Tag Archives: europe

Europe 2026, Part VII: Split Wisdom

This is the seventh and final post in a series that began here.

I head home via Dublin, with a pause long enough only for a single Guinness. Two weeks of solo travel is enough, and I am ready to be back among my people, enjoy shared meals and more robust conversation in my own language. But as my flight soars over Greenland, provides that God’s-eye view of its snow-capped peaks and fjords, I find a powerful release, that sense of being carried to an unknown realm. I will never lose my hunger for the world, in part because there will always be somewhere to go next.

After two weeks away I am happy to head home, toward a land where public bathrooms are free and the showers are not higher than the bathroom floor and where people actually believe in regular hydration. I am ready to stick to a single currency after revolving through lira and forints and korunas and euros. On the flip side, I will miss truly walkable downtowns and regular trains and people who are not degenerates enjoying open containers. The Europeans do leisure so much better than always-hustling Americans, make it a part of life rather than some sporadic eruptions of excess and self-care. A vacation in Europe, while itself a burst out in that tradition, makes it so much easier to internalize a pace, to recognize different possibilities for how to live.

My agenda over these two weeks underscored split identities. Istanbul is a living monument to the pulls between Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East, while Budapest finds itself in a tension between Europe and governance styles further east. Vienna strives to protect a cultural inheritance in a world with outside pressures; in a distinct way, so does Prague. Berlin was torn apart by calamitous conflict and now builds back, at once trying to remember and move forward. As someone who so often feels these different pulls, I am at home in these borderlands and tension-filled phases. I am split between a love for home and hunger for the world, a desire to stay in and write and a thirst to close down the party, to class it up at the opera or belly up to a basement bar, to draw strength from both reason and faith, to restore myself in both moments of solitude and by feeding off others’ energy. Over time I have learned to sit in this blurry zone, even revel in it, knowing a full life can have it all.

Traveling in Europe is an immersion in history, something that Americans like me, raised in a city where “old” means 1920 and cut off from drama by two great oceans, know only marginally. It is also a cautionary tale against wanting too much such history: Europe’s past is a story of a thousand tragedies, some of the sort that recur every generation or two and some on the scale of the greatest barbarity mustered by humans. As the Renaissance altarpieces and Gothic spires and mosaic saints remind us, we are a fallen race. These reminders have dual purposes, both cautionary and inspirational.

The continent is at a strange crossroads. The last people with living memory of World War II and firsthand knowledge of its brutality are fading away. With them goes a lived appreciation for the postwar miracle of Europe, those moments when a continent that had bloodied itself beyond belief for centuries before two epic orgies of destruction between 1914 and 1945 consciously turned away and, like Athens in the myth of the Oresteia, put aside its arms and deep passions and found a way to coexist in peace. Now, over time, one of humanity’s greatest innovations has been made boring and sometimes even cruel in its institutional, bureaucratized power. There are very reasonable worries about how Europe can hold up as it stops reproducing and as the world’s other powers play by different rules.

But great European cities also show the triumph of people who pour their souls into beauty, build things to last, and, when the inferno comes, rebuild, brick by painstaking brick. Europe’s power comes in its endurance. As China rises and Russia rediscovers some old muscles and the United States drifts off on its own strange path, Europe will need to find new ways to cultivate that old strength. I suspect that movement may need some doses of Charles de Gaulle or Otto von Bismarck instead of just a litany of small-state nationalists or milquetoast social democrats. Maybe it looks like Péter Magyar, firm in national pride but still within the bounds of a larger liberal project; it is much too early to put any stock in him. The divisions between Europe’s cultures, so often drifting toward Balkanization, make nothing easy. But I wouldn’t bet against some of the world’s most persistent nations and their recognition that, out of idealism or necessity, they need to present a somewhat united front. When at its best, the visions of life Europe can offer are the envy of the world, and I hope we Americans who venture across the pond can bring back some of those bits and apply its wisdom where we can.

One of the better pieces of advice I’ve ever received is to take two-week vacations. This is enough time to truly forget obligations back home for a moment and turn loose. It works. My time in Europe fills me with a vital force, ready to be tapped at any moment when the reserves run low. I can flash back to any one of them. The romance of Topkapi, even in Istanbul’s melancholy rain, and a golden cruise across the Bosphorus to open a door to a new continent. Delighted turns down back streets of Istanbul, on to another Byzantine wonder. Drifting away in a Hungarian bath. The toll of the Pummerin; Parsifal rising toward its apex. A beer-fueled crowd in a Prague bar, and a serendipitous stroll home when I’ve had my fill. A final currywurst and a walk through the Brandenburg Gate on my last night.

