I was sweaty, thirsty, hot after the run. I needed a recovery beverage, light on caffeine, some protein, non-dairy. I didn’t get a cortado. But this was Milwaukee, and I was at one of my usual coffee spots, Stone Creek on Downer, the hopping community gathering place on the East Side. Some say it’s the de facto faculty lounge. You’ll find so many professors and graduate students working on syllabi, holding meetings, or even holding office hours.

While circling the tail of the line, I ran into my colleague Rick. After concluding our catching-up-how-was-your-summer conversation, I joined the line and made my order for that cold drink with protein, not overly caffeinated, and not too sweet, dairy-free beverage.

While I was waiting, I encroached on the small-talk conversation between a barista and another customer who was there to study Greek.

“Oh, ancient or modern?” the barista asked.

“Modern.”

The barista said, “Oh, I’ve got ancient Greek, as well as Latin and Hebrew. Three ancients.”

The barista asked his buddy, the client, “What did you order? Did you get a cortado?”

He went on to explain that you can tell who has been a barista in life because they are most likely to order a cortado.

The Modern Greek student hedged. “Nah, I can’t enjoy the coffees that aren’t full strength.”

I couldn’t help myself. I chirped, “In Spain they drink cortados throughout the day. Because the caffeine is lower, you can adjust your stimulant levels as needed without overdoing it. Have one for breakfast, one at 11 a.m., then another around lunch.”

I tried not to over-pronounce cortado with a Madrileño accent, but you know I can’t help myself.

In English we say cort, like court, the R sound made by the tongue curling back toward the molars, then hitting that T hard with a tongue click behind the front teeth, on the roof of the mouth. Cor-tah-dough. For the last syllable, the dough, the tongue is nearly in the same spot as the T, but less aspirated, hardly any breath behind it. Put your hand in front of your mouth and say it. Notice the wind you feel from each part of the word.

Pero en castellano se decimos—however, in Spanish we say it like this: Cor-TA-do.

The cor has a tidier O sound, not so much movement of the lips to make an O shape. Go straight to the erre, the R. Imagine you are making something closer to a D sound than an English R, like the D sound in headache. Now try to mispronounce—or make—headache gently morph into the name Eric.

Are you saying headache or Eric?

The only difference is your tongue is curling the slightest bit to make the Spanish R. Don’t over-trill. It’s only the single erre, not the errrrrrreh!

Say cor with that same Eric R sound morphed into headache.

Cor. Cor.

Good.

Now the ta. The Spanish T is softer and not aspirated like the English T that has that crisp, tik click. Somewhere in between dog and thanks. Say thanks dog five times quickly and notice where your tongue is moving between that TH—the theta sound—and the Dddddd of dog. Try saying it with your hand in front of your mouth. Don’t let too much air escape on that consonant.

Corta, corta, corta.

Dough.

Cortado.

The D in Spanish also shifts to a softer, less windy sound. Like though. Can you hear the difference between the theta sound in thought and though?

Though is thumpier, more bass drum than hi-hat. Where thought has more air, and maybe even your tongue is more forward, though has more of a hum than a flat-tire hiss.

To make the D sound, take the theta sound from though and pull it back to more of an English D, but with your tongue in the same place as the TH. More like corta-though.

Cor-Ta-Do.

It means “cut,” from cortar, to cut.

El café expreso se ha cortado con leche espumada en una proporción de uno a uno.

The café espresso has been cut with foamed milk in a one-to-one ratio.

Pero en España, but in Spain, the cortados seemed smaller. Indeed, they were closer to 2–3 oz., where in the U.S. they are 4 oz. The difference is that in Spain they take a shot of espresso and add just a dollop of foam, something closer to a macchiato. The U.S. follows the 1:1 ratio.

The conversation at Café Dabov in Madrid on San Isabel would go like this:

Hola, buenas, ¿qué tal?
Hola, ¿qué tal?
Me pones un cortado con leche de avena, porfa.
Claro, ¿algo más?
Eso.

Hello, greetings and salutations, what such, how things are?
Hello, what such, how things are yourself?
Me, you put a cut with milk of oat, pretty please-y?
Clear, of course, anything more?
That.

That’s it.

Continuing on a theme from last week, from the Graeber and Wengrow book The Dawn of Everything, there was something that stuck with me. As I was reviewing my courses and syllabi for this semester, I noticed my reaction to a phrase I found: “democratic values, ideals, societies.”

I winced a little bit. Now I’m struggling to say exactly why, but it has something to do with taking for granted the idea that democratic ideals are accepted universally as the best systems.

Now that I write this, I remember wrestling with that language last year as well. It comes up in a couple of different contexts. One is an essay prompt for Internet Culture in which I’m trying to get students to recognize their roles when using digital tools on the internet, but also to recognize the limitations that individual actions can have on a system without a kind of collective, organized approach to changing things.

In other words, to challenge an overly simplistic position: “AI presents problems, challenges, threats, is bad for x, y, and z reasons, so I don’t use it. There, I fixed it.” Some tools are parts of larger systems and require more than a sense of individual responsibility to address the challenge. That’s what we expect governance to do when concentrated power becomes out of whack for the good of the many.

Another place is in the Media Graphics course, when I ask students, again, to balance their thinking around individual freedoms and collective fairness in order to keep a stable, yes, and fair society. This assignment is about freedom of expression, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and discerning between corporate and government censorship.

How and when is graffiti vandalism, destruction of property, and when and how does it become more than a crime and more like civil disobedience or a creative expression that critiques without destroying, vis-à-vis, intellectual property, culture jamming, clever tactics, like what Naomi Klein might frame as advertising jujitsu?

So, what I’m gathering here is that democracy is a kind of shorthand for what I might call a fair society where people can have freedom of expression, can upset and critique power, where that power hears and responds collaboratively to redistribute or create fair access to resources, and where stability becomes the norm over violence, terror, war, poverty, and fear. That’s what real politics are, not the red team versus green team partisan gotcha sport, but figuring out how to collect the garbage, keep electricity and clean water running, safe transport, etc. Distribute the resources fairly.

It’s how I explain to my class something about authenticity from the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin, who notably took his own life in Spain, just across the Pyrenees French border, in Portbou, Catalonia. Beside the point, except that Benjamin was fleeing the Nazis who understood him as a significant critic of fascism and the regime. (Julie Weitz has a great piece touching on this, I Don’t Know, Adonoi.) The quote that I hang on to from that Benjamin article from 1935 that has to do with photography goes something like this:

And that’s the politics I’m talking about. Seeing and believing the challenges of creating and maintaining a fair society, fairness in society. For the ultra-empowered class, that means keeping, at most, a simmer of discontent, so the pot doesn’t boil over. For most everyone else, it means making sure we all have our daily bread, at least. Which brings me to question this trail of breadcrumbs. So, Royal Turkeys, how did you get your name?

In case you haven’t already guessed, I’m talking about peacocks, because we saw them in quite a few places in Spain, and captured some good moments in photo. A peacock is the male specimen of this colorful, large bird; a peahen is the female, and as is normative in the bird world, she wears more muted earth tones. But what do you call the bird, ungendered? I’ll wait while you guess.

In Spanish, as far as I’m aware, there is no specific name for the male and a different one used for the female (even in English we’d say, “Look, a peacock, there’s both a male and a female peacock!”). They are called pavos reales, plural. Or just a pavo real, singular. Royal Turkey. But real can also mean the real ones, the authentic version.

And the story goes like this. These birds came from Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Pavo [Phasianidae], or in Linnaean Pavo cristatus, iridescent blue and green. You know it. And if you were a great and powerful royal person or nobleperson, you did major business across the Mediterranean. And what better way to show off your powerful commercial and social network than with a bird that came from India? Nice Pavo. Thank you.

This pavo, this peafowl, (there you go, did you guess it?) was not an agricultural bird. It’s fancy, has no real job on the farm, like chickens do. Mostly ornamental, for peacocking. They do actually make great snake hunters, so you keep some peafowl around your vast walled estate, keeping out their predators like big cats or wild dogs, then you can walk about with dignitaries and esteemed guests without fear of snake attack. Also, they screech like an alarm siren, so good for palatial early-warning invasion detection. Champagne problems, am I right?

But here’s another Champagne problem: once Spanish conquistadors and explorers went to the Americas, they encountered a similarly shaped and scaled bird kept by Indigenous peoples that is called guajolote in Nahuatl. Benjamin Franklin almost made that bird a national symbol of the USA.

They called them pavos. Linnaeus named them Meleagris gallopavo. Guineafowl Rooster-Peacock. Not a Pavo cristatus, the crested peafowl, el Pavo Real, the real one. Are you talking about a turkey, a pavo, or a real, royal turkey, un pavo real?

Of the easily searched peacock photos in the files, several days at Retiro in Madrid: April 27, May 6, May 10, in the area of the park called Pabellón de los Jardines de Cecilio Rodríguez, named after a gardener who worked there from age 8–88. And then there was a day at the Royal Alcázar Gardens in Sevilla.

On this day, we learned that a peacock call sounds like a small child belting out our daughter’s name in a high pitch three or five times: “Sarina! Sarina! Sarina! Sarina!” Cawcaw. Cawcawcachaw.

Sarina found this amusing and gave a light chase to the voice, where she found her suitor, fanning, clattering his feathers, turning round in circles, calling from the maintenance area. Total peacocking.

I have started to read David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, a book that begins by questioning what we think we know about human nature and the development of human societies. They revisit the familiar opposition between Hobbes and Rousseau: Hobbes imagining human beings as inherently dangerous and disorderly, requiring government and authority to keep society from descending into chaos; Rousseau imagining a more innocent human nature corrupted by the institutions and inequalities of society.

But Graeber and Wengrow question the larger assumption behind these opposing stories—that there was some original human condition from which societies followed a more or less inevitable path toward the political and social orders we know today. Hobbes and Rousseau were also proposing thought experiments, not empirically based social theory. In other words, they were making arguments about hypothetical human beings, not looking at the comprehensive body of evidence that we have today.

What the archaeological and anthropological record of the last 50-100 years suggests is much more varied. Human beings have organized themselves in very different ways, moving between forms of hierarchy and equality, centralization and autonomy, freedom and constraint. So the question isn't simply whether humans are naturally good or bad, or whether strict or loose social orders are more conducive to freedom. Probably it's something more contextual about how people have actually organized themselves in relation to other factors, what seems to have worked, when, why and what it means to continue to be on a quest for better forms of social order over ones we’ve had.

I was thinking about this while flipping through my photos of the Parque de El Buen Retiro in Madrid. The park itself can be read as a kind of physical history of changing forms of political power. Created in the seventeenth century as a royal retreat for Felipe IV, the Buen Retiro was originally a space organized around the power and privilege of the monarchy. The royal complex developed around the Monastery of the Jerónimos and included formal gardens, woods, culinary gardens and orchards, fountains, canals, and the Estanque, the Great Pond, which became one of the central features of the site.

Carlos III opened portions of the gardens to the public in 1767, with some restrictions. The Napoleonic Wars transformed the space again. The occupying French forces used it as a military headquarters and leaving much of the palace and gardens badly damaged. They basically destroyed everything for target practice or camp fires, except for the Montezuma Cypress, the Ahuehuete, aka El Abuelo, the Grandfather, which they used to hide their artillery. And in 1868, following the revolution that overthrew Isabel II, the municipality of Madrid took control of the former royal site and the park became public.

The more vast former royal landscape was being broken apart and urbanized, reorganized along with the social order. Isabel II had already sold the western portion of the old Real Sitio in 1865, almost a third of its original footprint, and the subsequent development created the posh neighborhoods of Los Jerónimos, and more, incorporating remnants of the old palace complex, mostly to fancy noble families and ambassadors, embajadores.

What had once been a space of royal privilege was becoming a collection of public, civic, cultural, and scientific spaces. Looking outside the fences of today's Retiro park at the adjacent area makes that apparent. The Real Jardín Botánico was not technically part of the Buen Retiro itself, but became part of the larger landscape of royal and Enlightenment projects along the Paseo del Prado. Today UNESCO recognizes the Paseo del Prado and Buen Retiro, a landscape of Arts and Sciences as a single cultural landscape, encompassing the Paseo del Prado, the Jardines del Buen Retiro, and the Real Jardín Botánico, along with the Barrio de Jerónimos.

I don't want to push this analogy too far or use the history of Retiro to prove anything about social theory. But looking now at the photographs again, I am fascinated by the way the park and the larger landscapes around it hold these different forms of social order within some of the same physical spaces.

Each time I visited Retiro was its own episodic event. A different experience of the park, a different way of moving through it, and a different set of photographs. I tired to cover as much ground as possible, making sure to reach the literal corners, getting lost, reorienting again, I found some of the same sites and places, over and over.

What follows is a simple recap of those visits and an attempt to figure out what I actually photographed. I have organized the photographs around these episodic memories, and in the process I’ve been confronted with having to decide what counts as a visit to Retiro in the first place.

Remembering the Visits

The first organizing principle is based on location-embedded images. I searched for “Retiro.” This is where things get complicated. Retiro can refer colloquially to the park, but officially it is also the name of the larger Distrito de Retiro, which contains several neighborhoods, including Los Jerónimos. The park itself is the Parque del Retiro, also commonly called Parque del Buen Retiro, while the Estanque Grande del Buen Retiro, the Great Pond, is one of the surviving central elements of the original royal complex, the heart of Retiro.

So my first search is useful but imprecise. It captures the iPhone photographs that Apple has associated with Retiro broadly, and not the photographs I made with the Fujifilm. . Back to the question guiding the images for this post: What exactly counts as a visit to Retiro?

Next, I note the data of the geolocted Retiro photos. I was in the park those days, but did I also carry my Fujifilm camera and take photos? Yes, look for green stuff and those familiar park settings. Now I pull these into an album of favorites from several hundred images and decide which actually belong.

