Colors to the Sky

My footprints are pink. After the spots and smears of Spring’s beckoning muddled on the shower floor, a splotch of scrubbed too hard pink on the bottom of my foot remains the singular remnant of the day’s extravagant endeavors.

Earlier today my friends and I gathered to celebrate the Hindu Holi Festival, a celebration of spring that is internationally famous for the throwing of powdered dies and colored water.  Early in the morning, long before the celebration, I arrived at my friend Janel’s house where mimosas assisted in the preparation of tasty vegetarian delights including garbanzo samosas and gogola, fried banana beignets.  Guests in white arrived as fritters sizzled, salads tossed and the samosas toasted to a golden brown.  After an afternoon of snitching our delicious eats, we boarded the metro with a frenzied excitement in search of the Holi celebration. We followed the echoes of Indian music dancing off stone sidewalks and concrete walls to a plaza where a crowd surrounded a small stage.  Soon after, packets of powder were dispersed and color was flung high into the air, pushing back the enclosing grayness of the city.  Green landed in thick drops across noses and pink smeared on cheeks and foreheads. After the plastic bags of color emptied and the puffs of neon yellow had yet to settle on the tops of heads, the festivities resumed as both the dancers on stage and the stained onlookers danced wildly to the music.  We had become new people: colorful, confident and happy. 

This is my Madrid.  

I chose to come to Spain as a way to expand upon the knowledge I acquired at Carleton College.  As a Spanish Major I learned Spain’s history, culture and language from the other side of the ocean.  This was my chance to live it.  I stubbornly sought an apartment with Spanish speaking roommates and learned to cook with the limited range of ingredients in Spanish supermarkets.  I even adopted the Spanish lisp while pronouncing words like “Cerveza” (thervetha).  But as time progressed I began to see that living in Madrid is not solely about immersing myself in Tapas bars, eating every part of a pig, taking siestas and all else that may be considered “Spanish.”  Madrid has much more to offer.  It is a Cosmopolitan city bursting with people from every corner of the world, and as an American I am immediately a part of this community.  I teach more Moroccans, Latin Americans and Eastern Europeans than I do Spanish children, and I would need more push pins than I have to mark my friend’s home countries on a world map.  I have learned that searching for peanut butter in the tiny shops of the immigrant neighborhood is not a cop-out, but instead an opportunity to know the people I buy my food from and a challenge to try cooking with ingredients I can barely pronounce.

So, here I am: a Madrileña throwing colors to the sky