Saturday, January 5, 2008

We spent most of Saturday in the Salamanca district, Madrid's toniest shopping and residential area. Madrid used to be a walled city, but when the walls were pulled down in the nineteenth century, the wealthy immediately moved to this area, which was just outside the former walls. There's some derogatory term for the people who live here, something like the English "yuppie" but I can't remember it. It generally resembles a cross between Manhattan's Upper East Side and Rodeo Drive. Somchai didn't take his camera around because we were trying to blend in with the yuppy-equivalents, but I found a few pics on the web, mostly of the business district here. Weirdly, the incredibly ornate building you see in the one photo is the post office.




2 comments:

Anonymous said...

OMG....it's so funny you would say that. when kendra and i visited madrid with our friend arturo (who is really from california but spent about 6 months in madrid just after being born) she and i were all jazzed about that building, thinking it was really impressive and ornate. Arturo was appalled with us for apparently acting like tourists and taking a picture of it, dismissing us with a truly bitchy "it's just the post office, every city has them".

bitch.
Madrid was the low point of our trip.

Somchai and Brian said...

As we discussed, I don't think Madrid is bad, it's just not immediately loveable. But I agree it's not one of Europe's top 5. And I don't know if you went to the Rastro Flea Market, the subject of an upcoming post, but that's in Madrid and I do think that could be the worst thing in europe, not the worst market, but the worst thing.