The very first episodic visit was March 8. I got up to go for a run in the park, but heavy rains had closed it. Gates locked. Huh. Instead, I joined a serendipitous fun run and ran the entire perimeter of the park, starting at the Puerta del Ángel Caído in the southwest corner and running clockwise: north on Calle de Alfonso XII, around the Puerta de Alcalá, taking another right onto Avenida de Menéndez Pelayo, then curving farther right onto Paseo de la Reina Cristina until connecting back to where Paseo del Prado meets Calle Claudio Moyano, alongside the Real Jardín Botánico, where the Feria de Libros, used book vending fair, is held.

We lived nearest to that corner, on Calle de Atocha, close to Mercado de Antón Martín, at the edge of the Huertas and Embajadores neighborhoods, in the area associated with Las Letras.

This is an episode with no photographs inside the park except for a selfie geotagged as Los Jerónimos. The account of the path around the park came from my watch recording and the map generated by the Garmin app from the run.

Then, March 9: a walk with Bonnie after visiting El Rastro, grabbing a pincho de tortilla at a spot, and walking through the park for the first time.

I knew there were two very notable trees that were at least three or four centuries old. One was an olive tree that had been moved and transplanted over time. Another was an ahuehuete, purported to be one of the original surviving inhabitants of the park, although some of the stories surrounding its survival during the Napoleonic occupation are difficult to separate from legend.

We found the lollipop trees, which became Bonnie’s favorites. We exited at the Puerta de Alcalá and headed east into the fancy neighborhoods of Recoletos, Goya, and Ibiza.

March 14, I went back for an afternoon run. I saw the lollipop trees from above, the Estanque, and discovered the Montaña Artificial. I saw the park from high up looking south from the northeast corner, then crossed down toward the center by the Palacio de Cristal, zigzagging down to the highly ordered rose garden, La Rosaleda.

March 25, back at it again on a bike tour with our visiting friends. Rudy took us by the Prado's northeast corner, past the anonymous artist statue, and into the Buen Retiro. We paused above the Parterre, then went by the Palacio de Cristal and the Estanque, and out by the Puerta de Alcalá. Patterns, repetition.

On March 30 and April 1, I was back again, with photographs of La Rosaleda and the blooming forsythia between the Palacio de Velázquez and the Estanque's southeast corner. April 2, back at the Goya entrance of the Prado. Maybe that one doesn’t count.

April 7, Cord, Su, and I hit the Real Jardín Botánico. It isn't officially part of the Buen Retiro, but it is part of the larger historical and cultural landscape that developed around the former royal site and the Paseo del Prado. UNESCO now treats the Paseo del Prado and Buen Retiro, a landscape of Arts and Sciences as a single cultural landscape, linking the Paseo del Prado, the Jardines del Buen Retiro, and the Real Jardín Botánico.

Another banner day at the park was April 24 with Anne and Todd, when we figured out how to get the free tickets and take a ride on the Estanque in a rowboat.

Back again April 27, the day of the Madrid Marathon. May 6, with Milo and Shannon. With cousins on May 7 to the Real Jardín Botánico. May 10, back with Milo and Shannon and Sarina.

So now I’ve got 74 photos in that album. I suspect I visited on at least thirteen different dates. Ten in Parque de El Buen Retiro proper.

Do I boil it down to a sampler pack, with generous generativity for future posts? Do I tackle a certain formal consistency: formal landscapes and architecture, or more formal portraits and selfies, and the hybrid forms? Shall I exclude images based on geographic location, excluding the UNESCO pieces outside the formal Retiro?

We’ve got some main trees: the olive tree, the lollipop trees, the old ahuehuete. Palacio de Cristal is in, along with the Alcachofa fountain and Estanque, but what about the Prado and Botánico on the outskirts? Royal turkeys in?

And then there is the last full day. Bonnie and I walked back to the Alcachofa fountain for a selfie.

The best one.

Welcome to the 51st weekly installment of this project, or 53rd if you want to include the couple of substantial pilot versions, including Valencia and El Gran Apagón, the great blackout. I’m revisiting a bit of a reflective motif for the purposes of putting together a photography conference proposal this fall on the theme of momentum.

First, I can’t thank Colin Matthes enough for convening the sessions he sometimes calls the Durable Artist, an Anti-Fragile Artist, or How to Be an Artist When You Have a Life, and the fellow artists within. Momentum was a major component and theme of the exercise, which primarily begins with simplifying, clarifying, and de-cluttering workspace and intentions. I feel I’ve been on a roll since last summer’s cohort meetings, and I’m even composing this under the focused-firehose-pressure-valve-of-attention-device of a 21-minute timer.

So let me say something more about my weekly process, which isn’t always so uniformly structured, without saying too much about the content. I took eleven thousand photos—about seven thousand on my Fujifilm camera and another four thousand on my iPhone 12—between January and May 2025. For most of those weeks we were based in Madrid, but our Spanish journey had a prelude in Costa Rica, Mexico, and Italy. These sixteen weeks were the accumulation phase, the research in the field, the immersive language learning, and deep cultural infusions.

That period had different weekly processes than the past fifty-one weeks, which I promise I’m coming back to soon. The accumulation phase, sure, let’s call it that, which includes and is primarily the field research, had about half the weeks centered around a half-day of classroom language instruction in Spanish. Three-four hours. Before, walking to school, and after, sometimes field trips, organized cultural activities, or self-organized wanderings became the subject of my relational photography.

In Madrid, we developed a one-weekend-in, next-weekend-out-of-town schedule so that at least every other week we had a home-Madrid weekend. The other weekends were reserved for my research questions and quenching the wanderlust of seeing more of Spain, its cities, and its varied and distinct seventeen autonomous communities. Europe was book-ended by the six weeks between Carnivale in Venice and Semana Santa in Andalusia. We were sent off by one final festival in Madrid, celebrating its founder, San Isidro.

Procrastination is a critical part of the weekly routine, which is what the last few paragraphs have been, but it’s also part of the reflection and cognitive process which makes meaning. Ideas are rattling around in my head during the week as I settle on a theme or approach. One way is through the photo sorting. I will sometimes do this on my phone, favoriting, editing, and processing the photos themselves, creating digital albums and adding photos to them. From the outside, it looks like I’m just scrolling on my phone.

When I do finally sit down and open my laptop, I can go to that album, which perhaps has already settled the theme or subject for the weekly post. There may be an episodic memory I can translate, or even pages of notes from my sketchbooks to transcribe. I can’t resist the history, but I do try to resist re-creating Wikipedia articles. The momentum—moving forward—comes from looking back, to my own experience, and to my experience in the sites and stories of historical experiences.

When I’m good, this sitting down happens on a Monday or a Tuesday, making the release of the Substack article on Wednesday at noon a lovely exercise in mindful working. When I’m in life, traveling, or with other work commitments, sometimes the Wednesday deadline is the thing that compels me to begin in earnest on that day. I can’t stop until I get that out. A few times it’s come after midnight. Once recently, I just caved, went to bed, and published on a Thursday morning. Fine. Everything’s fine.

There’s the accountability piece, to which you, my dear reader, hold me. I also, but not consistently, post a carousel of images related to the article on Instagram. Some people only know I’ve written a Substack if I’ve posted to Instagram or shared it on my LinkedIn timeline. Timeline? Feed?

But this weekly process didn’t begin with the Substack. The impulse, the kernel of it was forming long before these fifty-one weeks.

Before this series of mini-photo ethnographies, and the time in the field, and the artist cohorts, there was the Fulbright proposal. That was three years ago, the summer of 2023. The idea that there was something more for me to learn in Spain about community and identity. That 523 years after the King and Queen expelled Jewish life, the Spanish parliament passed a law and King Felipe made a proclamation: we’re sorry, you can come back, this is your forever home. What did that mean? Who came back?

The Fulbright proposal made it past the first round and had me dreaming for three months, a phenomenon I called the great balloon of hope. But perhaps it was something more like Schrödinger’s cat. But it was enough time for the hope to take root, more than a kernel, a “one way or another” tenacity picked up mass and speed.

When the support was not awarded, a pivot to the gratitude and tools and support we did have: new game, now how do we play it? Denied a five-month visa for the EU? New rules, how do we play it? Language school in Costa Rica for two weeks, land in Spain with a stronger foundation, for both the language itself and the growth mindset and confidence to learn. Use the 90-day visa. Three months is still a long time.

The kernel of my Spanish manifestation began even before 2023, and the Fulbright proposal contained several essays detailing my “whys.” For me, it goes back to the nineties, a recognition in the faces of people I met on the Iberian Peninsula, and a real comfort with the rhythms of life. All of my doppelgängers. And it goes back to the rhythm and style of the 2010 Spanish soccer team that won the World Cup for the first time. And the curiosity: how much further back could it go?

Fifty short stories, articles, photo essays, micro-ethnographies is actually a lot of moments synthesized as momentum. Look back: the proto-ideas were first Esquinas y Edificios, corners and buildings, which began in Costa Rica, and You Want to Take My Photo? But Why? Because You Helped Us. These foundational pieces help me to settle my intentions of the relational aesthetic and ethic to place and people. An exchange rather than extraction. My intention, at least.

Moving forward by looking back, and growing outward by looking inward—but momentum starts somewhere, at a point in time.

It could be the past, or it could be this very moment, when the kernel, the impulse for a proposal takes shape.

But now, en este momento, how much further could it go? What does momentum do to the project now? My favorite place to be in a project is the iterative, making-multiples phase of production. The “so-manys,” which help to give multiples in a body of work their generative potential. I’ve learned a lot and grown in skill.

So now I’m putting it out there, to a conference proposal and to you, dear reader: What’s next for these photos and writing? Exhibition, book, presentations. What does momentum look like, now? ¿Cómo es el impulso ahora?

First of all, Barcelona is a city in Spain, but if you’re trying to understand a national Spanish identity, it is not a typically Spanish city. It is an international city and a proudly independent-minded Catalan city.

The language is distinct—not a dialect or accent of Spanish, which is Castilian, but Catalan, one of a handful of living Iberian languages. It is Spanish in the sense that it is spoken in Spain, but it is not the Spanish language that was exported and disseminated through the last 500 years of Spanish colonialism.

That’s Castilian, castellano, the language of Castile, the large former kingdom in central Spain. That’s not where we are. Welcome to Catalonia, Spain’s northeastern autonomous community, bordering France and the Pyrenees.

Barcelona is also one of the great touchstones of medieval Jewish culture, one that still reverberates through Jewish consciousness in prayer, scholarship, law, and Kabbalistic spirituality.

I’m at a bit of a loss for how to express the depth and breadth of its influence: the early Kabbalists; the Sefirot, the visual and conceptual framework of Kabbalah; the Ramban, Moses ben Naḥman (Nachmanides), whose Torah and legal commentary became foundational, also defining the 613 mitzvot; Abraham bar Ḥiyya, who introduced algebra to the Latin West through The Book of Measurement and Calculation, giving medieval Europe its first complete solution to the quadratic equation; the Sarajevo Haggadah; the Catalan Atlas; the record of the Disputation of Barcelona, in which the Church challenged Judaism and Nachmanides defended the faith before King James I; and the foundational halakha and responsa of the Rashba. All of this emerged from the Principality of Catalonia and the Crown of Aragon—from Girona, Barcelona, and the surrounding region.

The Jewish community, with its immense contributions between the tenth and thirteenth centuries especially, was distinctive from other Sephardic-Iberian communities. Just as the principalities and crown lands of Catalonia and Aragon asserted their own authority and identity, so too did their Jewish communities.

They developed distinctive rabbinic, philosophical, legal, and cultural traditions whose influence extended across the peninsula, over the Pyrenees, and throughout Europe, through North Africa, and the eastern Mediterranean. Resist the flattening. Embrace the plurality. While you can

Then, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the city was shaped and reshaped by architects and urban planners, most famously Antoni Gaudí. Barcelona expanded thoughtfully in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, creating the urban fabric that now draws millions of visitors each year. Ironically, that success has created a new generation of urban planning and infrastructure challenges.

The Barri Gòtic preserves much of the medieval city, including El Call, the old Jewish quarter. Gaudí, especially the Sagrada Família, has become the city’s global brand.

Meanwhile, Gaudí’s Park Güell began as an ambitious planned community for wealthy suburban residents before becoming one of Barcelona’s defining public spaces.

We were there during the May Day weekend, so the city was especially crowded. There was more than one occasion when I imagined the closed umbrella in my hand was a machete, with the throngs of tourists growing like thick reeds and dense hanging vines.

They covered every surface, blocking progress at nearly every step. The beaches, too, looked like mounds of human overgrowth washed ashore upon the bathing coast.

Curiously, many of the customer service workers preferred speaking English with us rather than castellano. French would often work as well if Catalan wasn’t your preferred language. That’s how strong the regional identity remains.

Milo arrived during our stay, and we celebrated his twenty-first birthday in Barcelona.

On our tour of El Call, the Jewish quarter within the Barri Gòtic, our guide explained that the name derives from the Hebrew qahal, meaning community, and the Latin callis, meaning narrow street.

He showed us a royal administrative building constructed with reclaimed stone, including Jewish headstones taken after the pogroms of 1391.

The Centre del Call happened to be closed that weekend, so our exploration of Jewish artifacts was limited. Still, we noticed something telling. The interpretive signs and maps marking important Jewish sites had been faded by the sun and repeatedly scrubbed by graffiti removal until much of the text had disappeared. A decade after their installation, they had largely been left to rust. That, too, became a kind of historical marker.

Barcelona is also a great port city. Its active harbor, container terminals, and ship traffic are visible from Montjuïc—literally “Jewish Mountain”—named for the large Jewish cemetery that occupied its slopes between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries.

