Reconsidering the "24-hour city"

A little while back, I compared Madrid to NYC, and called it a "24 hour city". I am not sure that is entirely accurate. Madrid certainly has a very active nightlife-- I can remember wandering by a discotheque very early one morning near my grandmother's house (7:30 AM), and seeing people just finishing their evenings.

However, in other ways, Madrid is not nearly the "always open" place that NYC, or really any modern US city is. From a practical perspective, I enjoy the way the crass commercialism and rapacious struggle for capital accumulation has made the American business cycle a 24/7 quest to lure one into spending money. Late-night grocery stores, fast-food, and Walmart can all be very useful. In Europe, not so much. The only business open past 9pm are restaurants, bars, and the all-night pharmacies (and Spanish pharmacies are just pharmacies, not mini-supermarkets a la Walgreen's). This is to be expected when businesses close daily from 2pm-4pm so that everyone can go home for lunch. At the end of the day, I expect this makes for a much healthier consumer culture, and a better work schedule for clerks and shop-owners. But you'd better make sure you have everything you need for the evening by 8pm.

So this European business pattern rained on my plans today. I left the apartment intending to go shopping at a number of used book stores. Unfotunately, I made it to only one of them before they all closed for the day at 2pm. Because god-forbid the owner of a bookstore lose his saturdat afternoon working.

So instead I went to a couple of museums. I visited the Museo Arqueológico Nacional and the Biblioteca Nacional, which share a building on the Plaza de Colón (pictured above). The BNE is a fantastic library with a rather goofy museum charting, awkwardly, the history of the book. I hate to say it, but it was a waste of time. The MAN, on the other hand is a fine museum, currently undergoing a major facelift. Unfortunately, that means that about half the exhibits were in storage. I got to see the famous Dama de Elche and the absolutely terrific Tesoro de Guarazzar (more on this later), but a lot of the medieval stuff was not displayed.

I did get to do a brief bit of book shopping at the Feria del Libro in El Retiro, the world's biggest book fair (pictured below).