It is another very American belief to think that one of these bursts outward can lead toward epiphany; to think that, because of some moment of awe or insight, things will never be the same again. Schooled on Europe’s eternal cautionary tales, I am not so deluded. But they can be useful signifiers of change, or plant seeds that, someday, grow into something. Unexpected side streets appear, new gates open; some old ones close, too, perhaps never to be seen again, and that is alright. It is the task of the traveler to sit down back at home to sort through these interruptions of all routine and decide how to remember these journeys, and which ones may come next.

Europe 2026, Part V: Bohemian Rhapsody

This is the fifth post in a seven-part series that began here.

I board a train from Vienna and spend a pleasant hour in a compartment with a British family on Easter holiday who are also on their way to Prague. We change trains at Breclav just across the Czech border, and are separated as we wedge into a standing room only Czech train. The flatlands of the Carpathian Basin fade away and we rise up through the Bohemian Forest hill country, springtime bringing forth flowers and fresh leaves and sunlight dancing on the stream along the tracks. Czechia lacks Austria’s pristine order but remains well-kept and takes on a bucolic air, more integrated with nature than in the crisp Teutonic lines cross the border.

My first impression of Prague, after dumping my bag and walking to the Old Town Square two blocks from my unit, is one of overwhelming charm. It is dusk, and the light of day melts into the lit-up glow of historic buildings. An Easter market is open in the square, little huts all selling traditional Czech fare, and the trees are spangled in springtime ribbons while traditional choir music floats in on the light breeze. I piece together a meal from the various stands, sample a mulled wine, and drift from one corner to another. If Vienna is grand and stately, Prague takes the same instincts and scales them down to something heartwarming, a fairy tale Europe spared the worst of the World Wars and ready to welcome in the tourists.

And oh, does it welcome them. Prague is surpassed in tourism numbers only by the grandees of Europe like London and Paris, but is a fraction of their size. There is about as much Mandarin and English as Czech on the Old Town Square. I am warned by multiple people that British bachelor parties are known to swamp the city. At peak times, especially this holiday week, some of the streets around attractions are truly clogged; on main streets, there is a steady soundtrack of suitcase wheels trundling over cobblestones. At U Sudu, a marvelous cave complex of a bar, I wind up in a catacomb populated mostly by American and British college kids, here on some mix of study abroad and spring break trips, all experimenting with the heretofore forbidden pleasure of smoking indoors while drinking. Count on the Euros to give the Anglos a good crash course in hedonism.

In Prague I’ve taken a studio unit attached to a hostel, which, after a week of eating out on hearty central European fare, offers a welcome opportunity to pick up some basics from a Czech greengrocer (no signage in the windows necessary these days) and enjoy a few meals in. Consistent solitary eating out may be the weirdest part of traveling alone, though at least in Prague it is always accompanied by good beer, and a duck I have a few blocks off Old Town Square is the best of that bird I’ve ever had, melting away in my mouth.

Here in Czechia I have left the lands of imperial aspirants and entered a nation state pieced together out of a few old fiefdoms that shared a general language. The history of north central Europe is one of stray principalities and duchies and margraviates, electors of Holy Roman Emperors who only nominally led them. Eventually the Habsburgs chipped away at parts of this world, including Czechia, and nationalism rose alongside Napoleon; a subsequent century was defined by the rise, conquests, and struggles to contain Germany. Now, Czechia has reached a stable state: comfortably its own little self, at peace with the Germans and Austrians and buffered somewhat from Russian revanchism to the east. It is the most affordable city I visit on this trip (with an asterisk on Istanbul, which is cheap in some ways but extracts every last lira for its attractions). As a society it reminds me somewhat of Portugal: safe, stable, reasonable, and deeply rooted, therefore proving alluring to outsiders, trading wine and coastline for beer and woodlands.