We rode the cable car to the summit on the day Milo arrived, waiting for the call that his plane had landed.

From the top you can see the Catalan senyera flying over the imposing Montjuïc Castle. The fortress has become a complicated symbol: a place of military power, but also of Catalan resistance, where political prisoners were held, tortured, and executed during periods of repression by the Spanish state.

It’s no wonder why so many people would rather speak Catalan, French, or English than Spanish.

And don’t say Bar-theh-lona. That would be the Castilian pronunciation.

Some reflection for an exhibition. I suppose the plan has always been to take this writing, which consists of reflecting, editing, storytelling, and turn it into something else—or at the very least, mindfully notice how it manifests in a new form.

And so, a new opportunity: to exhibit, in January, a selection of photos at a Jewish senior living center.

There’s something in here about community and care, and that’s my why for serving on the Art Ovation Community Committee.

Is there meaning without connection? Flip that: humans crave connection because we search for meaning. A community provides both—meaning and connection.

It’s part of the panic over AI: not just that there’s a gobbling up of resources, but that it substitutes for both meaning and connection to other humans. Sarina was just explaining something that Marx said about art being essential to humanity.

We don’t need it in exactly the same way as food, shelter, or clothing, but art, which is often deemed nonessential, is the thing that captures the essence of being human. We don’t need it, but we are compelled to make it and experience it nonetheless.

It is in that service role—as art committee member, artist, and member of the community—that I’m now thinking about and editing images.

The pitch is really about the heritage tourism sites in Spain. I don’t want to show anything too complex or contradictory: no images of hanging jamón or hooded nazarenos.

Neither do I want to show work that falls too hard into the tourist trap. What makes a photograph compelling to me is the way I saw and experienced a site, not just what makes a good encyclopedia illustration.

That, too, is the distinction that Sarina unpacked, shifting the context of beauty “in the eye of the beholder” to literally mean that what is definitional about art is that it is made by humans in the process, in order to process, to express, and to understand an experience of reality.

AI-generated garbage created to visually illustrate something can never be art because where is the humanity, the human experience of beholding it?

The tourism economy itself could be argued to be a synthetic, hallucinatory, or romanticized version of the past. Yes, and that is still a human experience, even if it is fabricated or contrived.

I go back to the work of historians and social scientists whose work is meant to guide us in understanding the past, our communities, and the fabric of reality (María Rosa Menocal, Hans Magnus Enzensberger), or to jolt us awake from our nostalgic, foggy dreaming (Castaño, Fishman and Kanarfogel, Flesler and Pérez Melgosa, and Linhard).

July 22 is Marc Cucurella’s birthday. He shares it with my friend Jon, who got us tickets to see Spain’s first match of this World Cup against none other than Cabo Verde. Shout-out to the only two teams that earned an A grade for their performances by ESPN.

Spoiler alert: Spain have won the FIFA 2026 World Cup, defeating Argentina, just like the viral children’s book said.

With a minor scoreline change, but with the illustration still showing Spain’s Ferran Torres (#7) scoring the winning goal, it was almost exactly the matchup I wanted to see: pairing GOAT Lionel Messi with wunderkind Lamine Yamal, who first met during a charity calendar photoshoot when Lamine Yamal was a five-month-old baby. The year was 2007. Messi, who turned 39 during this tournament, was 20 years old. Lamine Yamal, Spain’s #19, had turned 19 just a week before the final. On July 19, 2026, the two would meet on the sport’s biggest stage.

The coincidences had been lining up since earlier in the summer.

The similarities between 2010, when Spain won its first World Cup, and 2026, when it won its second, were eerie. Both years Spain found itself in Group H while entering as reigning European champion. In 2010, the opening match featured hosts South Africa against Mexico. In 2026, the opening match featured hosts Mexico against South Africa. Shakira performed the tournament anthem in both years: Waka Waka in 2010 and Dai, Dai in 2026. That’s weird enough.

Eight players on Spain’s national team came from FC Barcelona. Barcelona won La Liga, while Atlético Madrid lost the Copa del Rey final. Spain defeated Portugal 1–0 in the Round of 16 in both the 2010 and 2026 tournaments. I could stop there, but I haven’t even talked about the final.

Both finals ended 1–0 in Spain’s favor. Both winning goals came in extra time, scored by Barcelona players: Andrés Iniesta (#6) in the 116th minute in 2010, and Ferran Torres (#7) in the 106th minute in 2026. Both the Netherlands and Argentina were reduced to 10 men after late red-card send-offs and were criticized for overly aggressive, cynical tactics. 6-7. 🤷‍♂️

Like Ferran Torres said—perhaps in reference to the children’s book—el destino ya estaba escrito: destiny was already written.

When I last left this story, I had said goodbye to one fútbol-watching community at Nomad World Pub in Milwaukee and had just been sobbing tears of cathartic joy at a soccer bar beneath Breese Stevens Stadium in Madison. Angela Sevilla Atlanta and Dane had recommended it as the best chance to gather with fellow futbolistas. The heat and the Tuesday afternoon kickoff made the place a bit quiet, but it also meant seats at the bar were available. Anne, Todd, Bonnie, and I had just begun a road trip that was supposed to culminate in a relaxing, yoga-focused eco-lodge retreat on the shores of Lake Superior.

In Madison, we watched Spain face France, a match I had been billing as the moment an unstoppable force would meet an immovable object.

France was the unstoppable force, the clear favorite from the beginning of the tournament—until Spain broke them. Only one out of twenty commentators was picking Spain over France, choosing a super team over a team made of superstars. France had been that star-studded squad, undefeated through the group stage, steamrolling everyone in its path.

A camp counselor at the soccer stadium had brought about sixty seven-year-olds in bright orange T-shirts inside for cooling breaks and to watch the kickoff. He saw Bonnie and me in our Spain regalia and asked, “What should I tell the kids about why they should root for Spain?”

I’m that guy. I answered in Spanish first—maybe because I’d been yelling ¡Vamos! so often. “Porque son amigos que juegan juntos, con diversión y amistad. Se ayudan mutuamente a mejorar.“ I interrupted myself and switched to English.

“They’re friends who play together for fun. They help each other become better.” The counselor smiled. “Oh good,” he said. “I’ll tell them they’re friends who work together as a team.” Yes!

That became the prevailing analysis in the days to come. Spain played as a distributed network. Every player knew his position and role, and if one went down or drifted out of position, another instinctively filled the space. They always seemed to know where they needed to be to maintain the team’s shape.

By the time we watched England take a late 1–0 lead over Argentina at Woolly Bear Taphouse in Viroqua, I had begun to understand something else about Argentina’s network structure. I saw a look of determination in Messi’s eyes and said to my companions, “Argentina’s going to win.” Bonnie said, “First, hey have to score.”

They did. Then they scored again, dashing England’s hopes of football coming home. 2–1. Argentina is a centralized network. Messi is the center. Whatever he thinks or feels becomes what the rest of the team thinks or feels—frustrated, determined, energized. It’s as if he creates a clone of himself, and every player plugs into it and becomes a little more like Messi.

The final was set: Spain versus Argentina.

We had planned to watch it somewhere up north in Bayfield, but a forest fire north of Lake Superior was blowing smoke across Wisconsin, and Bayfield’s air-quality numbers looked terrible. Hazardous, in fact. Dark red. Purple. Over 500.

We remained optimistic, trusting the weather forecasts that predicted the wind would shift and the air would improve. Even as people told us they were canceling their reservations. Even after someone who had just come from Bayfield described air so thick with smoke and particulates that ash coated her car. Downright apocalyptic.

We began driving north from Viroqua on a smoky morning. The air-quality situation had developed overnight. I kept thinking we might just need to drive through one bad pocket before reaching cleaner air.

It was a very big pocket. As we drove north, conditions only worsened. Visibility dimmed. My eyes itched. My nose began to burn, so I put on one of the N95 masks we had picked up at Walgreens.

By the time we reached New Auburn and saw that Bayfield’s air quality was still terrible, it was time to call it. The silver lining was that Todd found a bottle of Weller 12 Year bourbon sitting on a shelf at a gas station.

U-turn. Back south. We headed toward cleaner air, toward Dubuque, where Bonnie and Anne found us great lodging in a town I had never visited before: Galena. It felt like a time capsule, preserving the grandeur of a nineteenth-century river town. Highly recommend. But accommodations were available for only one night. Popular.

Then on to Dubuque. There I found a bar that had hosted previous World Cup watch parties with the local soccer club, Dubuque Unidos. Todd and I scoped it out during the England–France third-place match. France, down 4–0 at halftime, still looked broken by Spain.

I’ll never forget the look of pain in Mbappé’s eyes days before when time was running out and Spain was about to book its place in the final.

They were still reeling, but France stormed back in the second half, turning it into the highest-scoring match of the World Cup, 6–4. France still lost, but Mbappé scored two more goals to finish with ten and claim the Golden Boot.

That night on Duolingo, the app finally rewarded me with a Spain uniform to wear. Finally. I had been waiting 39 days. But also, I have been waiting 16 years for Spain to win a knockout round match in the world cup.

It was a massive pivot—from Bayfield to Dubuque—but there we were. For the final, we secured a comfortable indoor table at the back of the bar, close to the restroom. The air quality in Dubuque had turned hazy. But once the courtyard filled, the call of the crowd became irresistible.

There was a palpable buzz in the air, and it wasn’t from the smoke of the wildfires. The air outside was clean enough for me, and Anne and Bonnie took turns joining me in the throng on the bleachers while Todd held down our air-conditioned table inside.

I found myself on the right flank of a group of young Spaniards. As the match grew more contentious, so did the chirping between the young Spanish woman in front of me and the young Argentine man behind me.

It reminded me of the hilarious cursing scene between onscreen rivals, the Spanish actor Antonio Banderas and the Argentine actor Oscar Martínez in Official Competition.

Spain prevailed through exemplary play. Argentina disgraced itself with unsportsmanlike behavior, both during and after the match.

When Spain finally scored and won, I celebrated with the young Spaniards. Later they came over and asked me in Spanish whether I had a recording of them celebrating any of the goals or the singing of the national anthem.

“Sí, sí, sí.” I asked Anne in English if she had any good recordings.

“¿En inglés o en español?“

“Los dos.“

We talked more. Maria and Margarita, both from Madrid. I showed them my twinning Marc Cucurella photos and my Valle-Inclán pictures. They told me I was Spanish. I laughed. That pleased me. “Can you sign an attestation for me?”

“Yes, you’re not an honorary Spaniard. You’re Spanish. Totalmente.” They made signatures with their fingers in the air.

We had driven hundreds of miles, pivoting to other directions on this trip this week, letting go of some dream summer plans at a cool resort on the big fresh water. My world cup summer journey, started big in Atlanta, with a terrifying but epic draw with Cabo Verde, got bigger at Centennial Olympic Park, then with the Aficion, the fanatics who were traveling to see Spain.

When I pivoted back to Milwaukee, I found another community of soccer fanatics at Nomad for the knockouts as the Spanish side grew into the tournament. I took that on the road for the semifinals and final with my traveling companions and Spain took it all the way with my homies supporting my fervor. My social media feed completely inundated with Spanish futbol memes.

As the crowd thinned out and we were planning to do the same, it hadn't yet occurred to me: What would I do with World Cup Marc?

How will I behave now that it’s not socially acceptable to scream and chant indoors or out and wear the bright colors of a uniform for a sport I don’t actually play, wrapped in a flag as a cape, a superfan?

I returned one more time to the courtyard to share one more video I found. Miguel was there too. He asked me in Spanish why I was supporting Spain. Maria began to explain that I lived in Madrid. I answered with a phrase from a Spanish soccer meme made famous by a confident, defiant Spanish defender Aymeric Laporte in a viral press conference.

When a journalist doubted Spain’s chances of winning the championship, “¿Por qué España puede ser campeona? Laporte challenged him with the simple question, ¿Y por qué no?, raised his eyebrows, paused and asked again, ¿Y por qué no?, Sí, sí. And why not? Absolutely yes.

That’s what I said to Miguel’s question, why are you a Spain fan? ¿Y por qué no? ¿Y por qué no?

His jaw dropped from that quick retort, shocked at the depth of my Spanish soccer meme knowledge. Oooooooooh! We laughed. We recognized each other as community.

I asked him where he was from. Madrid, but the suburbs, las afueras. Up north? No south. I said, oh my daughter went to school in Villaviciosa de Odon. He said at Agora International? Yes! He said he went to the other international school same suburban town, down the road at Eurocolegio Casvi Villaviciosa.

Small world, big World Cup. Lots of new friends.

In the meantime, World Cup Marc waits. Four more years.

2030. Nos vemos en España.

I’ve participated in my last Nomad soccer match watch experience of this World Cup. I got out of there after England dispatched the great Norway team and before the place became even more wall-to-wall with Messi jerseys.

For more than a few matches, I sat with Chris and Tyler, fellow travelers, international skydiving and surfing aficionados, respectively. Tyler had surgery recently to put his knee back together after a moped mishap, so his outstretched, brace-clad leg, crutches, and wheelchair bought him a little more personal space.

Dane and Angie, who I call “Angie Sevilla Atlanta” in my contacts, were back for the Belgium match. I joined them outside under the umbrellas, and Romi—Lamine Yamal España fan—joined us too. We were incredulous when Spain conceded their first goal in this tournament but celebrated Mikel Merino’s late-minute heroics. “¡Somos españoles!” I shouted, turning back toward the bleachers and throwing my arms in the air. The small crowd behind me answered with a little roar. “¡Vamos!”

At the Mexico–England match earlier in the week, the line to get in stretched up the block, longer than for the previous USA match. I ran into a former student, Diego, and we stood together at the bar. For the second half, I found Tyler and Chris sitting out back.

