An adventure

So recall in an earlier post I described the problems involved in getting from hither to tither using Madrid’s bus system. These problems are several: a) there are at least three separate bus systems with disparate websites servicing our area; b) said websites are terrible; and c) the average bus map looks like this:

And the average street map looks like this:

I challenge any of you to determine more than one correspondence between a stop on the bus map and a real location on the city map (hint: I’m giving you the Hospital Infantil Sofia for free; use it if you can).

Today, our knowledge of the system was put to the test: Nathan had a soccer “match” (not game, he vigorously reminds me) up in a sports club northeast of the city. Through a painstaking internet search, I identified two or three buses that possibly went by both our bus stop and the sports club, and estimated times of arrival at the local stop. I wasn’t exactly sure which of these buses really went by the sports center, but assumed I could ask the driver.

Here is a schematic detailing the problem with my assumption.

The situation was further complicated by the fact that there’s a city with the same name as the sports club, but the sports club is not in the city. While I thought I told the driver “I’m going to the polideportivo named Jarama” the bus driver heard “I’m going to the polideportivo in Jarama.”

As a result, Nathan and I found ourselves, about 20 minutes later, walking down a seldom-trodden, litter-strewn path along a major Madrid highway. The good news is that I discovered during this adventure that my 6-year-old is extremely risk averse, hugging the fence alongside the Heineken factory we skirted and asking questions like “Is this illegal?” “How do you know this isn’t illegal?” “Just because there’s no signs saying it’s illegal doesn’t mean it’s not illegal, right?” So the chances of him enjoying wild-party teenage years are pretty slim, I’d say.

The other good news is that we eventually arrived at our destination in plenty of time, and even managed to spot the preferred bus stop along the way. The preferred stop had all the relevant buses posted (well, mostly; a few buses that went by were not posted), and so I was able scribble down our options for the next trip out to this polideportivo.

But this story is not over. I deposit Nathan and his snack bag at his soccer game match, divine the ending time of the match (1:30), and make mental note to return by 1, as there’s not a lot of attention paid to official ending times – games here seem to end when the coaches decide they’re done playing, which is often quite a bit earlier than they anticipate. Then I set off on a long walk. My first attempt led me down an abandoned/creepy dirt road to the edge of one of the largest rivers I’ve seen here in Spain – very picturesque, but no way to cross short of getting on the highway and walking over its bridge. So I turned around and walked down the other option, a dirt road headed south toward the airport. Like many places in our section of Madrid, there’s not much distance between civilization and farmland; I passed ramshackle farmhouse #1 and #2 before pulling up short in front of a little patch of trees.

There, lounging in the shade, was a pig. A very large, wrinkly, dark gray, free-range pig. With no fence, no barn, and no leash in sight. Being a city girl, I had all sorts of questions. Was the pig wild? Was it hunting truffles? If so, where was its handler? Can one get gored by a pig? Luckily, I had pulled up behind three bikers (the non-motorized kind) who explained the situation to me: the pig was owned by ramshackle farmhouse #3, which also sold Dalmatian puppies for 500 Euros apiece.

For this enterprise, by the way, the inhabitants of ramshackle farmhouse #3 had one thing going for them: location, location, location. For down this dirt road whizzed past me sports cars, BMWs, and Mercedes. Their goal? Apparently several of the prime horse-riding schools in Madrid are on this particular lane. The lane was also populated by several free-range small yippee (as in “arf arf arf”) dogs – distant cousins of the free-range rottweilers whom I’d encounter while running in the countryside in Georgia in the 1990s. The Madrid kind is immensely less threatening.

I returned to soccer in plenty of time to see the end of the play (1:15) and to go hang out with Nathan and wait for the bus back to Madrid. He’d spent the entire time playing soccer as hard as he possibly could, so in fact stayed mellow for the entire 30 minutes we waited for the (correct!) bus to take us back home.