Sunshine Productions

Madrileños love the climate and are proud of these changes. Where can you get such a variation in any other large city? When they ask you at the café how you slept and you say it was too bloody hot to sleep until just before morning they tell you that is the time to sleep. There is always that coolness just before daylight at the hour a man should go to sleep. No matter how hot the night you always get that. It really is a very good climate if you do not mind changes. On hot nights you can go to the Bombilla to sit and drink cider and dance and it is always cool when you stop dancing there in the leafiness of the long plantings of trees where the mist rises from the small river. On cold nights you can drink sherry brandy and go to bed. To go to bed at night in Madrid marks you as a little queer. For a long time your friends will be a little uncomfortable about it. Nobody goes to bed in Madrid until they have killed the night. Appointments with a friend are habitually made for after midnight at the café. In no other town that I have ever lived in, except Constantinoble during the period of the Allied occupation, is there less going to bed for sleeping purposes. It may be based on the theory that if you stay up until that cool time that comes just before daylight but that cannot have been the reason at Constant, because we always used that cool time to to take a ride along the Bosphorus to see the sun rise. Seeing the sun rise is a fine thing. As a boy, fishing or shooting, or during the war you used to see it rather regularly; then, after the war, I do not remeber seeing it until Constantinople. There seeing it rise was the traditional thing to do. In some way it seemed to prove something if, after whatever you had been doing, you went out along the Bosphorus and saw the sun rise. It finished off everything with a healthy outdoor touch. But being away from such things one forgets them. At Kansas City during the Republican Convention of 1928 I was driving out to my cousin's house in the country at an hour that I felt was much too late in the evening, when I noticed the glow of a tremendous fire. It looked exactly as it did the night the stockyards burned and, while I felt there was little I coould do about it, still I felt that I should go. I turned the motor car towards the fire. When the car came to the top of the next hill I saw what it was. it was the sunrise.

- fra Ernest Hemingways Death in the Afternoon, 1932