Dateline Madrid: Cinco de Mayo special
Spring, El Parque del Oeste, La Rosaleda, 7:39 p.m.
Madrileños are incapable of letting things pass without comment, even if what passes by is banal enough: a person, jogging, or pretending to jog, or jogging to pretend. ¡Mira como anda! The park as contemplative refuge is a foreign concept, which is why if you get up from a patch of grass in Madrid you will likely have cigarette butts stuck to your, er, butt. If you are in search of some quiet space to save yourself from writing anything as awful as the previous sentence, don't live here.
Or live here and complain, which is what the locals do ( I am a good assimilator). If you want to visit 
like a local, enjoy the following: tinto de verano, aka lazy man's sangria (equal parts cheap red wine and lemon soda served in a collins glass over ice with a slice of lemon); anglophone cultural events in small numbers (Seamus Heaney reading in the Circulo de Bellas Artes to no more than 150 people); jamón ibérico (a given); puentes (3-day weekends which seem to increase exponentially from Easter until August's full stop); and the loveliest garden in all of what this writer has seen of Europe, La Rosaleda.
Most of the flowers are in bloom and when I entered today there was even someone who kept stopping (really) to smell the roses. A young guy wearing what looked to be dancer's clothes (black tank top, striped jazz pants) took his time walking between the different floral varieties and bending over to smell each one. Final flower count: fifteen minutes, 32 sniffs. Plus my four, out of inspiration and curiosity. Can you smell the difference? In Spring, even with a stuffy nose and mala leche, you can.
-Kathleen Heil 9:28 p.m. Monday night near Plaza España. Madrid