Madrid, Waking | Why We Travel

The latest in my Why We Travel series takes you into the intimate moments before a city is ready to reveal itself to you. Before the sights and sounds surface, before its citizens start to mindlessly pass you, into the innocent way it wakes. This was the magic that I was immersed in every morning as I commuted an hour outside the city while teaching English in Madrid. I’ve never been a morning person, except for in 2013, on a commuter train through the Eastern plains of Spain. Come with me, through these words I wrote during one such commute.

I get to see Madrid each morning just as it’s waking. A city so captivating, that mix of dominating modernism with unwavering tradition. I see it at its most vulnerable. The sunrise hardly beginning to warm the sky over the mountains in the east as the rest of the metropolis lays in soft darkness, waiting. The plants sit still in the windows of the flower shop, actively dormant. The startled baker picks up a pile of baguettes he dropped along the sidewalk, brushes them off, then leaves his delivery before the cafe has its first customer. At the coffee stand in the station, sparse customers ask quietly for a cup before boarding the train. But for most, we wait until we reach our destination, preferring the slow calm waking of early dawn over a caffeinated jolt, letting the sunlight warm us and the city as one before we let substance, noise, bother consume us. As it slowly peaks over the horizon the sounds crescendos, the pace quickens, the Madrid at dawn bows graciously to the Madrid of morning and we all inhale as we are enveloped into this charming, relentless city.