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Madrid: My first solo trip. I arrived on a Tuesday and had a warm welcome from my friends who were respectively studying there and visiting. We exchanged thoughts about our new lives in Sweden and Spain on a hill as the last of the light shone on the Royal Palace, occasionally listening to a group of Spaniards happily singing and laughing together. They managed to find a tapas bar I could eat at. They weren’t joking about how much pork there is in Spain.
After my first night at a hostel sleeping through faint snoring and forgetting how loud my alarm clock was set (sorry everyone), I wandered around for hours. Retiro park is massive. I found an underground, industrial museum built into an old railway factory that featured rather avant-garde works (I couldn’t bring myself to save them in my camera roll). It felt like I was walking through my own artwork I made for a DND campaign. I couldn’t stop tracing the real, cracking textures on the wall, the rusted mechanical rotors, wrenches the size of my torso. It wasn’t just preserved. It was beautifully decrepit.
Exploring on my own really showed me how much I was drawn to architecture. It's not surprising, considering how much 3D modeling I've done. More than that: it was the details I couldn't take my eyes off of. The details were always the tricky part of my renders. It's where you whisper the stories of the past: who lived in that house, what this factory was built for, how the whole society thinks. It was in the details like these, etched into the towns I walked through, where I found myself lost. And so I made a conscious effort to zoom in, photograph the extraordinarily incricate details from a time when there was a person behind every stroke, carve, choice of material.
Toledo was my next stop.
I discovered this artist, Night Tapes, just two days before my trip while I was studying for my Heat Transfer exam. I downloaded the album to listen to on the plane, but it really soundtracked my whole experience in Madrid. One of my favorite aspects of music is how connected it is to my memories. A time capsule for emotion.
My last day, I went to El Escorial. I thought all the schoolkids out front, playing ball and chatting, were there on a field trip, until they disappeared inside a secondary entrance meant for the school built into the complex. I realized then that the museum would tour through just a fraction of this immense monastery, palace, pantheon, and college all built as one.
On a whim, my friends and I dropped by a blues bar. It was a good thing we got in line so early, because we were some of the last ones let in and we had to cram into a hallway. I felt bad that I might be blocking a couple people, until I noticed the guy behind me give up on watching the band and just dance to himself. People just seem so expressive in Spain. Everywhere I went, people sung, hugged, kissed, cheered. So strikingly dissimilar to the Swedish culture I’ve grown used to.
Thanks for checking out this experiment of a post. Hope you enjoyed and have a nice day :)