thejdizzler
10hr ago
Madrid Trip Report
All it took was one week and I'm ready to convert to being a Euro
As many of you know, I’ve been studying Spanish for over five years using the Refold method. I took the B2 test and passed back in May, but wanted to test my skills out in the real world. My parents wanted to do family Christmas in the UK this year, so I thought I would take advantage of needing to be in Europe to travel to Spain and use my Spanish and see many of the sights I had been reading about in books or hearing about from my tutor Rafa. I had planned to go with a girl I was dating in the spring, but we stopped seeing each other, so this ended up being a solo adventure which is not usually my thing. However, I had a blast in Madrid (and Toledo) because of how friendly everyone was here and because of how satisfying it was to put something I have worked so long and hard at into practice. I also learned a lot about myself during this trip: I’m much more extroverted than I thought and I don’t enjoy traveling just to travel.
What I did (roughly)
Monday: Arrive, ate a tortilla at a bar, slept 13 hours
Tuesday: Easy run through Retiro Park, history museum, vegan restaurant #1 (Mad, Mad Vegan)
Wednesday: Easy run casa del campo, paella class, language exchange, cocktails with Anna Landler (college friend)
Thursday: River run with Anna, romanticism museum, cheese shop, walked around university and read a book, vegan restaurant #2 (Musgo)
Friday: Toledo + dinner with Zack
Saturday: Exploration run + Prado + vegan restaurant #3 (Oveja Negra)
Sunday: Retiro Run Club+ vegan meetup + chilling/writing this post
Los Lugares
Madrid and Toledo were both extremely beautiful cities. Madrid has a historic core (from ~1600) that is surrounded by successive layers of development: the center feels like a medieval or Renaissance labyrinth, the zones a little bit to the north or south have wide boulevards and apartment buildings that reminded me a little of Paris or Washington DC, and even further out you have something that feels like an American suburb. I spent most of my time in the city center: all the museums, restaurants, and even supermarkets were within walking or metro distance. There was absolutely no need for a car. I was especially impressed with the metro: it felt clean, safe, and had extremely high usage. From about 2pm-10pm it was pretty much cheek to cheek, at least on the lines that I took. The only American metro system that compares favorably is Boston, which I think is pretty embarrassing for us. Of course there were also plenty of cars on the roads, but the city is designed in such a way to funnel most of the car traffic onto specific busy streets and keep most of the city center for pedestrians only. Madrid unfortunately did not seem very bike friendly: not a whole lot of bike lanes and those that I did see were not protected from traffic. Bike infrastructure is probably unnecessary in the city center here: walking and metro are fast enough, especially as there are supermarkets on almost every block. I didn’t spent enough time on the periphery to know what the situation was like there. All in all, it seems like the center of Madrid is a pretty positive model for American cities to potentially follow: high-density, mixed zoning with key roads for cars, and the rest for pedestrians.
I was also really impressed by the number and quality of parks in the city. The two big famous parks, Retiro and Casa del campo, felt like Central Park and Van Cortlandt Park respectively. In addition to these two big ones, there were a ton of smaller parks dotted along the rivers that run through the city that made for some really good running.
In terms of museums, I was not super impressed. The art museums were great, but even the Prado I think is a little overrated. It felt like half the museum was just royal portraits by Goya and Velazquez. The history museum concentrated on Madrid itself, but stopped before the super interesting (to me) era of its history: the Civil War. The museum of Romanticism was terrible and I do not recommend going.
Toledo was much more sleepy and provincial, although there were a ton of cool historical sites to see, including the Toledo Cathedral, Alcazar, and the reconstructed workshop of El Greco, one of Spain’s most famous painters. The Cathedral was very impressive, but I unfortunately found it a bit boring. For whatever reason, I'm struggling to find the narratives in the New Testament compelling at all any more, which makes most of the church paintings dull as bricks.
