El Rastro

Americans were panicking, small children were screaming, and everyone was packed in tight with manic eyes. I had a weird inception moment where I just saw sardines eating sardines eating sardines eating sardines. I was bobbing up and down and weaving about, trying to avoid being taken out by the woman dishing out baguettes to her family with the javelin arm of Fatima Whitbread. It was my second day in Madrid. I had come in search of an authentic Madrid experience, and bloody hell had I found it.

I had been told that the two main options for Sunday morning were either to follow the holy and attend Mass, or follow the Masses and go to El Rastro, the holy-grail of flea-markets. Not after anything too intense, I had chosen the latter and, well, clothes.

It had started off well enough. I had journeyed with the hordes on the metro, been swept along the streets merrily amongst them - our footsteps rumbling like the rolling R, feeling quite Spanish and very smug. I had enjoyed the rainbow array of silks and tie-dyes, been amused at the stall with extensive supplies of gas-masks, the grumpy old men with an army of dolls, and the old man with a hundred red screwdrivers. But that was before. Before it began to actually get busy, as the internet had warned me, and before this. Before Bar Santurce.

Bar Santurce: a tapas bar specialising in grilled sardines and beer. Where one gnaws on whole sardines between glugs of beer, and disposes of the bones by throwing them on the floor with wild abandon! You stand (and eat) squished up against a bar, much as you would expect to spend a Friday night in an English pub, except of course it was only noon, and on a Sunday morning. If a Sunday morning tells you anything about a culture, I thought to myself, then the Spanish are fucking nutcases.

Those lazy irritable thoughts had began to shimmy to the surface of my mind though. You know the ones. Is this really worth the hassle? Wouldn't I genuinely rather be sipping on a cup of tea, eating scrambled eggs? But then I bit into my first sardine, and, honestly, I almost had to hold on to the bar it was so bloody good. They were made up of the kind of richness you can taste in your ears.

I began to embrace the frenzy, lose my British inhibitions. I didn't nibble, I devoured, I destroyed, I ravished, I relished the barbaric pleasure of tossing fish bones and dirty napkins willy-nilly about me, amidst Viking gulps of beer - I was - I was interrupted. By that screaming child, now somewhere near my knee.

To be fair to him, I could only imagine the carnage of experience from down at that height: the echoing raucousness of human feeding-time, ricocheting off the swirling, froth-like tiles for as far as his eye could see; greasy napkins snowing down and sardine carcasses falling from the sky all around, brains hanging out, eyes still staring. Christ I was only just about coping, and I had beer. Snapping out of my orgasmic barbaric moment, I suddenly felt a bit sick.

Glitter had turned to smudged mascara, and I couldn't breath for fish-fumes.

I jostled my way out, apologising to the small boy with my eyes, who had now grown rather frantic, and emerged out into the air. Although less pungent with dead animals of the sea, it was absolutely rammed with people, stalls, live animals. I almost tripped over a woman pushing a cat in a trolly cart.

See here's the thing, where stopping for a bite to eat would normally provide respite, at El Rastro it is more of an osmosis. An osmosis of chaos. I couldn't appreciate its beauty anymore, I needed to get out.

I struggled back past the array of fabrics, the tie-dye man in his tie-dye world, the gas-masks, the doll army. Children, grandparents, teenagers, demonstrative lovers, dour sellers, shouting parents.

I eventually succeeded in ejecting myself out of the thing, like a teeny tiny sliver of soap I shot out through a small gap in El Rastro's fingertips. More and more Madridians surged down the side-streets, in all their exclaiming, gesturing glory they marched confidently into the fray. I could only admire them, for a short moment, before continuing on my flapping way up the hill, to a small cafe I had spied behind a flower stall.

As the cappuccino drew bitter squiggles down my throat, I began to relax. From behind some sunflower petals, and at a safe distance, I peeked out at El Rastro monster. It was sensational, really. I looked on at the wonderful, vibrant, colourful, exhilarating fervour of the thing and Jesus Christ, I thought to myself...

Next Sunday I think I'll go to Mass instead.