Sam Goes to Spain!: Día de la Huelga

America might have snow days or teacher days, but Spain has huelgas. "Huelga" means "strike" or "protest". There will be several throughout the year. Usually they are two to four day events and students choose which days they will go to school. This huelga was three days and I only went to school for one of those days, which gave me a 6-day weekend. No complaining from me.

This is what I understand about the cause of the huelga from all the information that I gathered (*Disclaimer: This may not be entirely correct, it's just a collection of what I heard.*): A new bill was passed in the Spanish government that will make every school in Spain a private school. Every person will have to pay to go to school. I'm not sure why any of the legislators thought this was a good idea, with the crisis in Spain making jobs scarce and money much harder to obtain. Obviously, the students didn't like this, and neither did the teachers. So they posed a three-day huelga to protest about it. It was a good idea, but just too late. The bill has already been passed. I'm not sure if anything will change on that front in the near future, but it does make you wonder about what is going to happen to the exchange programs in Spain.

The huelga was on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The week before the teachers told us not to come to school on Thursday because that was the day that all the teachers were protesting in Madrid so none of them were coming to school that day. So that left me to decide whether or not to come to school the two other days. I knew that most of the other exchange students were skipping all three days. On Monday I asked several people whether they were coming or not and was shocked to find out that most of them were. I've come to realize that my class is a little more studious than the average students here in Spain. But anyways, I decided to come on Tuesday, mainly because I needed to speak to my English teacher about something. She wasn't there, which made coming completely pointless. (Actually something did happen that day, but that's a story for another post.) I knew through the group message for the class that the next day only about half of the students were showing up, so I didn't go. I got to sleep in past ten and more or less lazed around the whole day. So basically a perfect day for me. I may or may not have gotten something productive done.

Thursday I didn't go to school either, but this time I actually went into Madrid to see the huelga with some AFS friends of mine.

I woke up late in the morning and took a bus into Madrid with my friend Angie. Once in Madrid we met up with another friend and her host sister for coffee and milkshakes and then parted ways. Angie and I walked around a lot looking for the rest of the group that was somewhere in the city and just took in Madrid (this was only my second time in the city, everything was still so new for me). When we finally found them we went to a few touristy places and took a bunch of pictures. At one of these places we saw another group of teenagers speaking English checking us out (the same as we were doing to them). They walked by and when it was clear they weren't going to say anything, we called out to them and all ended up talking for a long time. They are here with Rotary, a different intercambio program. We all exchanged numbers so that we can meet up another time.

Oh, by the way, quick story. All throughout Madrid there are these men (mostly Moroccans) lining the streets that have items for sale on blankets. It's obviously illegal. As my friends and I were walking into Grand Plaza we noticed that all the guys were packing up quickly and there was a whistling nearby. Before we knew it we saw the police and then we were watching 20+ of these men sprinting across Grand Plaza, all with their huge sacks slung over their shoulders. It was the funniest thing I'd seen in a while.

After the encounter with the other exchange students several of our group had to leave and then we were down to four. After killing another two hours we headed towards the place where the huelga was going to be held. We followed a group of men that were chanting for a while but then turned back.

We found the huelga in front of the Palacio de Telecomunicaciones. After a lot of hesitating we finally went into the thick of the crowd and got to experience the huelga. To give you kind of a feel of how many people were there at the high point, it was tens of thousands. You looked back and you couldn't see the end. Well, let's do some math. If the HP Pavilion seats 17,500, and there was at least five, six, seven times that many people, that means there was probably somewhere around 100,000 people at that huelga. Wow.

The energy was out of this world. Students and teachers alike had come together for this one cause and were raising their voices for it to be heard. People were chanting and singing and there were drums playing and flags flying. At one point I climbed a big pedestal to take pictures. There were trucks with huge amplifiers and police helicopters flying overhead (but everything was completely safe, it was only a precaution). The entire thing had a slow progression down the main street. For a quick five minutes, it rained, but in the blink of an eye, everyone had pulled out umbrellas. Apparently, Spaniards are good about checking the weather. It was extraordinary to see that many people all together for one purpose and the pride in their manifestation.

I had an amazing day and an amazing experience. It is definitely a day that I will remember for the rest of my life.