A view of the U.S: from the other side of the pond.

• Author: Wiesner, Pat
• Position: On MANAGEMENT

THE AIRPORT IN MADRID IS A LOT BIGGER THAN I expected and a lot older, too. providing miles of rough going for the wheels guiding your baggage along with stairways that should have been escalators.

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It was a long trek to the baggage claim and the exit while horsing four difficult bags along, all the time looking for what we used to call a "sky cap" and never finding one.: Imagine a country where the national uncmployment rate is close to 20 percent and nobody will touch a bag. Sounds like the U.S.:

But that is about all I can sav bad about the look and feel of the city.

Madrid and the other pans of Spain we visited were beautiful. My wife, Janet, and I are there to attend a conference, and to that end we also visited Toledo and Villadolid. The people in those places love to be out and about, and the streets were jammed in all three cities every night.

They told us, for example, that 300,000 people live in Valladolid, and I'm sure they were all out walking the streets in groups and couples with kids in strollers, enjoying the weather, an ice cream, music, a beer, each other or whatever until 11 p.m. or later. The streets everywhere we went in any of these cities were Super safe and secure.

These people seem to know something about life that most. Americans haven't quite worked out.

In the first few days we discovered that the trains are the only way to get around the country. The slow "last" (rains go about 120 kilometers per hour and the fast "fast" trains go more than 200 kph. And they are beautiful, sleek and spotlessly clean. They're also relatively inexpensive.

When we were taking a cab to the Madrid train station we got caught up a little bit in a Spanish version of Occupy Wall Street. There was a big crowd building in the street in front of us. Instead of the rag-tag look of our protesters in the U.S., these guys wore very similar outfits and seemed to carry...