Two more weeks in Madrid

Plaza Mayor

On Tuesday I woke up feeling terrible, and the week really just went downhill from there, I spend most of the week in bed with a bad cold, only leaving to go to more Foreign Offices. I made a bit of a scene at one office and got an "information appointment", with a woman who also told me that this type of visa didn´t exist, but then success, the woman next to her butted in to say that it did! After their boss made calls for about half an hour she told me to make an appointment at another office for a student visa, and just lie on the phone so that they made me the appointment!

Other than that week two here was pretty boring, one of the highlights was discovering the button on the TV remote that changes programmes from being dubbed into Spanish back to their original english! TV is weird here, they have less advertisement breaks than the TV shows were designed for, so the programmes keep going through the parts where they´d designed a pause until some random point, often mid-conversation, when they whack in a really long break. Strange. While most people don´t finish work until 9pm here, there is a really active life in the evenings, its still winter so I keep getting told that it will be much busier in summer time! We (well Miguel and Ricardo) entertain here a lot in the evenings, so most nights we´ve had people around for dinner and a few drinks. I don´t know how everyone operates on so little sleep, although I guess if you sleep during siesta its ok. Speaking spanish all of the time has worn me out quite a bit since I´ve been here too. This has made sightseeing harder than in Germany, as by the time I get up there is only a few hours until everything closes for siesta, and I dont really like heading out to see things after siesta when it is dark, not that I feel unsafe here, just that you cant see things as well, it would be really different if it were summer time.

Plaza Mayor

On Saturday morning Miguel headed to Prague for four days, and Ricardo went back to Ciudad Real for his brother´s birthday, so I had my first night alone in five weeks, a weird feeling! Funnily it was also the worst night´s sleep I´ve had, I am just not used to the silence anymore! On Saturday I spent a lot of time cleaning, washing and sorting out my stuff, and then went to the Museum of Dress, they have stuff there documenting changes in dress from the 1600s until now, and traditional dress from the different regions of Spain. I also found a supermarket with a asian food section (i.e. one shelf), so I will be able to cook some proper stirfrys and noodles this week. I really miss the nice mix of foods that we have in NZ, here everything is really traditional and heavily based on rice and meat, I really miss eating vegetables. If I could find somewhere here that sells curry and proper chilli powder then I would really be happy!

Line at the museum I didn't visit...

Sunday I headed off to the Museum of the Americas, a collection of things from Spain´s former colonies. I am really into Latin America and have studied different cultures from there quite a bit, so I found this quite a good museum. I was really excited to see a Quipu, the collection of knotted ropes used by the Incas to record things and communicate, these always fascinated me, and now I really want to visit Peru, but the collection was quite strange in that it skipped over the whole colonization part of their history! I had a picnic lunch in the Parque del buen Retiro, a big park in the middle of Madrid that used to be the private park of the royal family. Even if it must have been around 5degrees there was a lot of people in the park, and I got quite excited watching squirrels run around - the simple things that we dont have in New Zealand really amuse me! Because it used to be royal property it is full of statues and sculptures, every 20m or so is another, but there is a really massive monument thing in the middle overlooking a lake that you can row boats out onto, I am quite keen to take one out when it is warmer. I planned on going to the Museo del Prado afterwards, a really famous museum of art here, as its free for a couple of hours, but once I saw the line I decided I would rather come back early one morning and pay the entrance fee!

Palacio Real

Monday is museum-free day in most of europe (it keeps catching me out!) so I went to the Royal Palace and the Cathedral de Nuestra Senora de la Almudena. The Palacio Real was begun in the 1700s by a king who wanted to have a bigger and cooler palace than all of the other European kings. The current royal family lives somewhere smaller, so most days you can walk around the palace and check out things like the Royal Pharmacy and Royal Armoury. The Cathedral opposite is huge, and if you pay the museum entrace you can climb to the top. You arent supposed to take photos but I figured if I stood with my back to the security cameras and did it on the sly it would be ok - most of the photos really didnt work out! But the view was amazing. Around the corner I found a crypt under the Cathedral, and this was one of my favourite church visits, although I find it quite creepy that they bury everyone under the floor and then everyone who attends service there walks over them. Tuesday I continued with the church theme and visited the Basilica de San Francisco el Grande, this was really cool as a crazy guy who resembled a Spanish version of Mr Bean runs a constant circut tour of the place and explains everything. I stopped in at another Basilica afterwards but without a tour it wasnt as impressive.