We spotted a guy wearing an England jersey. He made it out alive. Nomad switched the broadcast to Telemundo, and there were great parades of Mexican jerseys of every vintage—black, green, white—all representing El Tri. Mexico lost, but people weren’t too devastated by it, and I got off Brady Street pretty quickly.

Michael and Jules were there frequently, and they introduced me to another regular, Omar, whose current wife had once been married to the man who raised his family in the house we’ve lived in for the last 25 years.

These are just some of the vignettes of the little pods I belonged to. Going into the final few matches down at Nomad, I started to anticipate that I needed to mark the end of the era somehow. I was trying to keep that needle and thread of culture moving: first Spain back to Milwaukee through writing these posts, then to Atlanta for the FIFA Spain–Cabo Verde match, El Aficionado, and the Fan Fest. Then back to Milwaukee, trying to find that same supercharged social energy.

Now I’ve got text threads, and while we watch—some of us exiled from Nomad, some still there—we react and share through text.

That last day, after England–Norway, I walked out of there and kept looking over my shoulder. One more glance. One more conversation. One more “¡Vamos España!” I remembered how it felt walking away from rallies and rotundas, drumbeats and chants, signs and scarves. On that hot July day, it felt like I was walking from the hearth into the snow.

Only proverbially, of course, because everything has changed again, and now we have our destiny match: Magic Messi’s final Mundial against Lamine Yamal’s sorcery in his first. The magic was in the baby bathwater all along.

When was the last time a team repeated as World Cup champions? Brazil in 1958 and 1962—Pelé’s first and second World Cup appearances.

Birthday celebrant, 19-year-old #19 Lamine Yamal’s first World Cup final will be played on July 19: Spain vs. Argentina.

The camp counselor behind the bar at the Forward Club asked me, “Why should I tell the kids to root for Spain?”

I said, “Because of the friendship. This team plays with each other, for each other. They are a family.”

He said, “Good. I’ll tell them that. They’re friends helping each other.”

Dai, dai, ikō, dale, allez, let’s go!

¡Arriba España! ¡Vamos!

For the last few semesters I’ve asked my Internet Culture students to consider a vexing scenario: What are we becoming when an instructor uses a Large Language Model (LLM) AI to create an assignment prompt, a student uses AI to do the assignment, and then the instructor uses AI to grade it? Sometimes I get answers that are a little too literal for what I’m trying to express, like “I wouldn’t want to pay thousands of dollars to not have my teacher grade my project,” which gets under my skin because I also wouldn’t want a student to pay thousands of dollars and not do the critical work essential for intellectual growth. Duh.

But those kinds of answers have helped me get at what I’m really curious about, which is this: Is a kind of AI-mediated feedback loop flattening individual expression, training writers to write for an average, middle-ground, standardized expression? Are we erasing some kind of individual linguistic biodiversity, like what happened with regional dialects when local news reporters began adopting one kind of plain Midwestern “broadcast English” in an attempt to have the broadest appeal and marketability? Listen to how we sounded in the Computer Genius video from 1984 in Louisville. Over forty original PROH-grums.

Are these technologies already changing the way we write through vocabulary homogenization—and what does this have to do with Spain or Spanish culture? Yes, see how I used that em dash, and something about Spain’s history that has to do with colonialism and imperialism.

First, Spain hasn’t always been Spain, and it has always resisted homogeneity. Seventeen autonomous territories. Many languages—not dialects of Spanish—different cultural expressions. Not all derived from Latin. Exchange, extraction, standardization, erasure? Go back three thousand years.

Phoenician traders and Carthaginian militaries extracted metals without subjecting the populations to assimilation. Romans came for the metal too, but stayed for the olive oil. Nearly all pre-Roman language was extinguished by Latin. The Visigoths came as a small ruling elite, but they assimilated to Hispano-Roman culture, except when it came to Jewish populations, whom they tried to convert or punish: religious uniformity as an administrative state project. In al-Ándalus, real conquest came with a standardizing layer—Arabic became the administrative and prestige language, but in the beginning, under the Umayyads, there was also hybridity and tolerance.

When Isabella and Ferdinand joined up, they imposed the starkest “unity through erasure” model in Iberia: convert, leave, or die; and the extractive labor-colonial model in the Americas. You already know that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but it’s not just a rhyming coincidence that in that same year they expelled all the Jews. Muslims had some contingencies for a little while.

Under Charles V, coiner of Plus Ultra, a reversal of the Roman Non Plus Ultra—nothing more beyond our great civilization—the motto was modified to Even More. Infinity and Beyond. The Habsburgs extended to, well, everywhere that uses “Spanish” as a language, including what is now—draw a diagonal line from British Columbia in Canada (you might as well start with the bottom of Alaska) to the Florida-Georgia border. Everything south of that, west of the Amazon River, all the way down. Including Antarctica.

Slices of Africa in the north, sub-Saharan, east. In Asia and the Philippines, named for Philip II, Charles’s son. Oceania, Tasmania, that’s us. And in Europe, besides Spain, parts of modern Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Hungary, Germany, Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, and Slovenia. What am I on about here? Expansive exchange, even if there was a lot of extraction.

The Bourbons came next to abolish the Aragonese, Catalan, and Valencian languages. One Spain, one law, one language. Doubling down on Isabella and Ferdinand’s “unity” model. (See what I erased there?) Castellano, Castilian, the language of Castile, is the one official language. Centralizing doctorate-granting and education in castellano as part of the nation-building project. And by the early 20th century, colonialism was in collapse: Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines. The sun was setting on the Spanish empire.

The republics tried to recognize—by decentralizing and re-legitimizing regional languages in Catalonia, Galicia, and País Vasco, aka Basque Country, kaixo, where they still speak the only surviving non-Indo-European language—ha—you missed one, Romans! Until Franco: National Catholicism, Castilian-only, forced labor, extractive fascist authoritarian brutal cultural conformity explicit state ideology BS. Post-Franco, a great structural reversal bounce: the state’s answer to internal diversity has more often been legal protection rather than suppression.

But I’ve got to go back to Sevilla on this one, the above-and-below trope. Four things to notice and thread together in this pattern of extraction or standardization, exchange, collaborations over time, and preserving culture: the rooftop tour of the Cathedral and the Giralda; Columbus’s tomb therein; the 14th-century university student graffiti on its north wall (Victory-we did it, we earned our doctorate); and, south of the cathedral complex, the parking-garage Jewish cemetery.

Way back in al-Ándalus, at the end of the 12th century, the Almohads built a grand mosque with a minaret. In the 13th century, Sevilla is “re-conquested” by Christians, and they convert it into a church. The minaret gets converted into the Giralda, from girar, to turn, as in turn around and around as you ride your double-wide horse carriage up the ramp to the top.

In the 15th century, the Sevillian leaders said let’s build a church so grand that those who see it will take us for locos, crazy, mad, insane-in-the-membrane people. The top parts were completed in the 16th century, Italian Renaissance style. George Lucas was inspired—Naboo in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones was filmed in Plaza de España in Sevilla—and Gaudí of Barcelona fame was inspired too.

We took the rooftop tour, but because it was Domingo de Ramos, Palm Sunday, we couldn’t go up the tower or get super close to Columbus’s tomb. His remains are being carried by statue likenesses of four Spanish kings from Castile, Aragon, Navarre, and León. Look at the four main panels of the Spanish coat of arms on the fútbol jersey for La Selección, the national team. Start with the castle and go counterclockwise. From a high catwalk, we could see the staging at the main altar, and just beyond, a light shone on the tomb.

Climbing up more stairs and narrow passageways, I thought, would be the way to my daughter’s heart. An adventure in a castle-church-mosque final resting place of Christopher Columbus sort of place. But like Han Solo, Sarina had a bad feeling about this tour, the guide and his storytelling style. I thought he was fine, a fine historian, professional, a compelling lecturer, but I had committed acts of cruelty on my teen daughter by subjecting her to this.

To be fair, the matzah-starvation segment of our trip had just begun.

The view from the roof was fantastic. Below we could see the setup for massive Holy Week services. At eye level and above, vistas of the city in all directions, and above all, the fantastic geometry of the architecture and the massive, towering Giralda. The detail was—what’s another word for fantastic? Standardization, commence. Google: “fantastic synoynm” [sic]. Extremely good and unbelievably strange. Buenísimo e increíblemente raro.

On a different day’s tour, the day before, we got the tour of the Alcázar, the borrowed word from Arabic for the castle, el castillo. We saw how the Catholic Kings kept the architectural style from the Muslims, the mudéjar style, which administratively, effectively operated like a work visa so Muslim craftspeople could stay after the Reconquista.

The Catholic Kings also had to keep the running water close by and their Jews closer. A community of six to seven thousand Jewish families at one time inhabited Sevilla, their barrio, their ghetto, their judería at the corner of Calle de Agua and Calle de Vida. The corner of Water and Life.

That was the southeastern corner of the judería, abutted to the royal palace, the Real Alcázar of Seville, also the primary filming location for the fictional kingdom of Dorne from Season 5 of Game of Thrones.

What a wonderful bricolage assemblage of culture. Sevillian Jewry as House Tyrell. Shmuel Ha-Levi as King Pedro I’s treasurer. That’s the King of Castile y León known as either Pedro el Cruel or Pedro the Just, depending on which side of support you were on. That’s where I took my nom de guerre or seudónimo artist alias of the 1990s: Marco el Cruel. And how you can make an anagram to spell Marc Cucurella, more or less, my Spanish soccer doppelgänger, more or less.

Continuing the exploration of Sevilla, separate from the spectacle of Semana Santa, our tour guide Clara walks us to the edge of the Judería and says we are going to see something unexpected in a parking lot. Then I whisper to my family, “A Jewish cemetery.” How did you know?

Erasure is a historical modus operandi, that’s how. Even in an age of cultural preservation, where the new parking garage created a small bathroom-sized cutout with a window onto a fallen pillar and stone, a Jewish tomb, it was the minimum space afforded under the new rules.

After the cycle of mosques to synagogues to churches to rubble (by Napoleon), the 1929 Ibero-American World’s Fair in Sevilla rehabbed the city and “renovated” the medieval Jewish Quarter, even though it was no longer inhabited by living Jews. In the 1990s, a parking-garage project at the end of the old city revealed graves that aligned with the historical Jewish community’s dwelling place.

What remains, Clara explained, is practically the minimum percentage of the archaeological site required by Spanish cultural heritage law: the stone coffin, preserved behind glass, a seven-by-seven-foot room embedded in the wall of an underground level of the parking garage. A plaque behind a Tesla explaining what was the Jewish cementerio.

In contrast, when the Setas were being constructed, Roman remains were kept preserved almost in their entirety. Clara, what happened to the human remains from the Jewish cemetery in Seville? Allegedly handed over to the archaeological ministry. Do they have the remains? No? Hidden, erased, or lost to history.

To conclude, an LLM would like me to wrap this up “by explicitly bringing the Sevilla/Jewish cemetery image back to the AI question so the essay lands on your real argument rather than just ending on a haunting example.” Today a prospective student introduced me to a Sheldon-from-The Big Bang Theory meme quote about sarcasm, from Season 1, Episode 2, “The Big Bran Hypothesis,” that gets at what LLMs actually do: “I see the format, but I don’t see the content.”

And so I need a bridge sentence. Something like, AI doesn’t conquer like an empire; it normalizes like a bureaucracy. No sword, cross, flag, or royal decree. (A prototypical AI language pattern, not this but this and this or this.)

It seems to be optional for now, the use of AI, not a compulsory conversion under pain of death, except it’s already in everything. Like self checkout in our grocery stores, a phenomenon that Spanish society quietly resists by never using, hmm, what a brilliant tactic. Insert thoughtful emoji. But AI only asks of you this: a prompt. And it says back what we want to hear using a pattern, and a preference for what is most legible, visible, audible. Most probable, most frictionless.

Stay on the sofa and turn up the volume. Buy a larger screen and have it installed all while never leaving the couch. Comfy. Hardcore History podcaster Dan Carlin, paraphrasing Voltaire, put it like this: “History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.” Don’t get all soft, you’ll fall. And your little civilization, too.

I don’t suspect the real danger is exactly like the scale of violence in old wars systems of extraction. But there is something to the scale of standardizing expression: tidying, averaging, smoothing. What doesn’t fit the pattern—what humans sometimes cleverly call our solutions to problems for survival, thinking outside the box— gets tagged as noise, then rendered invisible, buried, lost. This is where I may need to go back to Hannah Arendt —not in equating an LLM with historical atrocities, but in recognizing the banality of systems that erase without passion, flatten without empathy, and overwrite without even noting plurality of thought, opinion, dissent.

The parking garage basement in Sevilla. The Jewish tomb behind glass, a tiny cutout of preserved memory, a legal minimum of what once was a living community, neighbors, language, values, and world. A small window onto what remained after centuries of conversion, renovation, and forgetting.

AI may be doing something structurally similar to living linguistic ecosystems: taking vibrant, local, eccentric, embodied forms of expression—and their potential forms— and reducing them to remnants. Preserved as reference instead of lived experiences and practices. Training us, paso a paso, to prefer the version that sounds most average, most fluent, most universally acceptable. A parking-garage tomb for the real, rare, regional, human parts of how we speak, write, and think.

In between the buying, exchanging, and returning of new, vintage, and counterfeit Spanish soccer jerseys and gear, I’ve seen quite a few World Cup matches on both the big and small screen. In this week’s post, I’m going to try to peel back the layers of this World Cup onion since returning to Milwaukee from Atlanta. I’ll take you from private screens to public gatherings.

There’s a deepening of those layers here, too, from what to wear, to how to listen, to how to participate. It reinforces one of the central themes running through my Spain writing: language is a key that unlocks levels of culture, a way to enter a community.