The history here feels more obscure than in other parts of Europe. My knowledge of Bohemian kings is limited to a single Christmas carol about a good one who fed a peasant. The less good ones devised some impressive torture instruments, many of which are now on display at Prague Castle. As in Budapest, it’s less a castle than a sprawling complex, home to the presidential palace and some houses of worship along with old residences of kings and their attendant households. St. Vitus’ Cathedral is a gothic skyscraper with stellar stained glass, and the Czechs claim to have some of Moses’ staff; I wonder if they’ve compared notes with the Ottomans on this, as the Turks had the whole thing on display in Topkapi Palace.

The Castle is a worthy destination, but Prague is best experienced by idle strolling. Only in Venice and perhaps Madrid have I enjoyed more serendipitous walks around town. A planned venture to dinner or back for a nap turns into a meander of double the planned distance, because doesn’t think alley here look like it deserves an exploration? There are highlights: the Orloj astronomical clock tower on Old Town Square, the Franz Kafka head, the Powder Tower, the Eiffel Tower knockoff. On these warm spring days, Prague is most resplendent along the Vltava River, where a series of old stone bridges span its waters and boats ply about and a climb up into the park north of the center will take one to a giant metronome (the Czechs like their timekeeping devices) and a lovely terrace overwhelmed by Lithuanian basketball fans. To the east, I’m tipped off on the best hill to watch the sunset, not far from the weird tower with babies crawling up it, and I spend a happy evening among Czechs parked on blankets or in the grass, playing a little music and sipping a few drinks, pleased that spring has arrived.

Prague has made itself the city an American might dream of when coming to Europe. It is easy to forget this country was occupied by both Nazis and Soviets not that long ago, and underwent a divorce with Slovakia even after its triumphant Velvet Revolution. Unlike Budapest, it does not commemorate much of this history in monument in the city center, and Wenceslas Square, home to the protests of both the crushed Prague Spring and the successful revolt that toppled the communist regime, is largely torn up for reconstruction. The National Museum at the far end of the square tells some of this story in its modern wing and in a video display in a tunnel between buildings, but the great domed structure is more focused on a hall of gemstones and some more distant Czech founding fathers and, for some very deep history, the skeleton of Lucy the Australopithecus. Unlike the Hungarians, the Czechs appear content to nod to the past and move on, settle for their very large party in the present. For a few days, I am happy to kick back with a few pilsners and drift into its flow state, at one with it.

Part Six is here.

Spain 2025, Part IV: Against Dereliction

This is the fourth and final piece in a series that began here.

Sated on San Sebastián and ready to head the province of La Rioja, Andrew and I pick up a rental Cupra, which is Spain’s effort at a sporty car. We roll down a winding Basque tollway and up into the Cantabrian Mountains, where we seek out the Salto del Nervión. In wet times this is the highest waterfall in Spain, but today, it is just a pretty cliff. We chat with two older ladies who are taking a new car for a spin and get some sense of how it should look. The forests are lush, the karst formations jarring, and a few toros wander on to the road. We are back in rural Spain.

The number of elderly people who get out for this several-mile hike is a statement on Spanish superiority. The life expectancy in this country is 84, between second and sixth in the world depending on the source and inclusion of micro-states, even though booze consumption per capita is not low and smoking remains more ubiquitous than it is across the pond. The culprits would appear to include a lot of walking, a lot of olive oil, and a densely knit lifestyle that keeps people enmeshed in social networks long into old age. On the streets of Briones, the small town where we spend the next two nights, the average age appears to be about 70. But everyone is still shuffling about in their little friend groups, gathering on squares, no one warehoused away or struggling much beyond the inevitable physical toll. Almost no one is overweight, and the drinking seems like a steady social activity instead of a lonely or perpetual rush to blackout. There is an art to living well to a ripe old age here, and it comes not through self-denial but through keeping everything in its place.

Speaking of old, the Monasterio de San Millán qualifies: the twin monasteries of Suso and Yuso date to the sixth century, and we stop by Yuso, which is open for tours. The first recorded writing of Spanish (and of Basque) took place here, an attempt by a monk to bridge the Latin of the church and the vulgar Latin of a Visigoth-ruled Iberia around the year 1000. It is also home to one of the few complete sets of giant books of Gregorian chants for each day of the year, all stashed in a specially built chamber to control their humidity. Yuso’s 11 remaining Augustinians honor San Millán, a hero from that area who, like St. James along the nearby Camino de Santiago, got drafted into slaying some Moors on behalf of the Reconquista. A few pilgrims have made the side trip up here, including a Spaniard who started in Barcelona and a couple from Iowa City for whom we translate the tour. I feel the pull to don a pack and start walking.

