By asthaa
There’s a precious little bookstore/café in Madrid called “La Fugitiva,” or the fugitive. It’s up the street from the famous Reina Sofia museum on Calle Santa Ysabel (yes, Isabel with a “y”). The wooden floors squeak as you walk in. The door needs an extra push to close completely. Antique wooden toys decorate the store windows along with a collection of works on philosophy and a seasonal selection of Christmas books. The little tables and chairs around the shop don’t match and no customer gets the same coffee mug. The guys who work there are friendly and seem to be able to offer recommendations to even the most obscure reading questions. The walls are filled with posters for art shows coming and past, lectures, and offers of dance and language classes. There are some corners where little flakes of paint fall in your lap if your chair happens to scratch the wall. If you come into chat with a friend, it’s quiet and easy to sip coffee and share a muffin in peace. If you’re there to study, there are enough people searching through books, working or chatting so that it’s not too silent, but people keep voices low so that it’s conducive to writing borderline major papers. This quiet and lovely little shop I discovered a month ago upon recommendation of my host mom is my favorite place to study outside my home and I only have eight days left to enjoy it. The woes of the sun setting on my semester here in Madrid.
I begin this post with La Fugitiva because I go there less to look through books than to study these days. Along with trying to take full advantage of my time left here and checking things off my “to do” list, I am busy these days studying for finals. When people discuss their study abroad experiences they don’t really mention the studying for exams part. If focusing during midterms was difficult, it requires a lot more energy this time around to work on a ten-page paper in Spanish. I hope to see all the friends I’ve made one last time before we say to each other “until, the next time – possibly on a different continent!” There are a couple last minute gifts to be bought, one or two more expositions to be squeezed in, and quite a few more laughs to be had. I keep on imagining what saying goodbye to my favorite professors, Spanish friends, and host family will be like, and when I imagine the glass ball that says my future, all I see is tears and hugging. Yet, before all of this I must focus on the concept of movement and time in baroque Spanish art. I’ll talk and probably know more about goodbyes next week.