Forward to the Past

One of the most surreal things about Madrid (and Spain in general, I suppose) is that there are a lot of things here that make me feel like I've traveled back in time.  Which is pretty funny, since I'm actually six or seven hours in the future, as far as most of y'all reading this are concerned.  So essentially, I've traveled forward in time and landed squarely in the past.  "But how," you may ask, "can such a thing be?"  Or you may not ask it, but the wondrous thing about a blog is that whether or not you ask, I can give a long-winded answer and there's nothing you can do about it.  I suppose you could just decide not to read it, but that's the sissy way out.

Anyway, back to the real subject at hand: time travel.  After I arrived at the host-family's house, we went out to buy ingredients for our next couple of meals.  I felt like I had stepped into the past (somehow, I get the feeling I've said that before).  The streets are lined with small stores from a bygone era.  It's actually more like a dotted line, since there are also apartments, but you get the point.  Our first stop, the butcher's, was definitely larger than most closets.  Much more than that, I'm afraid I can't say.  The two guys behind the counter start saying  "Happy New Year" when you walk in and by the time they're done, you're already waiting at the counter.  Also, the various meats behind the counter bore a striking resemblance to the animals they came from.  Yes, I know it's supposed to be more hygienic for butchers to wear plastic gloves and plastic hairnets and to wrap all of their meat in plastic, but there's a lot to be said for buying meat from a guy who looks like he belongs in a butcher shop and not in a hospital.

Also, one-stop shopping does not exist here.  Our shopping list contained the following: sausage, tortillas, tomatoes, avocados, cilantro, and bread.  We went to 1 produce store, 1 "super" market (it was a little bigger than Kroger's produce section), 1 butcher, 1 baker, and 0 candlestick makers.  In case you weren't keeping track and are too lazy to go back and count, that's 6 ingredients and 4 stores.  We got half of our avocados and tomatoes at one store and half of them at another store just down the street.  But you can actually do that here since it's not uncommon to find, say, three bakeries on the same block.  I don't really know what to say about all this diversity and variety; it's so...un-American.