As it is, however, driving around Rioja is a beautiful way to spend a few days. Roads swing their way around ridges and vineyards, a view off to the next hilltop town or castle always somewhere in sight. Clouds hang over the mountains to the north, much closer in person than they appear on a map, and the valley of the Ebro River drinks in the sunlight that filters through them. Briones, where we stay at a restored old stone manor named Santa Maria Briones, is a quiet hilltop town that feels frozen in a different era. Once upon a time it was an outpost in competition with the even larger castle across the Ebro in San Vicente de la Sonsierra, a contested zone between the kingdoms of Castile and Navarre. Now, it feels about as far from war as a place can be, basking in wine country sun as the bell on the great old church tolls out the quarter hours and its residents shuffle into their later days.

We are of course in Rioja to drink wine. We schedule three tastings, and the two on day one are contrasts in the scale available here. First we visit Miguel Merino, a small producer that we can walk to in Briones, where it’s just us and Lorena, one of the five people employed by this operation founded by an exporter and carried on by his son, relying on small batches and doing some experimentation as they get into many Michelin-starred restaurants. Later, we tour the Marqués de Riscal, an industrial-scale pillar of Rioja complete with a Frank Gehry hotel reminiscent of the Guggenheim, with a dash of wine purple added to the color palette here. The place is massive, a winemaking machine in full force, though the Marquis himself still sits in a corner with some friends sampling the product. Up in Haro, one of the larger towns in the region, we stroll past some of the other big Rioja names in its neighborhood of bodegas and do lunch on a convenient patio at Muga.

Our two nights here, meanwhile, are a marked contrast. On the first we eat at Allegar, the restaurant at Santa Maria Briones. Seventeen small plates come out through the course of the tasting menu, each with a major element from Rioja itself, along with wines to match. The three-hour tour is a culinary peak of a trip of nonstop great food. The next night, Andrew, a diehard fan of Tottenham Hotspur, must find a spot where we can watch Spurs’ Europa League final against Manchester United in Bilbao. We wind up in an Haro sports bar surrounded by large, booze-fueled Spanish men. They approve of our allegiances (“fook Mahnchesta”) and provide some high-fives when Spurs, one spot above relegation from the Premier League, improbably hold off United in a fairly disgusting soccer game. The aesthetics do not matter to Andrew, who is giddy, and I am amused as we watch Spanish sports talk into the night.

We have one final wine tasting on our way south back toward Madrid. When we pull up in the town of Sojuela, I’m worried I’ve made a mistake: the address for the Ojuel winery takes us to an unmarked door on a nondescript house in a town much further off the beaten path than Briones; the website is down and the phone number we have doesn’t work. But an ancient lady calls down to us from the upper floor and says someone is on her way, and before long Mila, the daughter-in-law of our greeter and the mother of the winemaker, is taking us on what is, by several orders of magnitude, the most memorable wine tasting tour I’ve ever had.

Mila takes us in her car up to a vineyard. This is an all-natural, all-organic operation, and all Ojuel bottles feature a different butterfly in honor of these pollinators. The contrast with the neighboring field is striking, these gnarled smaller vines with weeds tangled around their bases separated by a wall of vegetation from the monoculture beyond. (Grapes from the first few rows are sold to other winemakers who don’t care as much about purity, lest any pesticides have drifted in.) This plot’s history is deep, as a stone set here traces its owners back for generations and lists the varietals grown here, though two of the nine are not listed because they have been effectively lost to time. We learn of how Mila’s son Miguel did some oral history work, pulling out old wives’ tales of the supurao wine made for holidays and special celebrations in the youths of some village elders, and reproducing their methods by hanging grapes to dry to produce that rare beast, a delicious sweet wine.

For the tasting, Mila throws a few bottles in a tin pail and takes us on a walk to a couple tiny old bodegas dug into the hill, a gathering place where locals would create their own stocks back before mass commercialization, where people would gather for a few drinks in the climate-controlled holes slowly dug out with pickaxes. Those not associated with Ojuel are now rotting away, but these have been lovingly restored and put to use aging barrels. Ojuel rebels against the Rioja control board, experimenting with new things; at one point, Mila pulls out a turkey baster and dips it into a barrel so she can draw out some wine and offer it to us. This is deep winemaking, pulling on old tradition in ways that can now feel radical, experimentation and rejuvenation and daring to let things be different. Long live the Ojuels of the wine world, in firm revolt against the unthinking present and the decay of rural Spain.