La Gente
My favorite part of Madrid by far was the people I met there. I managed to arrange one meetup via HelloTalk for language exchange. It was with a Venezuelan woman Nath, and we got churros and went book shopping together. Because of Strava I realized that a college teammate, Anna Landler had been living in Madrid for three months and we got drinks and ran together. On Friday I had dinner with Hank Wiedefeld and Ryan Clancy’s old college roommate Zack. Today I did a few miles with the Retiro runners, and went to a vegan meetup arranged by a girl I met on Bumble!
Throughout the whole week I was impressed again and again by how kind and open the Spaniards I interacted with were. Yet another thing that Americans could learn from.
I was surprised by the level of open-carry by the police and Guardia civil. I saw a lot of submachine guns this week, which is not something one expects coming from supposedly “gun-crazy” America.
La Comida
I tried to eat vegan as much as possible during this trip, but decided to make exceptions for Spanish tortilla and paella. The paella that I had I made in class and was very good, and the tortilla that I ate from Pez tortilla was also amazing, but honestly it was not necessary to make these exceptions in Madrid, especially after I found the local vegan scene through a girl Marta, that I matched with on Bumble. My favorite of the three vegan restaurants I went to was probably Musgo.
La Lengua
I’ve studying Spanish for five years, but this is the first time I’ve really spoken with natives outside of learning context. The first day was really bad: jet-lag made me feel really dumb, and I tried to avoid interacting with natives as much as possible. However, things got much better after that first day and I got some extra sleep, and I was able to turn things around. For almost all one-on-one conversations I was able to understand 100% of what was being said to me, and reply with relatively few mistakes. Group conversations were more difficult, and I especially had trouble understanding this one madrileño at our vegan meetup when he was speaking to the whole group. I had no problem understanding the signs at the museums, but I found after hours of being immersed in the language, it was very difficult to concentrate on even the simplest reading. Still have further to go with Spanish it seems, and unfortunately that improvement I think will only come easily if I live in Spanish speaking country.
Lecciones Personales
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I’m much more extroverted than I thought. My best days on this trip (today and Wednesday) were when I had a shit ton of social interaction. Next time I go solo traveling, I think I should plan on staying in a hostel where by nature there will be far more social interaction. When I get back to Baltimore I think I should also make more of an effort to fill my week with social activities.
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I don’t like being a tourist. While here I found myself gravitating towards activities that Madrid natives would do: run clubs, meet ups, bookshops, etc. I think meeting new people and seeing new things are really valuable, but if they’re done in a consumptive, touristy manner, it actually takes away value. When we come at travel from this manner, rather from that of openness and a desire to learn, we end up changing the place we are visiting rather than that place changing us. I saw a lot of this in Madrid: English absolutely everywhere, and it made me quite sad. This New Yorker piece explains my travel skepticism better than I ever could. I think I will be limiting vacation travel to visiting friends in the future, and if I really want to experience a foreign culture try and live there for a few years. This requires a lot more investment than people usually put into their vacations.
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Walkability really makes your life so much more pleasant. Even though I am car-free in America, getting around Baltimore on my bike is light years worse than walking and metro-ing around Madrid. The walkability really facilitated social interactions: you can just do things so much more easily. As much as I love Baltimore, the walkability in Europe is just so nice that I might have to leave.
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I’m really inspired to continue my foreign language study! It was so rewarding to be able to communicate with Spaniards in their native language. I can’t wait to keep improving and to lock in on Italian next year5.
thejdizzler
11hr ago
It's a quick read. Took me a few days.
thejdizzler
13hr ago
This is what I wrote about it
The Children of Men is a book about a world with ultra-low fertility, in other words, an extreme version of a world that we already live in. I had a friend's birthday party at the park a couple weeks ago (I'm getting close to 30 unfortunately), and I noticed that out of the 20 or so couples there, only one had a child. And I think this is becoming increasingly true over the whole entire world. Many of the downstream aspects of this fact also seem to be shared between James' novel and reality: the prevalence of pet parents, the lack of interest in the future of society (but a fixation on the past), and an obsession with health and safety at all costs.
