Mobs of Madrileños

There are a lot of people in Madrid. I mean, a LOT of people. They’re all over the place all the time. When you get on a Metro, it’s not unusual to board along with 100-200 other people…and keep in mind that the last Metro left the station 4 minutes earlier. There are people on the street walking their dogs and shopping and who-knows-what at 7 am and 6 pm and 2 am.

The people around here—unless they’re sprinting to make a Metro train—walk at best at a pace I would term “meandering”. Sunday it finally dawned on me why: they spend so much of their time slowly shuffling along in crowds that even "meandering" probably seems like a pretty quick pace to them in comparison.

I spent several hours last Sunday en El Rastro, the weekend open-air flea market, wandering through La Latina, up to Sol, and back again. Mobs of people everywhere. In front of you and behind you and up every side street: a sea of heads. The Metro was already pretty full when I got on, but at each stop, I got wedged further and further back in a corner. When we arrived at the stop for El Rastro, just about everyone exited and we slowly shuffled en masse up the escalators and stairs to the surface, where we merged with the already-arrived hordes of people. It was—literally at times—wall-to-wall people. OK, so the streets are much narrower than in Seattle, but that's still a lot of people. You can’t just skirt a slow-moving group or slide past a cluster at a vendor’s booth or take a wide path around a small crowd enjoying a band of street musicians—there simply isn’t room. You can only move at the pace of the throng, which goes at about the same speed as a glacier.

On the other hand, the people-watching is fabulous! Plus, there is such a sense of energy and…hmm, how to articulate it? Life? Enjoyment? I don’t know; it just gives me a little glow and makes me smile.