After Ojuel, it is time to return to Madrid. Our Spanish road trip is smooth sailing, packing a lot into a few hours. Just south of Sojuela the N-111 winds along red cliffs dotted with green reminiscent of the American Southwest; soon, it climbs up a long cut through the Sierra de Cebollera, where spring is still in its earliest stages. We descend to the plain, try to figure out how the city of Soria functions when every single road is under construction, and then cruise easily across Castilla y León and Castilla-La Mancha, that rolling open green country that could have been dropped in from the Great Plains. Spanish highway etiquette is immaculate, everyone weaving in and out of appropriate lanes based on their speeds. Over four days of driving Google Maps has the occasional misfire where it sends us down some very sleepy, bumpy back lane and the narrowing of streets through town centers is at times harrowing, but all in all I enjoy my time behind the wheel in Spain.

Andrew and I get to do a circuit of central Madrid together and share one final meal before my very early flight out the next morning. Unfortunately this is where I hit the wall, so I do not have my reflections in good order that evening, but it has been a joy to take this trip with Andrew. We survived a two-week road trip together as we both shifted between phases of life in 2016, and we are able to jump back in and seamlessly do it again now that we have attained some modicum of professional stability. Of course sharing tight European lodging with even a good friend for ten days will reveal some neuroses and see us both cycle through moments when exhaustion or annoyance catches up with us, but we share a commitment to the pace, a hunger to eat and drink it all up in short order, and that can power us both through anything that might drag us down.

We are a funny pair here, more capable in Spanish than the vast majority of tourists, one who could pass for a German and speaks like a Mexican alongside a half-Filipino who speaks like an Argentine, and I am amused by how often we confuse people. At Ojuel, Mila tells us Americans are the best tourists they get, respectful and curious about experimentation and eager to spread the word to their friends. It is not hard to juxtapose us against the loud, boozy British who make no effort to speak Spanish and the famously insular French. The Spanish resignation to bad tourists is at its worst in San Sebastián, where some waitstaff continue to talk to us in awful English even when we demonstrate some Spanish capability, but when we show that clichéd American enthusiasm for taking stabs at new things in Rioja, the people we meet are delighted. Of course the American tourists who get to second-tier European destinations clutching Rick Steves guidebooks and lists of Michelin-recognized restaurants are unlikely to be of the same demographic as those who go to Gulf Shores for spring break; this filtering is not present among the British, for whom Spain can be a quick weekend jaunt. But I do think there is something uniquely fetching in an American hunger to absorb the European deep histories and cultures that our imperial reality so often buries.

I am on that nonstop search on this trip even though I don’t think I am ever quite at one hundred percent. I develop a gross nagging cough early on, while my back does not seem to like the backpack I wear; bad sleep, a sporadic but lifelong scourge of mine, returns at times. For a second straight trip I make a dumb mistake with my writing tablet, this time losing its stylus (replacement cost: a disgusting $150) on the first plane flight. Because of that I never hit the reflective rhythm I aspire to, don’t have my thoughts organized the way I should when Andrew the lawyer probes me about our trip or our world beyond us. I worry I am too much a chameleon, am not reflecting as thoroughly as I should on recent developments in work and in the personal sphere, am only barely scratching a few deep yearnings I find welling up within.

But that is alright. These annoyances show I know I have work to do, and I will do it at whatever pace I can. For now, I can smile easily as I think of two weeks well-lived, of a drift down Spanish streets, of good art and good food, a drive up the coast and a sip of special wine. A hearty gracias (and an eskerrik asko) to this country I have come to love, though after three straight years it is probably time to try somewhere new next. We have so much to explore.