Beyond the social commentary, the actual plot of the novel is a little lackluster. It centers on an Oxford Professor of History, Theo, who happens to be the cousin of the dictator of England. Theo lives a pretty unremarkable and utterly selfish life (even before the "Omega" where most men suddenly become infertile), until he becomes involved with a rebel group that wants to enact some minor changes in the governmental system, but more importantly, is sheltering a woman who happens to be pregnant. Theo's time with this group changes his inner and outer lives almost completely: it's amazing what hope for the future does to an individual, although I was left wondering at the end how much would really change in England after the birth of this child.
Having children is no basis for a moral system in of itself (this was Chesterton's critique of H.G. Wells), but it sure as hell makes constructing a society a hell of a lot easier. Unfortunately I think our world is headed to a future more similar to what James envisioned in the 1990s. People simply aren't having children: I'm guilty of this too: it's not like I'm close to being married even. And that, I think, means that this society isn't very long for this world.
The movie is pretty faithful but plays up the immigration (there are migrant laborers from poor countries to help with labor shortages) aspect a bit more for woke points.
thejdizzler
16hr ago
This year I've read 62 books (so far). I hope to read a few more before the new year, but it won't be more than 65. Quite a bit less than the 89 I read last year, but I think as @FiveHourMarathon has said, there are other things to do with one's time besides read. I didn't do as good of a job reflecting on these books as I did last year, so that's something to work on in the new year. 32 of these books were in English, 28 in Spanish and 2 in Italian. Some favorites below.
Best Fiction Book: Niccoló Rising by Dorothy Dunnett
You know it’s good when you find extra time to listen to it via audiobook: I’m not usually an audiobook person!
I’ve been wanting to read Dorothy Dunnett for a long time. One of my other favorite historical fiction writers, Guy Gavriel Kay, wrote a poem about her work that I connected when I was a teenager, and I found the fourth book in the Niccolò series in a used bookstore in England in 2023 and had been meaning to start the series ever since.
Niccolò rising follows the most unlikely of heroes, the dyers apprentice Claes, on the first stages of his meteoric rise from artisan to prominent businessman. Claes (who eventually comes to be known as Niccolò or Nicholas) is a genius who initially uses his intelligence to perform outrageous pranks in his home city of Bruges, but after a few chance encounters with two Scottish noblemen who are out for his blood, he decides to change his ways and use his mind to make his way in the world.
Dunnett really makes Bruges, Milan, and Geneva feel alive, and the research that must have went into this book is immense in scale. Certainly puts Kay, and every other historical fiction author I’ve read to shame.
Best Non-fiction Book: Mi pais inventado by Isabelle Allende
I've read a lot of Isabelle Allende's fiction, and I enjoyed this much more. Allende has an annoying habit of masking her ideology and philosophy behind characters and situations that make you feel like a villain for disagreeing with, despite those actions sometimes being very wrong. This book is much more honest and tells both Allende's personal story, of why she left Chile, and of the recent history of the country as she understands it.
Most Subversive Book: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
This book managed to do both the thriller and the critique of science, which I don't think I've seen done before. The info-dumps served both to show us how this crazy island works, and to be used as action-fodder in the second half of the book when the whole system starts breaking down. Crichton did a great job with the characters too: I found myself being really annoyed at John Hammond and Lexie, and wanting to spend more time with Dr. Grant and Ellie. Getting your reader to root for the protagonist is surprisingly hard to do in thrillers a lot of the time.
Although the prognosis about genetic engineering hasn't aged that well (turns out it's really hard to do genetically engineer Eukaryotes on a large scale), the general prognosis about the scientific worldview has not. The park largely fails because of human hubris and inability to recognize the interests of other beings (humans or not). The inciting incident is directly caused by John Hammond being a dick, but as the ending shows, even if the dramatic events of the novel hadn't occurred, the park was already out of control. Trying to fight against nature is like trying to drink the ocean with a spoon. You ain't going to win, and you'll probably get very wet.
