Madrid

from barcelona we hopped on a plane to madrid arriving to what appeared to be another beautiful day outside. problem was, it was actually really cold. too bad.
we made it to downtown without a problem, found what i believe is an old post office, as well as a large arch.

old post office?

arch

we were kind of hungry and couldn't find a supermarket as planned, but we did run into a haagen-daaz so we decided to get the ice cream that we truly deserved.

it took us a little bit to get ahold of our host because he was in class, but his metro stop was easy to find and even more amazing was how close he actually lived to it! we also had been still looking for a supermarket and eventually gave up hoping there would be one near his apartment. low and behold there was! right next door! seriously these erasmus kids lived so conveniently close to everything.
our main host was actually from belgium, but his english was amazing. and apparently he speaks about 7 languages. makes me feel realllll good inside about my french skills haha. anyways. he was actually only there our first two nights since he would be heading home for a week, so we also got to know one of his italien flatmates. his english wasn't amazing, but communicating wasn't really a problem.
that first night samina and i passed out "early" because we were so tired from not getting a ton of sleep the night before as well as from traveling.

the next morning we started our madrid adventures. to save money we had purchased sandwich fixings and decided we would eat in retiro park. this park is beautiful, and felt very naturey which i haven't seen a lot of since being in europe.

my favorite part though? we found a swing! the child inside of me was so happy. i even made us stop for a few minutes.

there is also a "lake" at retiro park. it doesn't smell very good, and we found two dead fish, but at least we got to rent a paddle boat!

dead fish floating

working hard, obviously

next we head to the el prado museum and saw the renoir portion. unfortunately, as is the case with many museums, we were not allowed to take pictures. there was, however, a beautiful display and luckily a lot of stuff (though not all) was explained in english as well as in spanish. it was definitely more than worth the 4 euros we paid to get in.

we also saw plaza del sol, which is the center of spain. to be honest, i wasn't all that impressed. i thought it would be slightly more exciting because it is the center, but hey, i guess not.

i liked plaza mayor much more. it was a cute little courtyard, and not surprisingly, had a statue of a man on a horse. oh by the way, we found a lot of those in madrid. more interestingly though, there was also a human statue, a fat spiderman, and a matador! not really sure what all that was about.

fat spiderman?

matador?

next up we saw the royal palace and the cathedrale de almudena, though we didn't go into either. it was really convenient that everything was so close together, and that earlier we had found a map and had an information person circle the spots we wanted to go, so there was no need to spend all our time lost the way we had in barcelona.

cathedral de almudena

royal palace

though after awhile, we decided to get on a random bus to either see something new or head back, but really we were just cold. conveniently enough, we happened to hop on a bus that took us back to places we knew! since at that point we had wandered off a bit.

we made ourselves dinner that night, to save money instead of eating out, and because we didn't want to wait till spain's normal hour of 10pm. but we also made some guacamole! samina had been wanting it really bad, and we found out our hosts had never tried it, so why not! it was delicious.

that night we went out to a club with our two hosts. it was different than samina and i had anticipated, and we learned the spanish have a very different style of dancing than we are accustomed to. but it looked like they were having fun! i enjoyed afterwards even more though. it was late by the time we got back, but our belgian host convinced our italian host to make us some pasta! it was like 4 i think. but it was delicious. i'm thinking i should live with an italian in the future so they can make me pasta after we go out at night.

for our last full day, samina and i headed back to park retiro to find the crystal palace. its pretty cool actually. an entire building made practically out of nothing but glass. check it out:

afterwards we ended up at a restaurant for samina to eat lunch since she had eaten her sandwich the previous night. i just got a dessert, but it was delicious.

the waiter was also very friendly, trying to explain the menu to samina, considering that since it was in spanish, we were at a bit of a loss. my amazing spanish skills did come through though when we were asking where the bathrooms were. samina said bathroom. i said el banos? waiter said ohhh toilets. win!

during this lunch, samina and i got to thinking about the differences between europeans and americans, seeing as we have been around so many europeans. i remembered back to when i was in germany and watched german students attempt to name all 27 countries that are part of the european union. there were about 20 of them and they had some trouble with a few. we decided to see if the two of us could come up with all 50 states. we were doing pretty well, getting most of them very quickly. when naming them randomly stopped working quite as well, we tried alphabetically and had some success. all in all we managed to come up with 49/50. not bad right? i mean there were only two of us. well, this last state was killing us, and we spent the next hour or two while we were still wandering around town trying to come up with what it was. state number 50 was completely lost on us. which one was it? wyoming. thats right. wyoming. we now strongly dislike wyoming. who ever talks about that state anyways. have you met any one from there? exactly. anyways. it drove us nuts, but eventually we looked it up and were able to stop thinking about it.

so we didn't do much else that day due to the cold weather and the fact that we were exhausted from 6 days straight of walking allllll over the place. so we went back and took a nap before whatever would happen that evening.
well that evening samina and i got it into our heads that we really wanted to play pool like we had in milan. she looked up a place, problem was when we got there, we found it was closed. same problem with whatever place our host came up with. so we started wandering around asking people where it might be possible to find a pool table. eventually, however, we found one! problem was, it was occupied, and managed to stay that way until we decided to give up and go home. but while we waited, still with the hope we might get to play, we talked to the two people we were with who spoke a bit of english. we learned a couple things. there had already been some discussion before about the differences between certain languages. spain spanish and mexican spanish for example. or brazilian portuguese and portugal portuguese. well then of course came up the discussion of british english and american english. they didn't seem to think we spoke english, but rather american. we told them a number of times that american is not a language. both are english, the differences are the accent and a tiny bit of vocabulary. but they are the same language. they tried to compare it to different italian dialects, we had to point out its not the same thing. it was surprisingly frustrating. later though, on the bus back to the apartment, i also got to learn something else about english. did you know that if a word has 5+ letters you say more, and if it has less than that you add -er? interesting the things native speakers are never taught. i also loved that i was taught this by a guy who's english isn't the greatest :) learn something new every day!
and once again, we got pasta when we got back! love this whole late night pasta thing. seriously.

i have to say, overall i really enjoyed spain and would love to go back some day. i was even inspired to try to take spanish this semester since i have space in my schedule. i won't be able to since a beginning spanish class isn't offered/ my directors don't recommend learning another language while i am still perfecting my french, but i am sure i will in the future :)

i was of course, still super excited to return back to lyon and france. i had missed being able to understand what people were saying.

oh, and once again i forgot to buy postcards. sorryyy about that. so if you think you are owed a postcard, hopefully i'll remember to buy them from whatever city i go to next!