Walking through the center of Madrid, the artistic and historical monuments almost jump at you as you turn the corner to a new statue or museum or public garden. Amazed by the knowledge surrounding me, I could not have found a better time to enroll myself in an art history class. Once back in the classroom, our first task was to study a specific place/architecture located around the city. I was assigned Plaza Mayor, the central public plaza of Madrid, and while I couldn’t believe my luck with receiving such a monumentally important and well-known place, I quickly realized that I would need to memorize a LOT of information. After studying the material for a few days and practising my speech, our professor led us to part two of the assignment: a field trip to the city center where we would navigate ourselves from place to place reciting what we had learned about the baroque architecture or the hooves of the horse statue. As we came upon Plaza Mayor, I proclaimed my piece, in broken Spanish, about the history of the plaza as a former site for festivals, soccer matches, executions, and the largest market in Spain for many years. I spoke about the fires that had once tried to decimate this building, and the statue of King Phillip III standing tall in the center before we moved along to the next monument. After two sessions of two hours each we finally made it through our tour of 30+ locations all clustered around the center. I could not believe the concentration of beautiful buildings next to huge fountains, each with more history than the last, that we had seen in such a small plot of walkable space. I began to recognize too that the people living there had such a clear appreciation of the history that surrounded them. 

I learned quickly that the locals were more than happy to reorient lost tourists or foreign students; along with their helpful directions, the “madrileños,” or people from Madrid, loved to offer up a fun fact of the nearby statue or a history lesson from the temple up ahead. I was surprised by the attention of the locals there as well as their education on the spaces around them. I was raised in a suburb twenty minutes outside of Boston and I still relied on google maps to get from Newbury Street to Faneuil Hall. Moreover, it wasn’t until a friend from Mexico visited me in Boston, and we took the Freedom Trail tour, that I learned the history and landmarks of my own city. Madrid was hugely different and I was repeatedly impressed by the genuine curiosity of the locals to get to know more about the people and places surrounding them. This lesson was something I hoped to take with me throughout my own time abroad and in future travels. I aimed never to rush past a museum or monument without at least a preliminary search into its history. The love of learning I gained from Madrid helped me to feel more comfortable in a new city and reach out to other people for directions or a quick conversation. Finally, thanks to this progress in Madrid, I found myself bringing my visiting parents and friends around museums, parks, and plazas; and in turn, when they would ask questions that I couldn’t answer we would learn more about it together. This curiosity, and attention to detail, brought locals and tourists together as they learned from one another and learned together.