Best Book with Philosophy Book Club: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant
I had been thinking about Kant to some degree or another since 2019 because one of my college teammates and friends, Matt Kearney, was really into his philosophy. I watched a couple YouTube videos on him at the time (one about Kingdom of Heaven, which I still remember), and remember loving the idea of the categorical imperative, but not understanding the motivation behind it.
Reading this for philosophy book club helped to clarify the motivation for why Kant formulated the categorical imperative in the first place. Kant’s whole philosophy is really about moral freedom. This is not really freedom in the colloquial sense, because the categorical imperative is pretty restrictive, but freedom from particular life circumstances that may bias or impede your moral judgement. In order to be a truly moral law, according to Kant, a law has to be universal, which means it cannot be affected by interest that may come from particular circumstances.
I can’t say I really understood the whole chain of reasoning clearly, but I find this philosophy admirable in certain sense, but very foolish in another. It’s pretty impossible to live like Kant would want us to: reason is not the pure and unbiased master that Kant seems to think it is, and I also unfortunately think that a lot of morality is extremely contingent, and would be difficult to writer a moral law describing (a very Buddhist idea perhaps).
Best Book Originally Written in Spanish: El matrimonio de los peces rojos by Guadalupe Nettel
This is a collection of short stories where Nettel uses an animal to reflect the personal relationships of the principles characters. It's a pretty small collection, only 5 stories, all of which are good. My favorite was "guerra en los basureros" which is about a boy living with his higher-class uncle and aunt who starts to identify with the cockroaches the family is insistent on eradicating.
Best Reread: Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson
This was my fourth re-read of this book: I’ve read it every year since 2021 except for 2022. I’m getting loads out of revisiting this book every year. Figures and battles are becoming a lot clearer in my mind, and I think I can start to talk about a lot of the issues of the time with nuance and perspective. McPherson tells a narrative history: focusing on the evolution of key players and key ideas in the struggle which made it easier for me to follow the course of the war. Of course I've had to use other resources to dig deeper into specific battles and theaters. There's also nothing here about the trans-Mississippi theater for example.
Best “Normie” Book: Searching for Caleb by Anne Tyler
I picked this book up at the ‘Book Thing’ for free because the girl I was dating at the time recommended I read some Anne Tyler due to the fact that she sets her books in Baltimore, and I had said earlier I was starving for some fiction were set in this city in which I live that has such a negative reputation in fiction. Partially because I stopped seeing that girl, partially because this book is not my usual cup of tea, it took me nearly three months to finish this book. Searching for Caleb is a very slow book in which not much explicit plot really happens, but rather the family relations between the dysfunctional Pecks are explored in-depth. The plot which does happen is centered on the search for the eldest Peck’s younger brother Caleb, who ran away from Baltimore nearly fifty years ago, and the chaotic marriage of Justine and Duncan, who are cousins and both Pecks. I got what I wanted out of the book: an exploration of the Roland Park/JHU neighborhood of Baltimore as it was 50 years ago. In terms of theme, I got a bit more than I had hoped for as well. The advantage of Slice of Life is that we get to spend a lot of time with characters doing fairly normal things, without earth-shattering events that would tell us unrealistic things about their character. Much of the dsyfunction in the Peck family seems to stem from an inability to healthily grapple with change, but rather to run away at the first sign of difficulty. We see this quite literally in the character of Duncan, who can’t seem to stay put, causing his wife and daughter quite a bit of suffering. But the other Pecks suffer from this as well, the titular Caleb, but also the family as a whole, who by the novels end, seem to have retreated from the world, rather than confront the fact that they don’t live in the Belle Epoque anymore. Not sure if I will be reading more Anne Tyler but this was worth a read.
Most Disappointing Book: The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
I reviewed this book in-depth earlier in the year after giving it a chance based on rave review from many friends. While Sanderson does some things extremely well: really cool vistas, excellent character set-up, and consistent book delivery, I found this book to be both plodding and shallow which is impressive given its thousand plus pages. There’s a decent, entertaining story hiding underneath all this bloat and superficiality, but it’s just not worth the time investment. Which is a shame, as I was expecting another First Law or A Song of Ice and Fire out of this.
