Jacket weather

Aside from being at the school or my apartment, I'm pretty much either doing errands or shopping on the one hand, or actively sightseeing on the other. The first kinds of trips make up most of my day outside class, but it occurred to me that we can just accept this as a given and not explain the quotidian reasons why I was outside.

That said, just in the last couple of days the weather grew chilly and yesterday everyone was suddenly wearing jackets, becauseit was supposed to rain around two or three o'clock.

So I had to buy a jacket, which I did at the large department store called El Corte Inglés, equivalent more or less to a Nordstrom's. I purchased a green, supposedly Italian jacket and a cap to boot. The cap, inevitably wool, is what middle-aged and older men wear. In this cap and jacket my reflection in the store mirror did look passably European.

But when I went outside I found that the jacket, which I had hoped would be rain-repellent without even checking that it was -- was not. I got rather wet as I walked the 700 meters back to my apartment. In fact (due to my Parkinson's disease, which makes walking difficult for me) by the time I got there I was pretty worn out. Instead of going upstairs, I went into the nearby Cafe Valverde -- Valverde is also the name of the street i live on -- and had a capuccino. Fortunately, when I did go into my building, they had repaired the elevator, which stopped working yesterday afternoon.

Still no wifi though. For wi-fi I have to go to the Cafe Valverde. But it's not a place where you can camp out with a laptop. Doing so seems not to be a thing in Madrid, although the nearby Chinese restaurant, which I mentioned yesterday, allows teenagers and me to sit there and use laptops or do homework. It's actually three businesses in one -- a Chinese restaurant, a smoothie bar, and a bar bar. Different staff work at each of these, though it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.