The first rule of World Cup Club (WCC, an imaginary club I’ve just invented) is to wear fan gear every day. It’s a festival, and costumes must be worn, so I have been living in all of my vintage and newly acquired Adidas Spain and Coca-Cola FIFA gear. Matching shorts, oftentimes, too. On match days when Spain plays, it’s the red player jersey. On training or recovery days, the teal and navy kit or the visually complex pre-match top. The World Cup is essentially a fashion show of brightly colored and vividly designed synthetic fabrics. Fun.

The second rule of WCC is that when a match has one or more teams from a Spanish-speaking country or Latin America, it must be watched on Telemundo via Peacock. Es fundamental para mejorar mi español. It’s essential for improving my Spanish. It is also a bit of a meme among language-learning influencers to compel everyone to watch in Spanish. Even if you can’t understand the words, you can understand the emotion. Es una experiencia diferente a verla en Fox en inglés. And you can probably understand that sentence, too. The commercials are fun and useful as well. And even if no teams speak Spanish, sure, it’s fine to watch on Telemundo.

To try to match that “supercharged socialization” energy of Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, I looked for a bigger, outdoor viewing venue. I found it at Nomad World Pub on Brady Street. I can’t recall ever going to Nomad before. That seems wrong, having lived in Milwaukee for 25 years and never stepped foot inside, but I’m working on righting that wrong. Last Thursday, I walked the thirty minutes down to watch the Japan–Sweden match.

The third rule of WCC is that whenever you see someone wearing the jersey of a Spanish-speaking country, you strike up a conversation—in Spanish. Or, as Bonnie says, “Marc will speak to anyone in Spanish.”

I arrived in the aftermath of Ecuador’s victory over Germany on the last day of the group stage. I could hear some people behind me speaking Spanish. I said, ¡Felicidades por Ecuador!, congratulations, and began a conversation in which one man insisted that I come back. This is the place to hear the most Spanish, all of the time, with the best Spanish-language music. Mañana, aquí. Sábado, aquí. Vale, vale. Okay.

What I learned that day is that Nomad is an intercultural, intergenerational space. A third space: not home, or work, but the place you sometimes wanna go where everybody knows your name. I met Michael, who lives in the neighborhood and is in his seventies, whose late mother was deeply invested in Milwaukee’s Jewish community. He shared stories about the socialist and communist connections back in the day.

Jessica was wearing the great Germany pre-match jersey. She grew up in Germany, and told me southwest Germany is unexpectedly racist toward Germans of mixed ethnicities and continental origins. Her sister is in Guadalajara soaking up the WC vibe there, without tickets! We know some of the same artists in Milwaukee.

For the following day’s match of interest, Spain vs. Uruguay in the final matches of Group H, we returned. I dressed Bonnie in attire appropriate for the event: a 2018 Spain jersey, which pays homage to the argyle-like diamond stripe features of the 1994 home kit, and an ESP flag cape that I snagged from the Coca-Cola pavilion at the FIFA Fan Fest in Atlanta. Una pareja de colombianos, a Colombian couple about our age, came up to us and asked Bonnie in Spanish whether the other two stools at our table were open. We talked about our shared love of Madrid. In Spanish.

Another table in front of us was filled with young professional Spaniards. I said hola to a woman wearing a long-sleeved cream-colored Spain away jersey. I told her, Me encanta esta camiseta. I love that shirt! She’s from Galicia. Ah, like Ramón María del Valle-Inclán! Rosaria, I later learned, was her name. When it came time for the Marcha Real, the Himno Nacional, Spain’s national anthem, I asked her if we were going to stand. She did, and so did I. There are no official lyrics, so I hummed along: lo lo, lo lolo, lolololololo, lo lo lo...

Soon after, a man in a baseball cap came up to Bonnie and me and said, “I saw you guys in Atlanta.”

“What? You were there?”

“Yes. I saw you on the big screen at the Fan Fest. You were killing it.”

It’s true. Jon and I made a small sport of showing up on the screen because I liked arriving early to dance out some of the anxious energy. Dane and his partner, Angie, were there too. They had gone to see the Czech Republic–South Africa match that Jon and I had almost managed to get tickets for. They had friends who won the ticket lottery and were able to buy tickets for only $150 each.

“Why are you supporting Spain?” was the question that always came up in these conversations. Angie had studied in Sevilla twenty years ago, and Dane had spent time there too, describing un toque, the strategy of calling someone and then immediately hanging up as a way to signal that it was time to meet at a predesignated spot.

The match itself was brutal. Thuggery was perpetrated by the Uruguayans on the pitch, seriously injuring several key Spanish players. But Spain prevailed with a goal. I jumped up and down. Rosaria, also jumping up and down, hugged me. When the match was over, we took the party out front, gathering around the screen. I led a few soccer cheers, and more people asked me how and why I had become a Spain supporter. We posed for photos with a professional photographer. I have no idea where those photos are going to end up.

Then a song came on that I recognized—but only the chorus—”¡Que viva España!“ I somehow knew it was a pasodoble, a traditional dance, and all of these young Spaniards formed a circle and sang along. We spoke with a guy who lived near Chamartín in Madrid. Another man, Saturnino, from Pamplona, told me about the chains on the royal crest and how the original 800-year-old chains are preserved in a museum in Navarre. “The Camino de Santiago begins there,” he said. We also talked with David, who was originally from Venezuela but grew up in Madrid. Mostly, we conversed in Spanish, switching to English every once in a while.

Rosaria bid us farewell: Nos vemos—see you at the next Spain match, the knockout-round game against Austria.

We’ll be back.

We had made it there first a couple of days before for the Portugal–DR Congo match with VIP treatment, badges that let us into the Coca-Cola Pavilion with an air-conditioned living room and a balcony looking out on the crowd. On Friday for USA, they closed the doors when the crowd reached capacity at 15,000. High energy, unmatched. Even the stadium, with its assigned seating, felt tame.

In Digital Minimalism (2019, p. 184), Cal Newport describes a kind of experience that’s good for keeping people off their screens, which he calls “supercharged socialization.” Mostly, it is structured gameplay where you might act out in ways unusual for polite society—think of playing Charades or Taboo. But this also includes group exercise classes, concerts, or being with large crowds at a sporting event. It was this high-energy, supercharged socialization that, as the week went on, I prioritized.

At the beginning of the week, I was organizing our days around soccer matches, making sure we wasn’t missing critical teams and games. If we could see it live great, if we could see it on TV, great too. By the end of the week, I realized I was organizing them around opportunities to be swept up in a crowd, chasing the energy of the collective experience. The matches mattered, seeing the players, the game play, but the feeling of being part of a spectacle of thousands of other people mattered just as much, as long as that energy was sustainable.

Each day, with its menu of World Cup matches on TV or in the city of Atlanta, required its own itinerary. Monday was the sweepstakes: Spain and Cabo Verde, sitting with the Coke CEO a row behind us. Tuesday, a solid workday at the office. Wednesday, another Bottle Cap Suite VIP experience at Fan Fest. Thursday, wake up early to check prices for CZE–RSA. Darn, just missed tickets, twice, before the bots swept them all at 8 a.m. Good. This is a recovery day. Viewed at The Battery over lunch.

Friday: bonkers USA. Huge crowd, hot sun, but with the respite of the air-conditioned Coke suite. We treaded lightly. Then vamoosed on the MARTA train to Decatur to watch MAR–SCO. Saw an amazing funk band, JohnBoy and Surround Sound. Saturday, recovery. And Sunday, one final high-energy expenditure blowout. Spain versus Saudi Arabia, where the cheapest tickets were $1,000. “That’s just what they cost,” said a Boliviano on the train platform.

We left the house early to park at the Dunwoody station and take the 30-minute ride down to Five Points. What was Casa España? We couldn’t really say except it was where they had painted a new mural celebrating Spanish soccer, la selección española. It was a pop-up park. Tickets required, free entry.

We arrived 5 minutes before 9:00 a.m., and the line was long. I saw a woman wearing a Cucurella jersey and caught up with her for a selfie. “Mom,” her son barked, “Cucurella!” Mission accomplished.

Inside was a frenzy. Flags. Face paint. A tray of mini jamón bocadillos. Claro, probé un poquito porque aqui, yo soy español.

Jamón serrano, not as special as jamón ibérico. I got a Coca-Cola for some extra caffeine juice, and we headed over to the stage where a video screen was playing highlights and a sound system was pumping jams, favorites of la hinchada, or la afición, the fan base.

This wasn't just a fan zone. It was a temporary village, built around a shared identity that would last only a few hours or days before decamping again.

Soon the trumpet player Sete Fernández took the stage and the mic with his horn, a twenty-year veteran of traveling with the team and its fans. He took us through a handful of chants: the Spanish national anthem, Marcha Real, “Lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, lo, soy español,” and a Lamine Yamal chant to the tune of a classic Gypsy Kings flamenco number: “Lamine. Yamal. Cada día te quiero más.”

Every day I love you more.

Lamine. Lamine. Lamine Yamal.

It became frenzied: wigged maniacs, cross-dressing Sevillanos, and more bonkers, face-painted, red-jerseyed Spaniards dancing conga lines, jumping, shouting, ebullient.

Side note: A few times, a fan in the crowd with a megaphone started a problematic “No comen jamón” chant—you can see a TikTok video of it, with a few people joining in—but I didn’t take that bait. I just drank my Coke. You can see me front and center in this viral video. It’s part of a right-wing ultra-fan nationalist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic campaign of defiance.

The chant is alienating to Spanish-born Muslim star Lamine Yamal, who has called out these types of chants as disrespectful and intolerable, arguing that mocking other cultures and faiths only proves those fans are ignorant and racist.

Asking if someone “eats ham” has become a widespread dog whistle used to other Muslim cultures, and since we were playing Saudi Arabia, not good. No me gusta. I told Jon about the Inquisition and the old street test of faith: the free sample of jamón. Why don’t you eat jamón? This runs deep.

That's the strange thing about these crowds. The same collective energy that produces joy, belonging, and celebration can also create pressure to define who belongs and who doesn't.

Anyway, back to the happy part of the mob mentality.

The Casa España session was just the warm-up. I told Jon that, since we weren’t actually going to the match, our job was to get the fans who were going absolutely pumped so they could cheer on La Furia Roja—the Furious Red, the nickname for the Spanish side.

Sete shouted over the frenzy the Spanish equivalent of, “Let’s take it to the street!” And so the hundreds of fanatics packed into the makeshift party exited its temporary gates and met a crowd tenfold larger outside to march to the stadium. We chanted all of the songs, drum and trumpet leading the charge.

We marched out onto the street and, after a few blocks, turned the corner to see the stadium. Pausing along the way for more chanting theatrics, inflatable soccer-ball beach balls bounced around in the air and off heads.

By the time we crossed the bridge and got to the stadium, there was only one brazen man asking for a ticket. I asked a family behind me what “A por ellos, oé” means. “Go get them!” What a relief it wasn’t something inappropriate.

We split off from the stadium-bound group and headed toward Centennial Olympic Park and the big screen for some dancing while there was still space. As the crowd filled in, I befriended a family wearing a mix of Mexico and Spain jerseys. The son had spent time at the Real Madrid soccer clinic a few years ago. I hung out with them, and they made space for me at the front rail once the game started.

After the anthems, Jon went back up to the shade, air conditioning, and cold drinks. I took breaks during the hydration breaks, pausas de hidratación.

The crowd was excited to see Lamine Yamal starting. This was his second World Cup match; his first was on Monday. The game was scoreless, so he did not score, but we did see his first appearance in person. This Sunday match was his first start, and he scored in the 11th minute. Jubilation. Wild celebration.

I emptied my water bottle jumping up and down with the people.

Mikel Oyarzabal scored another just before halftime. I had to pee, but I said to the people around me, “I’d like to see another goal before the half,” and we did. Sixty-six seconds later, Oyarzabal struck again.

After halftime, I came back to my family in the front row with another bottle of water. Staying hydrated was important in the sun and heat.

I was also trying to explain in Spanish: Él es mi gemelo. Cuando era joven, me parecía a Marc Cucurella. He is my doppelgänger, my twin. When I was younger, I looked just like him. Dad helped me say cuando era joven.

Then Marc Cucurella scored Spain’s fourth goal, and the four of us went crazy. I emptied my water bottle jumping up and down, shouting “Cucurella!”

They asked for a selfie together when things calmed down. They took off after the hydration break.

I went back upstairs to get out of the sun. Spain finished 4–0, and Jon and I made our way back to Dunwoody, packing into a MARTA train car like sardines.

We got back, showered, and got ready to go out for a Father’s Day dinner at a steakhouse. No jamón. Lower-energy period, recovery, underway.

This post is a bit different from the regular digest of the last months. A lot of what has been written was after the fact, through the lens of reflection and time. Here I am in suburban Atlanta writing this while watching the France–Senegal and the Argentina-Algeria matches on TV. This post is written without a lot of reflection, but with the recent memory of the Spain–Cabo Verde match yesterday.

It’s probably also a story about Coca-Cola and corporate largesse, which is how my friend Jon and I were afforded the opportunity to attend a match. Through an Ambassador program he won tickets. I’d been hounding Jon for the better part of two years, but especially since last summer when the city schedules and groups began to form. Jon is the real hero of this story.

On the plane from Chicago to Atlanta there were many FIFA fans. I spoke to a costarricense and a colombiano who were both going to the Spain match. The guy from Costa Rica was going to six matches over the next two weeks or so in Atlanta and Kansas City. There was a couple from Boston who were going to support Cabo Verde. I asked, what languages are there? Portuguese and Creole.