Worst Book: Persona normal by Benito Taibo
We read this for Refold Spanish book club, and I think everyone who read it (just Nick and myself I think) had the same problems with it. The book starts well enough: Sebastian is a young Mexican kid who uses heavy amounts of magical realism to cope with the death of his parents while he’s living with his uncle Paco. Paco encourages this, and the two develop a very close friendship. Unfortunately, despite the great premise, the book quickly devolves into literary wanking and moral scolding: Taibo feels the need to constantly remind us how many Spanish greats he’s read, and how liberalism is the only sensible way of seeing the world. I had an extremely hard time getting through the last hundred pages of this, especially as the last 50 pages contain chapters about the COVID pandemic, which have aged really badly.
thejdizzler
1d ago
What is your issue with leftism beyond just gender politics? Don't lump as all together like that. History and other countries show that certain parts of the leftist agenda (worker protections, anti-trust, social welfare, environmental protections, a certain degree of rights for women) are both very popular and good for society. You can't just force certain things back in a hole: Franco tried that, Pinochet tried that, and it didn't fucking work.
Also the left is self-immolating without your "heroic stand". We haven't had an actual leftist party in power since the end of the Soviet Union in the West because the we're too busy infighting and tone policing over trivialities.
thejdizzler
3d ago
Cool writeup! Almost sold me on this, but I think it'll interfere with running!
thejdizzler
4d ago
The average finishing time for most marathons is in the high fours. So it's not awful, but it's not good.
Wow, I'm hoping it's the jet lag, but my Spanish speaking ability hasn't been doing great on this trip so far. V depressing. Hanging out with some people more one on one in the next few days, so hoping it's just jet lag+ anxiety + not knowing the customary short greetings.
Edit: Update it's the jet lag. Much better today and yesterday.
thejdizzler
5d ago
I love IJ as well. Apparently the footnotes are to simulate a tennis match. Talk about pissing off the reader. I wrote a large review of the book here, and would love to discuss with you.
https://deusexvita.substack.com/p/review-12-of-2024-infinite-jest
Temple of Debod is closed right now, but I'll head to the churches for sure. Have a ticket for all three of the art museums, and am going to go to Toledo and El Escorial for the day sometime this week.
thejdizzler
5d ago
Yes! It's been a revelation so far, although that's probably just the jetlag+ anxiety!
thejdizzler
9d ago
I’m there for a week before I go with my family to visit our extended family in north England. I haven’t made a detailed itinerary because that feels too much like work. Have a few restaurants and museums I want to go to, a run club on Wednesday night (classic Spaniards not even starting until 8pm) and day trips to Toledo and Él Escorial).
thejdizzler
9d ago
Anyone on this forum live in Madrid and want to meet up next week? I’ll be in the city from 15-22.
thejdizzler
12d ago
Okay but AI can't break the laws of physics. We just hit peak copper, have been at peak oil for 5 years, and the Co2 that we've added to the atmosphere has already caused the planet to warm by 1.5 C. We know what the solutions to these problems are, we just can't do them. I guess AI can help psyop these things but that's not a positive development.
thejdizzler
13d ago
Guess I’m curious about the timing. When are you eating these meals?
thejdizzler
13d ago
Can I get more specifics about your IF practice? Wondering if this will help me lose weight without experiencing cravings
thejdizzler
13d ago
Why? You’ll be dead and humans probably won’t exist anymore, or have existed for millions of years
thejdizzler
14d ago
See this is why I can't take space colonization advocates seriously anymore: you're extrapolating from trends on earth that have no real analogy in space. Colonizing space looks absolutely nothing like either the British Empire or Julius Caesar invading Britain because in both of those scenarios the various groups involved don't have to bring every single thing they need for their survival with them. There's just no real pressing reason to go to space: there's nothing super valuable we could get there that we can't get on earth for much cheaper (filtering sea water is probably cheaper than asteroid mining), if we really needed living space, seasteads or even colonies on Antartica would be far easier to supply and to make self-sufficient, yet we have done neither.
