THE MOST WEIRD CITY 2008 CONTEST
Candidates (Still Open): Varsovia, Brasilia, Praga, El Cairo, Toledo, Soria, París (Texas), Béjar (Salamanca), Madrid, México D.F.
ANONIMOUS MILA introduces us to the magic world of Madrid as a magnificent claimer to the awards and backs her candidacy with the following reasons:
1. Madrid went from being a little unknown village in the XVI century to become under Philip II to be capital city of one the biggest empires the world has ever seen.
2. If there have been two major events to shock Europe from north to south and east to west, those have been the Napoleonic Wars and the Fight against Fascism. Madrid has lived those two wars very intensely, in 1808 Madrid people raised up in arms against the French, altough those came to bring the ideas of the Enlightment (according to them) and from 1936 up tp 1939 Madrid fought against the siege by the fascist troops of General Franco.
3. Due to the war mentioned above, Madrid had the "honour" to become the first european capital where the civilian population was continuosly and daily bombed, a horrible precedent which became a habit during WW II.
4. Nowadays, it enjoys of one the biggest and most modern underground systems in the world, one of the most important airports, a railway local train station which is the biggest in the world (Atocha) which is daily used by a million people, and at the same time, Madrid offers the world the biggest shanty towns in Europe: La Cañada Real, where, as real madrileños, the inhabitants, as the police came to dismantel the town, they received such forces under a stone storm in what became to be known as "the third intifada"
5. I has a cathedral which took 4 centuries to be built, the Pope is here every so and so. Meanwhile Madrid is home to one of the most important gay neighbourhoods in the word, for its diversity, joyful life, and tolerance. It is, in fact, the current European Capital of Gay Pride.
6. Since the 50s, around for 40% of Madrid´s population is people who came from somewhere else.
7. We are the city with the biggest number shopping for inhabitant, with more bars by inhabitant, and the one with more hairdressers.8. It has being planner to build in the middle of what is almost a desert one of the biggest new neighbourhoods in Europe, which will significantly be called Valdecarros ("automobile valley")
9. We have some of the best museums of the world and what we are proud of is not that, but to be home to the Gate of Drug to Europe, from our airports to our roads, where illegal traffic can only compare to that of animals, even endangered species, which is enormous, up to the point zoos should be built from them.
10. Every week in Madrid there are at leas two demonstrations.
11. We have left nationalist terrorism, right nationalist terrorism, islamic terrorism, latin kings, ñetas, skin heads.
12. We have a Town Circus, which all madrileños have to pay.
13. The most important bullfighting festival in the world.
14. A census of more than 800 beggars.
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