Spain 2025, Part I: History’s Greatest Urbanists

This is the first in a four-part series. Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Being out in big surf is dreamlike. Terror and ecstasy ebb and flow around the edges of things, each threatening to overwhelm the dreamer. An unearthly beauty saturates an enormous arena of moving water, latent violence, too-real explosions, and sky. Scenes feel mythic even as they unfold. I always feel a ferocious ambivalence. I want to be nowhere else; I want to be anywhere else. I want to drift and gaze, drinking it in, except maximum vigilance, a hyperalertness to what the ocean is doing, cannot be relaxed. Big surf (the term is relative, of course—what I find life-threatening, the next hellman may find entirely manageable) is a force field that dwarfs you, and you survive your time there only by reading those forces carefully and well. But the ecstasy of actually riding big waves requires placing yourself right beside the terror of being buried by them: the filament separating the two states becomes diaphanous. Dumb luck weighs heavily, painfully. And when things go badly, as they inevitably do—when you’re caught inside a very large wave, or fail to make one—all your skill and strength and judgment mean nothing. Nobody maintains their dignity while getting rumbled by a big wave. The only thing you can hope to control at that point is the panic.

-William Finnegan, Barbarian Days (Against Dereliction)

On my recent trip to Spain I spent a little time mesmerized by the skilled surfers off Zurriola Beach in San Sebastián. Old friends and readers of my writing will know surfing can enrapture me, inspire words that go far beyond the exploits of a beach bum on a board. It is a feeling known to anyone who has ever given himself over to something beyond him.

The passage above, while less immediate in its death-daring fear, approximates the dream state I enter when exploring a European city on foot. I feel it all deeply, want to wander without a map, one with thousands of forces that flow of their own accord to weave together into the fabric of an urban life. Gifted thirty jetlagged hours in Madrid at the start of my trip, I pick out one museum for a visit, but I am mostly here to wander and explore.

Madrid is a city of seven million people, and yet most of its great monuments are reachable by foot. The Plaza Mayor and the Puerta del Sol are the humming hearts of the city; down the Gran Vía and Calle Alcalá, luxury brands take up shop in ornate buildings, a pastiche of revival and art deco architecture. On the west end sit the monumental palace and cathedral, while a series of arches in traffic circles (puertas and glorietas in Spanish, far more melodious) ring the entrances to the city center. To the east and southeast are the great museums, the Prado and the Reina Sofia and the Thyssen-Bornemisza. Great green spaces bookend the Centro, the sprawling Parque del Buen Retiro to the east and the lush Campo del Moro below the palace to the west. Strewn between are neighborhoods of life and culture and history, La Latina and Letras and Chueca, plazas dotting them to open up the narrow streets and give people places to settle at tables for a drink or a bite. Fountains flow and statues stand guard and that central Spanish sun beats down on the scene.

And so I re-immerse myself in that Spanish urban rhythm. I revisit a good brewery here and a fun restaurant there from my previous visit. I pause to read sign boards and take unexpected turns when piqued, and I sit in some churches and gaze upward in awe. In the Plaza Mayor, a stage has been set up and trucks are unloading kegs for the celebration of the Feast of San Isidro, which I will miss by one day. In the Puerta del Sol, lit up for the night, I sit for a spell and feel the rush of freedom that comes at the start of a new great trip, enchanted by what the Madrileños have designed here.

The Spanish are, after all, history’s greatest urban planners. It is difficult to find any Spanish town, no matter how godforsaken, without a walkable grid at its core and a pleasing central square and a couple appropriately scaled monuments: a church, a government building, some statues or fountains. Small, specialized shops are everywhere, selling food and technology and books (so many bookstores!) and just about any basic need within an easy walk of home. They make ample use of arcades, a superb and underused design feature, especially in hot or wet climates. Their housing is dense but not overcrowded; the apartment blocks in the suburbs, while not aesthetically pleasing, provide ample housing and are well-connected into the city.

These characteristics are not uncommon across Europe, but Spanish innovations endure. Whatever else one may say about their colonial exploits in the Americas, the Spanish did very intentionally export their urban form over the better part of two continents, and those plazas and zocalos will live on from Buenos Aires to Santa Barbara long after anything Bob Moses built gets replaced and the high modernists get consigned to the museums where they belong. More recently, the Spanish have built a train system that is the envy of the Western world, high-speed AVEs flying about, full lines built for the cost it takes to lay three ties on the California High-Speed Rail project; in Barcelona, the subway arrival time boards count down to the second. When I recently heard a joking proposal that we fire all train planners in the United States and replace them with Spaniards, I found myself nodding in solemn approval.