View from the Catedral de Nuestra Senora

My plans for Wednesday all went out the window as a lot of places let EU and Latin American citizins in for free on Wednesdays, everywhere was either already full or had massive lines, so I gave up and ran errands instead. I ran the NZ embassy here, speaking to a kiwi was quite funny, but he really wasnt helpful - he admitted that they had had phone calls from other NZers in this position, but they cant do anything about it except advise me to email the Spanish embassy in NZ that issued the visa. I pointed out that the deal they signed is based on reciprocity and it isnt fair that over a hundred Spaniards have already completed a year in NZ with no problems while we cant work here, but he just gave me his email to Bcc him in. Finally Thursday rolled around, and I was off again to see a third Spanish Foreign Office for an appointment that I had been assured would resolve my visa issues. I was determined not to leave without progress being made, and was prepared to take various peoples advice that crying and/or refusing to leave would get me somewhere. I had an appointment at 12 and arrived at 11.45, only to be issued a ticket with the number 92 on it...they were up to number 58. My plan of making a scene got a little scary when I saw someone refuse to leave when they refused to give her an appointment, with security phoning the police who came and arrested her!

Basilica de San Francisco

Over a hour later (what is the point of even having appointments!!!) I saw someone, who tried the whole "your visa doesnt exist" thing again, before someone else pointed out that it did, but that while the two governments had signed the agreement (a Working Holiday Agreement has also been signed with Canada) no one had ever instructed the offices on how to process the visa. They dont know how to document things, or how to give me paperwork and an ID card that shows I can work, and until someone works that out and creates the new national ID card template etc, they are just taking peoples names and saying they will ring them when its sorted...this list has been running since September with no resolution as yet! At this point, I jumped up and stood in the middle of the office crying, shouting and generally making a scene! The woman then decided that maybe it would be easier to resolve the situation with the NZers than the Canadians, so she would talk to someone else if I sat and waited. Another hour later everyone had been seen to and left, and the staff were leaving for their lunch/siesta, and I was still sitting there! Finally she came back out with a man and said that if I went to another Office and got them to give me papers to say I could work, I could come back to her office and get an ID card. She ended up being quite nice and at my insistence, even made the appointment with them for me.

Graves in the crypt

Unfortunately this appointment is when I am supposed to be in Belgium (I am actually not allowed to leave Spain until I have my Spanish ID card, but as I am staying in the Shengen area and my passport will never get stamped anywhere I am leaving anyway). I am really dubious that this appointment will work, given they couldnt work it out in the last five months for other people and only worked it out during a hour for me, and I have been temped to throw in the towel at this point, just finish my trip around and come back to NZ or look for something else, Ive been offered a few weeks of manual labour in Belgium or I could get a working holiday visa in Germany and try my luck getting a job without speaking any German. But, as Ryanair had 60euro return flights from Brussels to Madrid I decided to give it one last go. I am doubtful that it will work, and even if they do give me the papers to say I can work, I guess I then will have to go to Madrid from Paris or something to try and get the ID card, or risk leaving it until I return in late March only to have them question why I took so long! This will be the fourth Spanish Foreign Office Ive visited, and there are only six here in Madrid! The Spanish Embassy in NZ emailed be back, just to say that the Foreign Office is now aware of the problem and they are sure it will be resolved shortly - seems to me that they were aware back in September as well, and the Spanish definition of shortly is very different to the NZ definition! I forwarded this onto the NZ embassy here but didnt get a response - I figure if I am still unable to get my visa processed by late March when I am back in Madrid, by which point I will be here illegally, I will see if I can get a newspaper in NZ to write about the situation and see if that prompts the Spanish embassy into doing something!

Palacio de Comunicaciones

This meeting put me in rather a bad mood, so I just went back to the appartment and consoled myself with cheap spanish beer all afternoon, until a whole bunch of other people came around and we watched the elimination on Spanish Big Brother - possibly the worst reality show Ive ever seen! And then Friday morning it was off to the airport to head back to Germany...