MADRID. Population: 3.2 Million. +Outskirts = 6.4 mil.
Reunion with Caro de Romance.
=Le Bonheur!!
Weekend of Madrid. After another excellent Ryanair flight, land in Madrid at 1:30 PM. Take the enormously large metro system to SOL, where I get off and step into a huge square with tons of people. There I meet Caro, impeccably dressed as always with her signature Hermes scarf, and the fun begins. We hadn't seen each other in a year and four months!! Okay, so I drop my affairs off at her apartment, which is two seconds from the metro, and we go out to lunch at an outdoor cafe. We get Tortillas Espagnol, which is a traditonally spanish tapas dish that is a slice of what look slike quiche only its not. It's this crust type breaded stuff coating around baked potatoes and onions, but it's all one big mushy brown color. It was good. We continue our tour by walking to Rotiro Park, this huge park with lots of open green space, fountains, tennis courts, a rose garden, and a huge pond where you can rent rowboats and feed the ducks and there's men playing accordions all around and it's very pictoresque. Add to that the fact that in Madrid it still almost feels like summer, only with a cool breeze over the heat, and you've got a fantastic little city. On the way to the park we passed all the ornate office buildings of the major governmental departments, department of defense, foreign affairs, labor, etc etc, with guards in traditional uniforms posted out front and big Spanish flags flying. We walked around the park and rose garden exchanging news and then moved on the Prado, the biggest museum in Madrid/Spain. Comparable to the Louvre, it had a lot of classic works of art, including a painting that I love very much of Velazquez. From there we took the metro to the grocery store to buy some breakfast necessities and things for our apero (aperitif), and then we went back to her apartment and got ready for the evening. Some french friends came over and we had an aperitif and we were supposed to go but everyone was tired from the workw eek so we just talked and hung out and they left fairly late and we went to bed.
Saturday, wake up after a nice rest, start our day with a cup of tea and cereal with chocolate pieces, then head off to see the Opera, the Palais Royal, the Place de la Mayor, and finish with lunch at MacDo (tres spanish). From there we hit the boutiques where I bought super cheap an super chic clothes at Zara, which turns out is a Spanish label, and some gloves at H&M. After shopping we meet up with some of the French girls from the night before and eat chocolate churros Spanish style, that is we go into this cute little place that was sort of like a soda fountain shop and order churros and chocolate, and they bring us each a cup of melted rich chocolate and a plate of freshly made churros and you dunk the churros into the chocolate, it was soooooo good and filling. After that we return to the maison and get ready, then go to a Spanish friend's house for her 25th birthday party. We helped her make dinner and then ate it with her friends. Whereas last night everyone was speaking French, tonight everyone spoke Spanish so I was a little out of it, and it turns out the Spanish education system does not so much emphasize learning foriegn languages, french ,english, or otherwise. Nonetheless it was fun and we ate traditional spanish foods which was cool, even though I'm not a big fan of spanish cuisine (spanish cuisine is basically normal cuising but every dish also has ham in it, and in the kitchen this girl had an entire leg of a cow of bull or something with hoof attached, that you can buy at any grocery store). Yum. But the tarte au chocolat at the end was pretty good. We also made croque monsieurs because Caro had made them before at her house and the girl had liked them, and while a croque monsieur does too have ham, I had mine sans and it all worked out. Again we were supposed to go out but this time Caro was sick after eating so much junk food all day, so we retired to our hous around 2 am while the birthday girl and her friends went to a bar and then Joy, one of THE nightclubs. They go out late in Spain, they go out at 3 am and return at 5 or 6, so I'm kind of okay with us skipping the going out even though I know it would have been fun, I think I would have been dead the next day. Sunday we just woke up, ate breakfast, I stole some french songs from Caro's computer, and we went to the airport and said goodbye. Overall I had a super good weekend and spoke French the whole time, so it was a win win. Things to add: oh yeah, on Saturday we also saw Kilometer zero, the point from which all distances in Spain are measured, it was right in front of the SOL metro stop. And Place de la Mayor is where they filmed Vantage Point I'm pretty sure, that's what I thought of when we were there. In the Place there were all these crazy street performers, I took lots of pics of them, but they were all dressed up in wacky costumes doing different things. So in general Madrid had a lot of people, we were always bombarded on the sidewalks in the area where Caro lives, and there were lots of homeless people too. The city seemed very international, you heard english and french being spoken almost as much as spanish, well maybe a little less, and there were lots and lots and lots of police driving around all the time, especially at night. During the day ont he sidewalks there were blacks selling watches and DVDs and such, all laid out on mats that folded up easily into oer the shoulder pouches so they could run should the police come, because they were all selling illegally and mostly all here illegaly, we saw a group of them being pursued while shopping on saturday. Then at night you get asian people setting up mini snack stands on the street corners on cardboard boxes selling sandwiches out of grocery bags, drinks, and candy bars. It was weird. In general things cost less than in France, the clothes and the groceries and such. I really liked madrid even though Im not sure that I saw all the touristy stuff, I mostly liked it because I got to hang out with Caro again. One of her french friends I had met last summer in Bordeaux and i remembered her, what a small world. At the Spanish girl's birthday most of her friends were there on Erasmus, apart from the actual Spanish people who lived there, and so I learned a little bit about that program and it seems like it's a huge thing in Europe, and I learned more about Caro's program which sounds incredibly cooler than american universities. And Voila, I have now been to Madrid. Vive Espagne!
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