Besides the timeless aesthetics, Spanish cities understand something about human nature. An innate curiosity to peek around a corner, slip down an alley, emerge into a square. A simultaneous desire for order and ornament, a stable foundation topped by some of the flair that makes life fun. Spaces where adults can sit at tables and talk while the youths gather in another corner and younger kids can just dart about, all free to intermix while also carving their own little spheres. Spaces for God and spaces for hedonism; spaces for government and dim alleys to escape it. Meals are a progressive feast, small plates to escape gluttony, a free bite with every drink. Spanish city centers are a pleasure to stroll through, a pleasure to linger in, the place everyone wants to hang out instead of alone in little boxes every night.

My visit to the Reina Sofía modern art museum confirms my belief in Spanish urban thinking. How, exactly, does an art museum reflect values in city planning? Well, in it, I find a healthy heap of the original versions of designs I remember from introductory urban planning texts, from Garden City drawings to Le Corbusier’s schemes, along with plans for Madrid and Barcelona that seek to update these great old cities with grids that can sustain modern living. In a museum with relatively few non-Spanish works, the curators have seen fit to collect some of the most iconic pieces in the history of the field, show how their country then took those ideals and adapted them to their own towns. For the Spanish, urban planning is an art, worthy of its own wing just down the hall from Guernica.

Like its more classically inclined compatriot, the Prado, the Reina Sofía largely leaves out anyone who is not either from the country or in some way tied up in its history or artistic movements. Picasso and Dalí take center stage, but here also are Joan Miró and Juan Gris and adjacent surrealists who made the art world churn in the early 20th century. The temporary exhibitions include the funky sound artist Laia Estruch, a reasonably well curated collection of art attempting to subvert narratives associated with Spain’s colonial history (here I am pleasantly surprised to find art and video from a Mexican Zapatista community I have visited), and a painter named Huguette Caland with no obvious tie to the country who does hold the attention, sitting at an intersection somewhere between Picasso and Georgia O’Keefe, with the occasional sprinkle from the Middle East.

After my museum visit and a leisurely lunch on the Plaza Tirso de Molina a few blocks from my hotel, I head for Chamartín train station to get a taste of that great train system. It runs like clockwork, trains humming out every few minutes, and this isn’t even the busiest station in Madrid. The train I take rockets north, through tunnels under the Sierra Central and across the savannas of Castilla y León. The rain falls steadily on my train across the Spanish plain, through Segovia and Valladolid and Burgos and the smaller farming towns between them. The cities feature large industrial parks and larger apartment blocks, a somewhat bleak Spanish heartland.

When seen by train Spain feels like it is in a different stage of development, still suspended in an agricultural and industrial state instead of deep in the knowledge economy. In some ways this does not feel like a terrible tradeoff, with less job disruption and a healthier small business sector, with fewer basement-wage service jobs and a step of removal from the tech obsession and paranoia now gripping American culture. The only things that hurtle at maximum velocity here are the trains.

Still, it is a tradeoff: prior to the Great Recession, wealth in Western Europe’s leading economies (of which Spain is not really one) was basically on par with the United States. Now, American GDP growth has left Europe in the dust over recent years. Coming out of the recession, Angela Merkel’s Germany imposed bad austerity economics on the continent while the U.S. gave its economy some halting stimulus, and already higher energy prices have since been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. Tech has been an engine of American growth, while Europe has maintained a skepticism of that whole push. Throw in a strong dollar and it’s easy for an American to feel relatively affluent in Europe: even with some exchange rate rebalancing amid a trade war, prices on most things still feel like a bargain, especially since Europe eschews the absurdity of tip inflation. Real estate in downtown Madrid is expensive, but under conventional American loan terms I could make a play at it with my current salary if I really wanted to. Doing the same in New York or Washington would be laughable.

There are still many reasons, some empirical and some subjective, to prefer European choices over the American growth-at-all-costs machine. But there are serious long-term implications for that widening income gap and what it will take to sustain those European welfare states. What the economy gains in preservation of the past, it can lose in any sense of dynamism; youth unemployment is an actual thing here. A loud soccer bro on his phone two rows behind me on the train, speaking in a Gen Z English punctuated by an appropriate number of fucks and bros, thinks his future is elsewhere. The question looms: how next will the Spaniards reinvent their cities and networks to meet the world they now live in?

Part 2 is here.