By Veronica Mendez

With the cheese bocadillo and the whistle lips given to me at the door, I entered the Sala Heineken into publicity spectacle of ” The Night of the Ad Eaters.”

The venue was packed with a young, laid back crowd; people sat on tables, on the floor, or stood on the terrace watching the mega-screen above the dance floor. It was like walking into an outdoor movie theater- the only difference was that we were watching commercials. Not just any adverts though, but rather the 400 funniest advertisements from all over the world.

The “Noche of the Ad Eaters” dates back to 1981 where 600 people attended Kinopanorama in France to watch five reels of advertisement. Since then, the “The Night of the Ad Eaters” has been to 40 countries and 160 cities. This past Thursday, the Mecca of advertisement made its way to Madrid for the first time.

To some the idea of watching non-stop commercials does not appealing. But you don’t feel like you are watching advertisements, instead it was more of an audio-visual projection of fun and corky ads. I watched as two kids engaged in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon combat—for a McNugget. And Cadbury eggs splattered the camera in caramel to a battle song. Even a group of guys scream like little girls when they walk into a refrigerator full of Heinekens.

With live bands coming on between the forty-minute “breaks”, the free donuts, and the cheering whenever there was a particularly great commercial, it was much more than commercials—it was a party.

By Veronica Mendez

by Michael Kaeflein

“Hash!” hisses the man. This is Retiro park and it’s a lazy Sunday afternoon. I am nailed to the spot, wondering if I have heard right. “Hash!”, this time more urgently. Yes, this man is trying to sell me soft drugs in the middle of what is arguably Madrid’s most famous park. Talk about a downer, I came to the park to get away from it all, not to take part in shady drug dealings.

Hash or ‘chocolate’ as it is known in Madrid, is in my experience, as ubiquitous as the botellón and as popular as fútbol. Let´s cast a retrospective eye over my encounters with this substance in the past year and a half.

Upwards of sixty percent of the house parties that I have been to, of the lines outside concerts, bars and discos that I have stood in, have had the distinct smell of hash wafting over affairs. On countless occasions I have smelt hash in the streets, sometimes so strongly that I feel that I am back in Amsterdam! One of my flatmates has seen, on several occasions, people on their way to work having a sneaky joint, before they begin what is likely to be a surrealistic day of work.

One of the free daily newspapers reported a few years back that Spanish teenagers consider smoking hash less harmful than cigarettes. The Spanish authorities are trying to change imagine of hash as a ’soft drug’. Police in Barcelona last year began imposing 200 euro fines on people smoking hash and marijuana in the streets.
After countless visits to Retiro park I must have been propositioned by most of the hash dealers in Madrid. That’s quite honestly, why I now prefer to go to Casa de Campo!