Anyhow, luck prevailed upon us with tickets for the Monday match, and we woke up early to drive the 38 minutes into downtown Atlanta. I was excited; I had butterflies. We listened to the FIFA playlist. We arrived at Coke and loaded onto the bus that would shuttle a dozen or so Coke employees and guests to the hotel across the way from the “Atlanta” Stadium.

A woman in a Mexico jersey on the bus said, “Hola, buenas,” to me. That’s Spain Spanish for hi, good (whatever part of the day it is), without having to formally name it, like is usually done in Mexico. “Hola, buenas,” I cheerfully chirped back.

Atlanta stadium— in quotes— because it is normally known as the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, but all traces of any other non-2026 FIFA World Cup Sponsors besides Coca-Cola, Michelob Ultra, Adidas, Visa, Lay’s, Hisense, and a few others were covered with giant tarps, panels, or painted over.

At the hotel, where lots of fans of both Spain and Cabo Verde were staying, there were lots of soccer jerseys in the lobby. We were able to access some VIP areas, like a tasty brunch spread and the Panini sticker sports-card photo booth. A DJ played music outside and tried to get people pumped up. We could see the stadium from the hotel patio, which was covered in astroturf to resemble a soccer pitch. Energy was building, but it also felt like the day would last forever.

But it was time to explore the next zone, and usually when you leave one restricted area, there’s no going back. So we took a Powerade in hand and a short bottled water and put it in my Coke-branded, stadium-approved clear over-the-shoulder fanny pack. I had to chug the lemon Powerade before going through into the FIFA zone, and there was definitely no re-entry here. Only unopened water bottles.

We made our way past the winding barriers and turnstiles of the gates and into the fan zone. By now it was approaching the ten o’clock hour and the morning sun was strong. Lines were long for the freebies and Jon, as a brand ambassador, walked around checking out the booths and their operations. Be on the lookout for non-sanctioned brands. Pepsi, we’re looking at you. No, it’s all clear.

We did eventually wait in line in the hot sun for the face-painting station. QR codes scanned, consent given for whatever data harvest. In line I chatted with a couple from Colombia wearing Spain jerseys of the same vintage as mine, pero los hombros son diferentes. The shoulder stripes were different. It was the next level up—the player version with more breathable and stretchy fabric.

Next!

We got our face paint. I was wearing a bucket hat that had the red and gold stripes and made those stripes continue down my high cheek along my beardline. Somehow that marked us as next-level fans. We meandered, looking for more freebies or fun games. There was some jump roping and dancing and many, many Lamine Yamal #19 Spain jerseys.

We went for a drink. I found a Michelob Zero, and after it was empty we went inside.

Up steps, into the stadium—now I don’t really remember—but there was a door, and oh yes, a photo.

Inside the door it was wall-to-wall, shoulder-to-shoulder, a sea of people. I’d say an 8-to-1 Spain-to-Cabo-Verde ratio.

Then my first Cucurella encounter. I didn’t meet Marc Cucurella, #24 for Spain, left defender, but he is my doppelgänger. So this is the crowd that would recognize me as such. A couple of guys from Costa Rica. “Sí, Cucurella… ¡soy Cucurella!” We got a selfie together. Cucurella es mi gemelo, I said, he’s my twin. jajaja, they repeated gemelo and laughed. It was the first of no less than four Cucurella recognitions. That day. One corrected me. Papa Cucurella. jajaja. I forget to tell all these people my name is Marc, too.

I remembered that as far as soccer chants go, the Olé, olé, olé, olé chant might be a good one once Spain had done well. Jon and I tried it as we continued to section 109C. A few people joined in with us as we tried a few rounds.

But when we arrived at our section gate—wow, great seats. We also had access to a downstairs club area at pitch level. Posh. We found one place so exclusive we didn’t have access and chatted with one of the ladies standing guard, working hospitality. She was going to see the Falcons play the Bengals at Estadio Santiago Bernabéu in the fall. I gave her tips on how to pronounce the place where Real Madrid play.

Burn a BAY-you… no, not like bayou—more like bay-you.

BER-nah-BEH-ooh.

We went up to our seats. Warmups, Spotting the starters.It all began to unfold: the rituals we had seen on TV, the music, the flags, the march out, and the anthems.

The Spanish anthem, Marcha Real, is played but not sung with words. My litmus test of watching the faces of the players didn’t work since they had their backs to us. But when Cabo Verde’s anthem played, it seemed like the crowd was 50–50 Spain–Cabo Verde, or maybe actually 60–40, advantage Cabo Verdeans.

Spoiler alert: predictions of first goals scored in the 9th minute, 12th minute, and 15th minute were not met, but Spain kept having good chances thwarted by the 40-year-old Cabo Verdean goalkeeper Vozinha, making spectacular and heroic saves over and over. The defense was thick, steadfast, and held the line.Look how many players in white are in the center.

A woman a few rows in front of us kept initiating rounds of Olé, and a few times we were able to sustain some good chants. The trick is to turn around, look the people behind you in the face, and encourage them. They can’t look away—you’re standing between them and the match below.

The other chant we heard was: ES-PA-ÑA ///// ES-PA-ÑA

A little girl right in front kept looking back at me whenever I cheered or chanted. I asked her which team she was supporting. Her mom said she always picks the team who wears white. In this case, that’s Cabo Verde.

Around minute 66 the crowd became restless and started cheering. For what? What’s going on? I heard people around me ask. I pointed to the Spain bench and sideline.

It was Lamine Yamal getting ready to sub in. Highlights.

While everyone to my right and left was up getting snacks or using the restroom, a contingent of well-dressed non-fans came to row 24. One of the handlers said, “Excuse me, these six seats are ours.”

I said, “Row 24?”

She said, “Oh no, so sorry.”

They were looking for row 25.

When Jon came back he nudged and whispered, “That’s the CEO of Coca-Cola.”

I said, “Oh, the Atlanta Coca-Cola? Or US? North America? Some other country?”

“No. All of Coca-Cola. Atlanta is the world HQ and he is the CEO.”

Henrique Braun.

He was kind enough to pose for a selfie with us. And he said he tried to cheer Spain on for a goal.

Sometime in the 80s Nico Williams came on and made some impressive runs at goal. Cucurella had some nice tries—a bouncing header at the face of goal—but nothing potent enough to stop Vozinha from collecting it.

Thrilling, the last minutes were.

But no goals from either side, and that’s the way it ended.

Later I would see commentators call it shocking, but Spain’s dominance—74–26% possession and more than 800 passes attempted at 94% completion—sometimes smothers their own offensive edge. Games are not really decided by the number of completed passes but by the number of times a team can hit the back of the net. Goals.

Oh, but a dream day went by so fast.

As we meandered out, even more sardined than on the way in, the Cabo Verdeans were jubilant. Spain supporters were a little confused, befuddled, or frustrated, but still both teams came away with one point, even in a 0-0 draw.

It was a moral victory for Cabo Verde since their island nation has a population of only 500,000 people. I think Henrique knew where Cabo Verde was, but I explained to a person in his entourage that it was between Portugal and Brazil, off the west coast of Africa.

Back to the bus. One quick run inside the hotel to pee before the journey back to Dunwoody. Made it back to the bus, which took us back to Jon’s car. We drove back through the traffic and made it home, a bit wiped out from the adventure.

In the match of the other two teams in Group H—Uruguay and Saudi Arabia—also a tie, meaning all four teams now had one point each. Nothing gained, nothing lost, relatively speaking. All matches on Monday, June 15, ended in a draw. Only the second time in history.

The first being June 15, 1958.

For not being able to reflect very long—strange parallel reflections.

¡Vamos España!

If you’ve been reading, you’ve probably heard me say more than twice that in the Spring 2025 semester I took over 11,000 photos. That’s a lot in 109 days. About 101 photos per day, or more than 700 a week for fifteen and a half weeks.

Two weeks in Costa Rica, one week in Mexico, and about two weeks in Italy after a short stop in Madrid. Then back to Spain for eleven weeks (where all of the photos in this post were taken). Time flies, oddly enough.

Since then I’ve been sorting through these images, matching them with stories or telling stories about the images. In places, or across other kinds of themes.

Every once in a while, while I’m creating albums of photos, I see one that I love, but it just doesn’t fit—not in the current article, nor in any of the previous posts, nor in any future ones that I could imagine.

I just kept thinking, I like that photo, but it’s a little strange. But really, because it’s strange, I like it. Qué raro. That’s an expression that easily translates from Spanish to English, literally to “that’s strange.”

But when we say qué raro in Spanish—en castellano, cuando decimos “qué raro”, en inglés podría significar—it could mean: how strange, that’s unexpected, that’s curious, eccentric, occasionally rare, that’s unusual, huh… interesting, that doesn’t fit my categories.

Is that what it means in English, or is that what it could mean in Spanish? That’s an odd sensation—what does it mean when we mean to say something in one language and it could mean many things?

Probably, it’s more efficient in Spanish to say qué raro but one needs to use inflection to properly convey the sentiment. Kind of a funny meaning, because it’s partly a false cognate, a false-friend for rare, raro. It does land somewhere close to odd in its meaning.

But único is kind of a synonym: unique, singular, one of a kind, a one-off.

I suppose raro possibly holds a potentially negative charge, tension, uncertainty, deviation from the norm, and the other, único has a positive, special connotation, an appreciation of difference, the honor of distinction.

Así que, ¿por qué estas fotos raras son piezas únicas en mi colección? What makes these strange photos one-of-a-kind pieces in my collection?

I’m wrestling with that, and I’ve been laboring over how to say that in Spanish and English. But I think you know what I mean. They are weird and special, but why?

Maybe they didn’t make the cut from another photo-essay-micro-ethnography. Better exemplars and I was striving for brevity. Rare, that I would succeed, as now I usually try to include twenty rather than twelve.

In photography, my other language, I could rattle off some qualities based on John Szarkowski’s essay, The Photographer’s Eye, that would explain the distinction. Light, composition, juxtaposition of subjects, timing, point of view.

Those are just all of the things, that when one pays attention, makes any photo a good photo, a compelling photo. To put it another way, my mother’s rule, “I like photos with people.”

Okay so some of these have people, and some don’t, but the people-ness becomes implicit in the machines, buildings, signage, etc.

Maybe there’s no people, but animals are funny stand-ins for the main character. Sometimes the light is dramatic because the sun is shining but the clouds are dark.

And, I don’t know, people are doing funny things or changing the normal way we understand scale and pattern. And I saw it.

And was lucky enough to catch it with my camera. Something exceptional.

An uncertain tension. ¡Qué raro! Funny haha, or funny strange? Yes. Both.

I’ve been teaching an internet culture class, and in that class I think a lot about what culture is. When I teach online, I try to activate each student—to jump start them into expressing and contributing to the discussion areas in the course’s learning management system.

As they create effervescence around their affinities, cares, loves, and concerns, they begin interacting with fellow students. A shared culture develops, and each person is figuratively turning to the right and to the left to help one another more clearly, cleanly, and efficiently digest and express why theories and ideas, synthesized with lived experiences about communities, social groups, and relationships through digital technologies and computer-mediated communication networks, matter.

Over the semester the students chew on the material and, through some magic and mystical process, convert that into growth. The course site blooms, rises, and bakes into something delicious and wonderfully synergetic. Somehow a + b becomes wonder, curiosity, new knowledge, and a corresponding knowledge culture. Its not always easy to do as an online class, presence extruded through technologies of the word using expressive and persuasive language.

Culture can hang around as a nebulous thing that most take for granted as the wallpaper of life; an atmosphere. But I make a point to express culture as something that bubbles up through social interactions, long-held beliefs, rituals, habits, and shared ways of living. I also think about two kinds of culture relating to each other: social culture and biological culture.

In class, as in life, I often use fermentation as a metaphor. If you take a medium, say milk, and you don’t introduce any active culture into it, if you don’t have intentionality about the process, and you simply leave the milk to ferment on its own, what develops may be unpleasant, unusable, or toxic, spoiling with an overgrowth of bacteria. But if you introduce culture intentionally—a yogurt culture, for example—in the right environment, you can make something delicious and nutritious.

Other examples are more familiar now after the pandemic: kefir, kombucha, sourdough. Each depends on a living culture. You feed the starter. You maintain it. These are actual living things that transform one substance into another, and what they produce becomes desirable for our own guts. Many of our favorite foods, the ones that bring us intense joy, sometimes disgust, are made through the fermentation cultures and processes. My god, do you know what cheese is made of?

That led me to think that when we eat, perhaps we’re not simply feeding ourselves. Of course our bodies digest and absorb nutrients through enzymes and organs that squeeze and transport and transform matter. But perhaps more immediately, we are feeding the culture that lives within us—the bacteria, yeasts, and microbes in our gut: in the hollow space that is within you and without you, to borrow from George Harrison.

If you upset your stomach, you’ve upset your body’s own microbial cultural balance. Something you chewed like a momma bird to feed baby bird inside you met your own internal microbial converter engine and they disagreed. Culture clash causing indigestion. You should always chew your food well, it’s part of the process to have the mash the right consistency.

Food (and beverage) become the bridge between biological culture and social culture. Think about sitting down to share a meal. We bring our microbiomes into the same room. We exchange ingredients, flavors, habits, rituals. Food is not exclusively energy or sustenance or biological, chemical, physical or social exchange. It’s all of it. Foodways are cultural ways.

So when do we get to try the jamón? One distinctive aspect of Spanish cuisine is the reverence for jamón—jamón serrano, but better, jamón ibérico—the celebrated cured ham. Every food culture seems to develop these iconic preparations, things that become more than food but identity. What’s the Jewish equivalent? A quality smoked salmon, pastrami, brisket, or another salted, smoked, and cured? Some prized preparation, developed within or without Ashkenaz.

