Sweet Snippits of Old and a Cup with a Spoon

The sun bore down on the sidewalks and streets with the white hot light that it burns in winter to fool the eye into believing it's warm while the wind numbs your ears and makes your nose run freely. It reflected off the tarmac and stone, both wet from the melting of the last night's snowfall. White shine and glare and cloud, blue and cold breeze, and city. I stood in the middle of it wondering how best to spend the idle time between classes, the middle of the city in the middle of the country in the middle of the day.
I stepped underground and felt a sweeping tide of revulsion. Hurried back into the light and blue and brisk. Climbed off the grand paseo up into a little shaded calle to walk its length and plan my next urbanscape article.

Conde Duque, between Francoist Argüelles and Revolutionist Malasaña, where a scene of boutiques bars and cafés emerges between dodgy little squares and crooked little streets to captivate and service Madrileños bored or otherwise repulsed by the familiarity of more popular barrios. Cañas in La Latina have lost their allure. My boots slosh presh in the melting snow while we dodge each other on the narrow sidewalk and I step down and sprap tip in the puddles tween cobbles all over the one lane street like pools of light blue, reflecting the color of the sky on shaded pink and creamy gold walls. Few cars were passing and people crossed as they pleased and I watched it all with my head on a swivel until I remembered a place I'd crossed by before that boasted sixteen sabores of hot drinking chocolate and lo it was there and to it I stepped.

I say drinking chocolate because it's not hot chocolate like I know from sled days and numb noses in grade school breaks. It's more like a chocolate bar turned hot drink, thick and rich. It's actually how I'm told chocolate was taken, the only way they knew how, back when Europeans first brought it back and didn't know how to make it solid with wax for us to eat like cookies. So in I went, down three little steps into the small white room, bright with the blue and the white from outside. Three tables and two coolers, one long and one tall, where behind a man stood, himself quite small. Short and balding with mustache and light eyes and wearing a white coat like doctor or scientist of sweets. We spoke for a moment, sorting flavor and size and he turned and went to a small tub mixing burnt umber viscosity. Next he put before me a small cup on a saucer with a petite plastic spoon and asked me to sit if it would please me. While I sipped the delicious drink, whose richness and thickness and sweetness are all best left to the imagination and palate, I looked around at black and white photos from the Madrid of old times with coaches and trolleys when everyone wore a hat. This man wasn't there then but maybe his father was, or that man's father. Same white coat, same kind eyes and thick mustache. Same little cup on a saucer with a small spoon that clicked tick tick against its walls while the simple hot liquid chocolate and sugar drink was poured into and sipped out of by smiling faces of people unfettered. At least that's how I believe they were. I imagine them imagining the chocolate, wanting it and going to get it, seeking the assistance of their local chocolate expert, the man whose life was built on pouring those little cups and providing that treat that everyone in the barrio loved him for.

It's the capital of the country that people say is at the forefront of contemporary cuisine. They're renowned for their infrastructure and hired the world over the bring steel and bright colors to the fabrics of cities. In one of the largest cities in the continent oft-considered to define and provide the world with avant-garde everything, it's a treat indeed to sit with delight and let the chocolate expert serve me a small cup with its saucer and spoon, while the world rushes by slosh sprish whip in the clamour of twentyten.