I stayed there longer, though, I probably
would have gotten exhausted. One often
hears cities being referred to as places that “never sleep,” but in Madrid’s
case, it’s more than a cliché. The metropolis
seemed eerily uninhabited during the day, but then exploded with activity an
hour or so after sundown. The Spaniards
also struck me as proud, impulsive, and wildly inventive. One way the latter most clearly manifested
itself was in the number and quality of street performances I ran across while
walking about.
I used my
Nikon to record some of these.
Unfortunately, my camera battery went completely dead on me at the
moment I wished to capture the most impressive of all those I witnessed—it
involved levitation and those participating must have employed some sort of
very effective optical illusion to float the way that they did. I had a hard time choosing which video to
embed here. I finally settled on this
one, which shows a performance that took place in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor, one of
the city’s iconic locations.
I
eventually dropped a Euro into the tip jar and promptly got the bejesus
startled out of me when the three lunged forward. My face immediately reddened and then I faded
back into the crowd as nonchalantly as possible. A few minutes later, I left the scene to see
what else the city had to offer.
Later that
same day, I discovered that some of Madrid’s buildings also like to perform, as
you can see from the following clip.