Food cultures unify communities. Families eat together, yes, and systems of eating create networks of dependence and trust. Kashrut and Halal bind communities through shared values and shared constraints. And the practices institutionalize the social, political, and economical ecosystems that support them. Food can also divide and separate.

Part of the project of (Catholic) religious, (Castilian) language, and (Spanish) cultural unification in Iberia by Ferdinand and Isabella culminated in the Alhambra Decree of 1492. Also known the edict of expulsion, which made open Jewish and Muslim practice punishable by death within the newly reconquested, “made-great-again,” Christian Spain. Over time, one way suspicion attached itself to converts, conversos, was through food. Would they eat pork?

People, tour guides, tell stories of tests of faith, autos de fe on the street—offers of jamón, moments where dietary practice became public proof of religious conformity. Whether formal or informal, food became surveillance. Imagine the free samples at Costco or Whole Foods, but mandatory. Why won’t you try it? And hanging ham itself began to take on symbolic force.

A mezuzah on a doorway says: here is a Jewish home; here is a threshold marked with covenant and memory. Its symbolic ancestry evolved from another doorway narrative: in the Passover story, Israelites marked their doorposts with the blood of a slaughtered, sacrificial lamb so that the angel of death would pass over their homes, sparing the first born children. A marked threshold can mean: safety here.

Hanging ham once functioned as a kind of inverse mezuzah—not a Jewish sign but a Christian one. “Not safe. You do not belong here. This is not your home.” Food became identity made visible. Converts from Judaism, became Marranos, swine; Muslim converts to Christianity, Moriscos, shrimp. Both treyf, forbidden foods.

Y así que sí: “jamón, por favor, me encanta.” Cuando estuvimos en España, pensamos que si surgía la oportunidad de probar jamón, podríamos decir: “Sí, vale, vamos.” Pero salvo una vez, cuando el restaurante nos sirvió pulpo, no hubo nada treyf en el plato. No comimos treyf. Al contrario: hubo muchas comidas que probamos y que nos hicieron pensar: esto es comida judía.

And yet when we lived and traveled in Spain, despite the ubiquity of hanging jamón and knowing that history, we never felt an explicit pressure to eat it. Quite the opposite. People were often remarkably careful and accommodating about dietary restrictions. Even celery is treated as a potential allergen or food to be restricted, kept safely separated as a potential contaminant. Before we arrived we made a pact that we may very well stray outside our regular food boundaries, and that would be okay, but we never really had the opportunity or motive.

More often we’d look at the food and see a culturally Jewish equivalent or evidence that Arabic, Jewish, and Spanish cultures had inextricable exchanges. Spanish fish balls, albóndigas de bacalao (cod fritters), or croquetas de bacalao was gefilte fish. The Spanish tortilla, tortilla española, tortilla de patatas, that’s a potato kugel. Vermouth, the sweet fortified wine, that’s Manischewitz Concord Grape Kosher Wine. And olives. Semitic Mediterranean languages such as Arabic and Hebrew use the word zaitun for the olive. Europe’s word for “olive” connects through Latin, oliva, and to the Greek elaiwa. Except in Spain which adopted the Semitic aceite for oil and aceituna for olive.

We usually explained our diet as pescatarian. But no sea food, just fish. Among Jewish friends, I explain it as kosher milchig, dairy, or parve, vegan. Just not fleishig. No meat: no beef, chicken, lamb. Fish with fins and scales. No shellfish. No mariscos. Pulpo, octopus, has no fins or scales, but only once did a server put it on our table.

And for much of my adult life, beginning around 1989, I realized I’d developed my own simplified model of food culture that mirrored kashrut. Eat mostly plants. Humans are already voraciously devouring the planet in so many ways, show restraint. Add kosher fish after a summer working on an archeological dig in Portugal in 1995; this man could not survive on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches alone. Eat things that are intrinsically kosher—a piece of fruit from a tree, vegetables pulled from the earth, leafy greens. No meat, no need to keep separation from the milk. Keep separation where it matters.

But then a few months ago, still, long recovering from Achilles repair, I had to confront my long standing practice of keeping separation by omission of meats. I need to build back my calf muscle and its supporting structures. Online and among friends, recommendations: Bovine colostrum. Milchig. Creatine. Parve-Vegan. Whey protein. Milchig. Collagen. Fleishig. Meat.

Suddenly I found myself googling how long after dairy one should wait before consuming something derived from the flesh of an animal. And how long to wait after meat before consuming dairy. That really slowed my practice of eating fine cheeses at all hours of the day and night. Those cultures needed to be rebalanced into more limiting feedings.

Why? I’m not religiously observant to that degree. But I can’t let go of my feeling that food is culture. Meanwhile, I’m trying to feed my creature. I’m trying to feed the creature in a way that rebuilds my body. To optimize the culture of my body and its history through the cultures that feed it. And that doesn’t entirely map onto inherited religion. But neither does it ignore cultural continuity. And so I’ve started imagining creation stories differently.

In the beginning, a fine mist came from the heavens, hovering over the deep. Water already existed, a medium. There was not life as we know it, but when the mist settled in the water, ooze and sludge and single cells began bubbling upward from a primordial soup. The creature, creator, and creation were not separate. A day, a week, a revolution, seemingly ad infinitum. Generations began to begat.

The parent-creator-creature kept making new creatures, each containing some piece of what came before. Like a 3D printer working overtime, the creature built more 3D printers, to evolve each generation, to build cells and structures, of stems and capillaries, to build organs, bones, muscles, nervous systems for its creature bodies. And then another strange thing happened. Inside these animated creatures appeared another hollow place—the gut—pink and folded and strangely brain-like, another place where the parent-creature could live and speak and sustain and regenerate. And regenerate.

Okay, so that is my strange new religion: that culture creates creatures; that creatures create culture; that we feed the cultures in our foods; that those cultures feed the cultures inside us; and that all along, we are feeding the creature.

But not with jamón.

Not this time.

Plenty of Iberian cheeses to go around.

Hola, querido lector. Hello, dear reader. This is the 40th consecutive weekly post, mostly about the semester spent abroad in Spain and Spanish-speaking lands. They have been episodic remembrances and syntheses of field notes. They have been picture stories, photo essays, micro-photo ethnographies. They deal with identity and culture, but also logistics and tourism.

In keeping with the tradition of things undone, I have to put down at least two posts that must be forthcoming related to Spain and Spanish experiences. One is the exploration of Sevilla, separate from the spectacle of Semana Santa, which at least retells the tour we took. In this anecdote, the tour guide walks us to the edge of the Judería and says we are going to see something unexpected in a parking lot. Then I whisper to my family, “A Jewish cemetery.” How did you know?

Erasure is a historical modus operandi, that’s how. Even in an age of cultural preservation, where the new parking garage created a small bathroom-sized cutout with a window onto a fallen pillar and stone, it was the minimum space afforded under the new rules.

The second, I guess now that I say it, is related. It’s a question we were asked frequently by our Jewish friends, regardless of their place on the political spectrum: “Did you encounter antisemitism?” This harkens back to a previous post, Jewish People We Met in Spain: Communities of Practice and the “Offensive Amnesia.”

But perhaps this needs to be expanded to include more about graffiti, my exclusion of graffiti from photo frames, and general observations about protests where slogans may have elicited feelings from combinations of words like “Zionism,” “genocide,” “free,” and involving one body of water to another body of water. Códigos secretos. Codes. Críptico.

Jamón. The inverse mezuzah. I have a fine collection of photos of hanging jamón. Also collections of statues of old Jewish and Muslim sages. Statues of Columbus, kings, queens, and literary luminaries on horses. Fantastic royal gardens, peacocks, pavos reales, royal turkeys included. More street art and posters.

Oranges, coffee, grocery stores, wine. Portraits of school friends. Field Trips from school.Compelling compositions and oddities of the street. Bike tours. The other side of the Roman Empire, Italian adventures. The other side of the Spanish Empire, Costa Rica. Barcelona.

That’s what has been left undone, but I have more observations about the process of making the past 40 and 20. During the spring semester, as I wrote these, I had three course preps and more meetings, which stacked up my Wednesdays with obligations.

This made it more challenging to get the posts out on Wednesday at noon, like this week and today, as I prepare my summer course and meet with people. But the deadline pushed me to keep cranking. Not always perfectly (like the choice of that word), so I’d go back after the email went out and correct typos or fix phrasings that felt clunky or imprecise.

In the posts, I like to have a thread pulling through, thematic, like the most recent one about miracles and blessings, or above and below, which I will no doubt revisit in an upcoming post about Sevilla: seeing Columbus’s final resting place in the cathedral from above, and the Jewish cemetery in the underground parking garage below.

Sometimes the thread is of a different conceptual order, like Manifestaciones, street demonstrations, which parallel or contrast with culture or social movements in the US. Sometimes these threads are themselves manifestations of varied realities created by the diversity of thought in other language structures. Sometimes the concepts are theories or terms, like Enzensberger’s discussion of the souk in relation to El Rastro.

Most usefully for me, as I imagine other possible selves and futures in language learning and travel, there is the potential to develop more generative projects from this writing, photography, and posting: bibliography, exhibition, Fulbright, book, exploration.

On one hand, the romanticized medieval Jewish life on the Iberian Peninsula and the heritage tourism industry built upon it. On the other hand, a critique of this, seeing identities and cultures of Sefarad (of Mizraj, and Ashkenaz too), extrinsically ascribed to refugees from a faraway land, othered, disconnected, and orientalized, as almost all Jews have been in some way, at some point, in some place.

Necesito leer más por Castaño: ¿Una Sefarad inventada? Los problemas de interpretación de los restos materiales de los judíos en España. También, Talya Fishman, Avraham Grossman, Elisabeth Hollander.

I’ve been whittling a narrower collection of posts to serve as a central focus in a project tentatively named Trails, Traces, and Thresholds: Micro Visual Ethnographies of Jewish Identity in Contemporary Spain. The Core: Jewish People We Met in Spain, We Need to Talk about Toledo, Judeo-Spanish Memory, Muy Pronto Malaga of the Unfulfilled Fulbright, Granada is a Jewish Pomegranate, Holy Week in Andalucia, The Purple Madonna of Malaga, Movements around Cordoba, Cordoban Garden and Library Rivalries, Beans and the Fairy-Tale Castle of Segovia, El Gran Apagon en Madrid, and Public Space and Historical Memory in Madrid.

So now, all of these things move forward and backward at the same time: writing new posts and revising the first 40. Some posts are formatted with rich captions for the photos. Some have 12 photos and some have 20. Instagram posts of the photos with music. Sometimes the stories veer behind a historical backdrop, and sometimes the present lived experience is foregrounded. And sometimes a Stolperstein, a stumbling stone, reminds us that the past is sometimes still in the foreground.

Looking back, the last days in Madrid felt like an attempt to capture, encapsulate, and to seal off the entire experience. There were lists of things we wanted to do and the things that we left undone so we had a reason to come back. But there was also a slight feeling of desperation, of recognition that this might be the last time we experience something in just this way, and this might be the last time we see these people.

Of course, claro, nada está garantizado en la vida. Nothing is guaranteed in life, and gratitude is a kind of mindful exercise in recognizing the gift of time, relationships, experiences. Things that can’t really be taken away like other material objects, caps blown away by the wind, lost water bottles, forgotten scarves. But memory fades, and just like language is lost if it isn’t used, faces fade too. As I write this I can really see the desperation in this exercise.

In the beginning of the trip, I tried to create some kind of ethical framework of exchange, which in many ways could be reduced to a justification for me to take pictures of people without feeling too exploitative.

Why do you want to take my picture? Because you helped us, porque nos ayudaste. I haven’t yet figured out if that’s any different than, because I feel grateful for the gifts you shared: your time, your friendship, your love of cooking food, your care in preparing cortados, your patience in finding the right gelato flavor for this occasion.

It likely also goes deeper than that, my desire to want to remember, or what Speed Levitch said in his Richard Linklater Waking Life soliloquy about not forgetting. Now that I am not forgetting it by googling the transcript, the important excerpts go:

"On this bridge," Lorca warns, "life is not a dream. Beware. And beware. And beware." And so many think because Then happened, Now isn't … Before you drift off, don't forget. Which is to say, remember. Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting. Lorca, in that same poem said that the iguana will bite those who do not dream. And as one realizes that one is a dream figure in another person's dream, that is self awareness.

I feel compelled to say that Federico García Lorca was a Spanish artist and poet from Granada who went to school in Madrid and was best pals with Salvador Dalí. The creativity burned bright and hot, but when those relationships began to fall apart along with his emotional well-being, his family sent him to New York.

When he returned to Spain in 1930, political turmoil was beginning to churn. He lost his life in 1936 when fascist forces captured and killed him. The Franco era report that came out 30 years later rationalized the outspoken writer’s killing because of his socialist, Freemasonry, and homosexual activities.

This Lorca biography doesn’t have a lot to do with my portraits, except for Speed Levitch’s words that stuck with me for a quarter century, when I was thinking about remembering, or not wanting to forget. How rare those collaborations, interactions, relationships, and shared experiences can be, and how easily they can be lost to language, or state-dependent remembrances. Or simply to the fallibility of memory and consciousness. How temporary and improbable these experiences really are. How quickly people can disappear. Self awareness that everyone is a dream figure in another person’s dream.

Talking to my dad recently, in our recurring theme on the subjective perception of time and ineffable experience of reality, we tried to remember a Yiddish saying about that phenomenon. We consulted my mother, who reminded us that her father used to tell my dad, “life is short.” Then we landed on this partial quote from Sholom Aleichem: Life is a dream for the wise.

My photography has always operated inside that tension between dream-life and remembrance. Trying to simultaneously experience a moment and hold onto something that is already slipping away. Is that why I’ve always taken photographs, to remember? I think probably often, yes. I cite, to remember, to memorialize, in a lot of my statements and rationalizations. It’s a part of my tradition too, my collective unconscious, en mi inconsciente colectivo.