There are just certain things that are physically impossible and/or biologically impossible that will never come to pass. No one "has to" colonize space. We have no evidence of extraterrestrial space colonization (the Fermi paradox isn't a paradox if space colonization isn't biologically possible). You are giving evolution far too much credit. There are some boundaries that have never been crossed here on Earth in 4.2 billion years of life existing, there's no reason to think that life would necessarily be able to make it into space and expand throughout the universe. This is more of a reflection of our Faustian culture rather than of how life actually works. Life can just end with the sun evaporating the oceans on earth, and that's probably what will happen.
Current space exploration efforts are almost entirely the result of the one time fossil fuel burst we had as a civilization. We still haven't returned to the moon since the 70s, and the ISS was built in the early 2000s. We haven't made serious attempts at space colonization, other than a few probes, since Apollo. Yes SpaceX has made great strides in increasing efficiency and decreasing launch costs, but the vast vast majority of those launches are for satellites, not humans because there aren't actually that many reasons to go to space.
thejdizzler
14d ago
I'm pretty sure we are at Peak Oil right now. We've been on a long plateau since about ~2018 and certainly since 2022.
Pretty sure you're right about oil reserves, but you're missing the EROEI part: a lot of that oil requires a lot of energy to extract, meaning that we are effectively getting less net oil than we used to be because it takes more energy to get oil out of fracking or tar sands than it does out of gushers in Texas and PA. Of course if we have fusion this doesn't matter, but I have yet to see convincing evidence that we will ever have fusion.
thejdizzler
14d ago
Intellectually I really like Nate Hagens and Erald Kolasi on the energy front. I feel like both of them are genuinely trying to find a way that humans can flourish and make it through our current list of challenges.
In sport, I like a lot of what I'm seeing out of Norwegian triathlon (Kristian Blumenfelt, Gustav Iden, etc.) and Nils van Der Pol (speed skating olympic champion and world record holder).
thejdizzler
14d ago
Man I love that song. We used to sing it at summer camp when I was a kid not understanding any of the innuendos.
thejdizzler
14d ago
Looks like I'm wrong about Russia! They have actually an increasing share of nuclear power as a percentage of total electricity mix and are building a number of new power plants that will be online later this decade!
Quadruple nuclear still puts China at only 20% of electricity from nuclear which is comparable to Russia right now. This does represent a big difference from the US still, but I'm not sure it will be enough. What we need to start seeing is a decline in the total amount of fossil energy in the electricity mix, which we haven't even seen in Russia. I actually don't think we've seen this anywhere except for maybe Germany/UK, but the renewable buildout in those locations has obvious problems of intermittency.
Nuclear is better than I thought though, so I stand corrected.
thejdizzler
14d ago
I'm not sure I believe that regulation is the reason why we don't have fission. US has more fission power by GW than China and so does France. France's electricity mix is actually 70% fission and is dealing with various climate change related problems such as being unable to run the reactors in the summer because the water level is so low in the various inflow rivers to the nuclear power plants can't be used for steam generation. Even with a government that doesn't give a shit about safety regulations (China and the Soviet Union) fission clearly actually isn't that effective of a technology. Fission has actually declined as a share of China's energy mix recently (probably because of build out of solar), so I have a hard time believing it is a wunderkind energy source. @FirmWeird has posted a lot about this in this in the past.
I should clarify my view on AI. I don't disagree with any of your points, but I don't think AI will be materially transformative in the way that people seem to think around here. It's all incremental improvement (and destruction). It's not going to solve the energy crisis or help us discover genuine new knowledge.
In the long run it's also not going to last. We are going to run out of cheap energy or AI is going to rot everyone's brains enough that it can't self perpetuate.
New England and Mid-Atlantic are the only regions I feel qualified to speak on.
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