Carabanchel

My first step is to look for an internet spot to receive my instructions. The members of the readers’ forum had promised me to compose a list of the bars I should unconditionally visit in Madrid in those few days while working in the National Library. I get in touch with them in the quarter of Carabanchel, in an Ecuadorian internet locutorio that has established an exemplary internationalist brotherhood with the proletariat of a large number of the countries of the world. Half of the room is occupied by a Columbian food store in which the wares are not arranged by sort, but by countries of origin. They line up on the shelves under handwritten shelf-marks like in a good library, in order the guest worker should not browse for long: Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, Poland, Romania... The countries known by me are unequivocally represented by wares in lack of which the guest workers of that country are orphan kids: for example mineral water of Borsec and poteen of Braşov for the Romanian immigrants who are just illegally dismantling and selling as Francoist souvenir the iron grids of the once notorious, today abandoned prison of Carabanchel, thirty euros a piece of an ell. “Does it really sell?” I ask of the little round Columbian seller, with a hint to the water of Borsec. “Like hot cakes!” he answers with a large smile.

Carabanchel
Carabanchel
Carabanchel
Carabanchel
Carabanchel
Carabanchel
Carabanchel