Madrid

So, I am very behind on my days in Spain so far! I got here less than a week ago and I've already visited Madrid, Toledo, and then moved into my homestay in Barcelona where I will be residing in for the rest of the semester. For now this post will just be pictures and stories about Madrid and I'll post more about Toledo and my move into Barcelona on another post. (:

First night in Madrid some of us met up for dinner and walked around at night to explore. We ate a variety of tapas and look at all the cool buildings lit up at night. We walked thru Plaza Mayor and there were tons of people and weird street performers that would be doing everything like: painting themselves to look like statues then posing very still like a toy army figure, having three creepy heads popping out of a box swiveling around to look at you when you get close, at one point I saw three Micky Mouses (weird scary looking ones I might add) and odd yoga type people doing balancing tricks like the picture below!

Ordering food is somewhat of a challenge when you have a language barrier. Thankfully at times I'll go out to eat with people that can speak spanish or we will end up with a waiter that asks us if they would like them to speak english to us after they watch us struggle for a while. So far I've had pretty good luck with food! Tapas are amazing, my favorite are papas bravas! Basically they're little chunks of cooked potatoes with a spicy sause on top of them! SO GOOD. but then again i'll basically eat anything with potatoes in them because I love them so much. But the best thing I've had so far was churros with chocolate sauce (picture below). The sauce was thick and warm and not too sweet but not too bitter at the same time. I split some with Michelle and we were in heaven. We started drinking the chocolate out of the cup afterwards but later learned from our other friend that drinking it is rude and we should have used a spoon. whoops. 

Even though I've had good luck with food so far my friend TJ did not have such luck when he ordered "squid with black sauce" for whatever reason he thought that it would be good because all the other seafood and squid we had been eating the past two days has been amazing! However, once it came to the table we realized that the "black sauce" was actually squid ink... NO BUENO. It was nasty and even if it did taste good it was so hard to get over how disgusting it looked to even try to enjoy the taste of it. Naturally, I made him take a picture of it (below). 

 churros & chocolate aka my new weakness

never order anything with "black sauce"

We went on a tour of parts of Madrid and got to look at some very cool buildings one day as well. Along with our tour we went to a museum that featured Rafaels work. Old renaissance art isn't really my favorite, but it was interesting to learn about the perspective that some artists would paint in. For instance some artists began painting themselves in the art. There would be a painting telling a story about some type of historical moment and the artist would paint themselves in the painting. The self portrait of the artist would be the only person looking straight at you instead of looking at the others in the painting. Having the artist place themselves into the scene was like a way of letting the viewer know that the picture wasn't real. Other than facts like that the art really wasn't my favorite type, but cool nonetheless. 

Basilica Pontificia De San Miguel

Another day I went out exploring by myself during the day when everyone else was siestaing (which I should have been doing cause we ended up staying out really late that night at the club el Kapital which was a 7 story club, verrrrry fun, LOTS of dancing) and be being Lauren got lost, of course, but luckily I was taking pictures of the street signs so I could follow those back to the hotel. All the street signs are pretty but hard to see here because they're all on the buildings. I also made my way to the park called Puerta De Madrid which is HUGE. I only explored a small chunk of it but there were tons of runners, dogs, walkers, bikers and rollerbladers around! It made me feel like I wanted to go workout with them and I never get the urge to go running! Inside there are tons of little pockets of mini buildings, playgrounds, ponds and statues within all the grass and trees. 

One of the many pictures of street signs I took while on my walk.

Overall, the two days in Madrid were very fun and full of sight seeing and getting used to being in another country. Toledo next!