Zachor, remember, remembrance. Remember the Sabbath, remember the Exodus, remember, remember…or never forget. Besides the separation of the mundane from the special to create holiness, remembering—part of the code for the continuity of culture—that’s right up there.

That’s how remembrance becomes a sacred act. To remember is to resist oblivion: tell the story again in an unbroken chain of story tellers, ad infinitum; say the names again on this day; revisit the memory palace before its flattened by the tides. Photography, journaling, ritual, prayer—all variations on the same human impulse. I can sense this is meaningful, important, essential, don’t let this be lost. Help us find a way back here.

It’s universal in a lot of cultures, but with Jewish people it’s how we name-phrase our dearly departed. Zichrono Livracha, of blessed memory. You’ll see it abbreviated as Z”L on gravestones or in homages after the name of the person.

The flip side, oyf simkhes, the participation in true states of joy, like attending a wedding, baby naming, or b’nai mitzvah, means we should express gratitude for being together for joyous occasions, for simchas, not just for visiting the sick or funerals. Live life before it’s too late. Carpe Diem.

There’s a prayer and a communal meditation for that, the Shehecheyanu. A joyous blessing recited to express gratitude for reaching new, special, or first-time experiences. It thanks our Creator for granting life, sustaining us, and allowing us to reach this specific moment. Bringing us to this season, higiyanu laz'man hazeh.

And that is really all we could ever hold. Este momento presente. This present moment. ¡Qué bendición! What a blessing!

I don’t know the process for becoming a patron saint, but San Isidro is Madrid’s. There is something that has to do with his young son falling into a well and, after praying, the well miraculously floated Isidro’s son to the top, where they pulled him out unharmed. El Pozo del Milagro, the Well of the Miracle.

The patron saint has many names: Isidro de Merlo y Quintana, his birth name; San Isidro Labrador, the laborer. He is a saint for the people. He worked for Iván de Vargas, a caballero, a knight and significant landowner since reclaiming Toledo and its northern rural outpost, Mayrit, with King Alfonso VI of León and Castile from the Almoravids in the late 11th century. Los Vargas was one of the first Christian noble families to settle there in those first decades after the new regime.

We saw the well at the Museo de San Isidro, which was the former home of San Isidro’s employer, Iván de Vargas, along with other facts and artifacts about Madrid’s founding. Isidro lived there too and his room is now a chapel. This house was built on the site of the old Muslim citadel, and even now it retains Mozarabic architecture and decorations.

The museum does more than remember the history of the first generation of Christian madrileños transforming the frontier into the center; it goes back a little further. Forty thousand years ago our Neanderthal ancestors were hunting mammoths here. The museum, located in La Latina, has teeth and bones of both humans and mammoths collected from the surrounding area, including the field where the San Isidro festival takes place, just across the river in Carabanchel.

These are the two sites of the miracles of San Isidro, and together they make up a founding narrative for Madrid as we know it today. The first was when María and Isidro’s son, Illán, fell into the well. They fetched Isidro from the fields, rushed back to the well, and he prayed. The water rose up with child on top: God delivered their son. A miracle.

The second happened later in the fields. The noble caballero Iván de Vargas became dehydrated, suffering from heatstroke. Isidro struck the ground with his staff, and a spring bubbled up to provide water and save his employer’s life.

During the festival, when we visited the fairgrounds outside the chapel at the Pradera de San Isidro, volunteers from the parish were filling plastic cups with water from this same spring. Crowds bellied up to the tables to get a cup and drink. We got some, and it was refreshing.

The Festival de San Isidro is Madrid’s spring feria, a spring fair during the first couple of weeks in May. For us, it was a bittersweet time. For one thing, it wasn’t raining anymore and the weather was getting warm. Sweet. But our time in Madrid was concluding on the same date as the festival. The last day of San Isidro was our last day overseas.

The poignant reminder of the shortness of time truly began to strike at our hearts with about six weeks left. Semana Santa was coming up and then we looked at the calendar after Holy Week to see when we might be able to take more classes. No time. Visitors were coming, one more overnight trip to Barcelona, back to Madrid with more visitors, and then two more days: pack it up. No more time for weeks of Spanish instruction.

We had a moment where we thought about scrambling to extend our visas, which we learned we could do as students through our school, with their help. But that rule, to extend a stay while you were already in the country, was going away May 1. So instead of taking the last weeks and days of our time and hanging them with the uncertainty of staying, going, staying longer, we opted for a frame shift. Gratitude.

Could we have stayed longer? Yes. Did we want to? Yes. Could we have managed the logistics of Spanish bureaucracy? Maybe—we had tried and lost before with our first visa attempt, but with the help of the school’s administration, better odds. Had we spent a substantial amount of time doing the things we wanted and set out to do? Yes. Was it enough? If we wanted it to be, it could be.

So every time we experienced the fleeting nature of time, counting the days like sands in the hourglass, we interrupted our pity-party mindset. Instead of “only six weeks left, boo hoo”—wait a minute. If we told anybody that we were spending six weeks in Madrid, they would say, OMG, that’s a long time! You are so lucky. What a blessing. It’s true, Bonnie and I agreed.

Never mind that we had sabbaticals that allowed us to travel, to pursue curiosity, research, ask questions, learn more, for the entire fifteen-week semester. Each remaining week, day, hour, minute became its own miracle.

Only three weeks before we go back home. You get to stay in Spain for three weeks!?

Only ten days? Ten glorious days in Madrid!

Two nights left. Heavy heart. Reframe: two nights in Madrid during the spring feria! ¡Qué suerte!

So that last week, those last few days, were spent taking care of loose ends, but also spending time like an internet listicle: top ten things to do with 48 hours in Madrid, personal edition. We hung out with old school buddies. Saw the neighborhoods we had not yet walked through. Squeezed in as many museum visits as would fit between meals. Stayed out late walking around after dinner. Bought soccer jerseys from street vendors in Plaza Mayor.

That recognition, that frame shift, turned the feeling from bitter to sweet. And even now, when I remember those bright days and cobblestone nights with nostalgia, it turns a smile up on my face. In those last days the city was literally a festival.

Even though we couldn’t fit a week’s schedule of classes, we still went out on the weekly cultural excursion with the intrepid Luismi, our field trip leader from the Cronopios language school. We went to Parque de San Isidro, where about a dozen of us learned the very Madrid-specific lingo of the city and the festival. Dabuten, so cool, slang. Castizo, proudly, deeply Madrid. A mini, which is actually a pretty big one-liter cup of beer!

We sat high up on the hill overlooking the valley, soaking up the sun and the festive churn below. The ladies, chulapas, with their mantones, bufandas, the carnations, los claveles: two red if you’re married, two white if you’re single, one of each if you’re engaged. And just one red if you are a fair maiden, a young girl. And the gentlemen, chulapos, with matching vests and caps.

It was a street fair that was familiar to me from Louisville, more like the St. Rafael carnival or State Fair midway. Food, fried, street vendors. Here the fried donuts, rosquillas, come in four flavors. Las listas, the smart ones, are really the best, glazed with lemon icing.

And as the day wound down and we felt that it was our time to go, we said goodbye to our people, really for the last time. We walked up the Pradera, finding our route to get back home across the river, from the meadow back to the city center. The energy, compressed and lively along the strip, was beginning to diffuse, the soundscape opening up, music and laughter fading into the evening air. Families pushed strollers. The air grew cooler, more space opened between people, wind lapping at the edges of our shirts like flags. We were leaving, and it was still a miracle that we had been there.

Every Sunday in Madrid is a special event, 9am–3pm. It’s not just a flea market or bazaar, but a real site of cultural exchange. El Rastro has been ongoing since the 15th century, when it was related to the tannery–slaughterhouse–butcher economy.

El Rastro refers to the trail—the trail of blood from carting recently slaughtered animal parts from one neighborhood to another. But also the entrails, as at various points in the 500-year history, the less desirable but still nutritious parts of the animals were made available to the less affluent. Madrid tries to take care of its people.

In more modern times, the market has come to sit on a hill defined by four metro stations: La Latina, Tirso de Molina, Puerta de Toledo, and Embajadores. This is at the bottom of Centro, south and a little to the west. We could walk from our place on Atocha about 20 minutes through Embajadores to get to the northeastern edge.

There is one main, steep street that forms the central artery, one big hill, Calle de la Ribera de Curtidores, Tanner’s Road. It becomes so packed with tourists and everyone else by 11am that it is practically impassable. But lively, very lively!

That main drag on the hill has more standard fare: touristic socks, oven mitts, mass-produced kitchen things, caps and hats, some used clothing like fútbol jerseys and overpriced vintage denim. It’s all outside, a limit of 3,500 stalls, except for some of the storefronts on the side streets, which make it a sidewalk sale and invite people inside.

For more interesting items like appropriately—or underpriced—used denim, cameras, electronics, antique hardware, old keys, paintings, prints, antiques, furniture, live succulents, and less mass-produced tchotchkes, you have to go to the sides and to some other squares, like the Plaza de General Vara del Rey, a spot where we almost lived. It has a lot of the furniture and antiques. Bottom of the hill, closer to Puerta de Toledo metro, Plaza del Campillo del Mundo Nuevo, has a crustier vibe with old posters, vinyl, and toys. I think this is where I was tempted to buy a thrashed guitar.

It’s also a brunch scene, a place to meet up with friends and wander together. You’ll probably need the nourishment anyhow if you cross or become entangled in Calle de la Ribera de Curtidores. That’s a major expenditure of energy, so you’ll need to find a bocadillo, a toasted sandwich, a cortado, or a pincho de tortilla, a slice of omelette.

The first weekend we went, I was on a mission to find some kind of art for our bare living room walls. Success. For 5€ I found “silk,” 1.5 meters square. So many choices: wildflowers, a Garden of Earthly Delights, El jardín de las delicias by El Bosco, or the nice botanical print that ended up in our living room. Another trip I saw a lovely distressed Levi’s trucker jacket.

When we went back two weeks later, it was still there and I bought it for 20€. A backpack for Sarina for school. It needed to be navy blue or black to match her school uniform. Another time the sun was in my eyes, so for 5€ I bought a plaid gorra, a driver’s cap, which I later gifted to my nephew Leo. I also got my Borsalino fedora from vintage resale shop on the edge on Calle de Embajadores, just south of the plaza de Cascorro, an official border of el Rastro.

Keychains galore. In our latter days, we felt as if we needed trinkets for our homies back in the EEUU. I still carry my navy, red, and gold striped keychain for our house key, as I did in Madriz.

The people-watching is exquisite because it is a blend of communities and peoples: tourists and new madrileños, vendors and store owners and hipsters, families with children, grandparents, and the curious. One Sunday, a man older than me with a big camera asked if he could take my photo.

It was a fascinating exchange, partly because I confessed to him: that I was also a photographer; a doppelgänger for Ramón María del Valle-Inclán; descended from Jewish families. Of Valle-Inclán—for whom Ramón shared his first name—he excitedly pulled out his phone and began scrolling for photos. His family was from Cuba, and his grandparents hosted Valle-Inclán—he showed a photo of my doppelgänger with his ancestors.

Of my Jewish ancestry, he expressed admiration, what my people endured and their contributions to culture and society. I can’t take all of the credit for that, but I thanked him for his support.

In researching and remembering for this article, I came across a citation of one of my cherished authors, Hans Magnus Enzensberger (HME). He wrote a lot and for a long time about the power and potential of new media, but in 1987 he wrote Ach Europa!, aka “Europe, Europe: Forays into a Continent” in the 1989 English translation. He echoes an idea that I’ve also heard from Franco, that Spain is not really part of Europe, but more a part of North Africa.

There’s a point to be made about that, since it’s much harder to cross the Pyrenees Mountains (ask Walter Benjamin) than it is to cross the 14km of water between Spain and Morocco at the Straits of Gibraltar. Anyhow, Enzensberger is attributed on the Wikipedia page for El Rastro and in many blogs for saying, “El Rastro is the final border between Europe and Africa.” Which is a nice way to say it’s an eclectic convergence of the curious.

But I couldn’t let Wikipedia and a dozen blogs repeat that imprecise phrase, “final border between Europe and Africa.” I went to the library and picked up the book. Page 231 from the chapter Spanish Shards, 1985: “The Rastro is the souk, the grand bazaar, of the capital. This is where Europe ends.”

For HME to use the words souk and bazaar is to conjure the etymology of Arabic and Persian, respectively, for public market. Yes, okay, Wikipedians, Europe and Africa, if we think of land masses—the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb, or Morocco, north-south. But think of civilizations the way the Phoenicians did: by water and the seas. Then Spain is the final border between Europe and the Middle East. Yes, Africa—North Africa—but also West and South Asia. Persia and Arabia, the east, and Iberia, the Algarve, al-garb, the west, in Arabic. The western most point of the Iberian peninsula, from where Columbus launched.

Before we left Madrid, I found an Instagram account, @todorastro, everything Rastro. The creator, photographer Alejandra Seijas, finds the coolest people and does a short interview about where they are from, their style of dress, where they got their pieces. Sometimes it’s more than fashion, sometimes it’s music, sometimes the curious wares, but mostly, just like everything Rastro, it’s más que un mercado, it’s more than a market, it’s a cultural exchange. Y muy de Madriz.

When we first started looking for an apartment in Madrid, the search was harder than expected. Part of it was simple sticker shock. Madrid had become far more expensive than we had imagined from preliminary research. Especially true for a family trying to rent for several months instead of a quick holiday stay. Part of it was not knowing the rules, or whether there even was a right way to rent an apartment as a foreigner arriving for a temporary life. And we were searching in the inflated post-Covid digital nomad market.