On the last day of my biz trip to Madrid last week, I had a few hours to walk around town and check things out - my full photo album is here.   But for this blog entry I wanted to bring forward a couple of the picts I took at the Atocha train station - Spain's equivalent of Ground Zero + 9/11 -

One of the entrances to Atocha - the columns and glass are covered with tributes from Spaniards

A romance tragically interrupted...

"Son of a bitch aznar. Thanks for the war that you only wanted to fuel your prestige, for killing 200 people and killing 200 families, and for destroying the station of my neighborhood, el pozo. bush is a murderer"

[thanks to Xofis for some translation help]

A smaller memorial inside the station

A few of the tributes left behind

Overall, from walking around town a scant 2 months after the tragedy, I have to say that the Madrileno's seem to be taking the whole thing FAR more casually than New Yorkers even 2 years after 9/11.   9/11 was certainly a bigger event overall & it permanently scarred the NYC skyline whereas train carcasses are a relatively easier thing to clean up and push to the backdrop.  The body counts in Madrid were less than a tenth that of WTC.

Nevertheless, I was still suprised by the degree to which most people just seemed to be going about thier biz without any of the heavy emotional weight I could feel New Yorkers carrying.   Now, I don't speak much Spanish and, for that matter, I did NOT spend much time interacting w/ the locals aside from small conversations at restaurants, bars, and a few tourist spots (and, of course, work).  But still, the prima facie observation was still rather striking.

One friend contends that it's because Spain has had a much longer history with terrorist actions on its soil as a result of ETA and even the various revolutions that rocked the nation in the 20th century.   Consequently, they just aren't as shocked by the novelty of it as we were.  Perhaps.

It was also surprising to see just how many metal detectors were all over the place.   Not just at entrances to the train station or other government buildings but even secondary places like smallish office building.   Some of these were in place prior to Atocha (once again, ETA...) but I assume that many only came on line afterwards.

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