First Visit to Madrid

This morning, I was supposed to fly out to Portugal for our free weekend, but my credit card was denied for being in another country, so I had to call my bank AGAIN and work that all out. Fun times. Luckily though, we got it all worked out and bought some tickets. It was actually really nice to have a day off, because I was really tired! Instead, my friends Courtney, Christina, and I all decided to go into Madrid! Good trade off, I'll say. Madrid was great! We took the train into town with the Profe's, and they gave us some tickets to the Reina Sofia museum. It was so super great!!!! First, we had to find the place. Madrid is a big city! There are lots of streets, lots of buildings, and lots of people. We had a map, but I hate having to pull it out and look even more like a tourist. Everyone knows at their first glance that we're not from Spain, but it doesn't help when we have to pull out a huge map and have more problems folding it back up! Needless to say, we had to do this a couple times. I even worked up my confidence and asked a few people for directions! It can be a little scary for me, because many times I feel like I lack the skills in Spanish to ask and then to understand, but then I'm always happy to discover that I really can do it! :) Confidence boost right there. Finally, we found the museum, got some free tickets because we're students here, then started our tour. The museum is a modern art museum, so we saw many works that were quite interesting. I can appreciate modern art, but I don't always love it. I guess I just don't think as deeply, or as simply for that matter, as some people do. It takes a certain kind of mindset to really love some modern art. However, we finally got to a certain part of the museum and started seeing works by Picasso. WHAT?!?!?! Picasso!! Holy crap, it was cool. They had a lot of his sketches, a few of his less-known works, and also "La Guernica," which is an extremely famous painting. I've studied this in a couple of my classes in the past, and here I was seeing it in real life. Such a cool feeling! I was freaking out a bit. The whole exhibit that displayed "La Guernica" focused on the Spanish civil war, because that's what Picasso's painting is about. I was really surprised, because "La Guernica" is huge! It spanned across the wall. I always thought it was a lot smaller, so it was cool to see all the detail in real life. I felt so extremely lucky to be there!

Sadly, we couldn't take pictures inside the museum, but at least there are pictures online! :) I'll never forget that one! After the museum, we left to try and find a market that Profe. Pratt had told us about. It sounded super cool! Sadly, though, finding places on a large city map that's not extremely detailed is a lot harder than we thought... We quickly gave up and decided to stop at Starbucks for lunch instead. I had a lunch that my Gloria had packed me, but the other girls bought muffins, frappachinos, and hot chocolate! Perfect timing, too, because it started to pour right as we got inside. That wasn't good for when we had to leave, though. None of us had packed our umbrellas. Bad idea for Spain. It seems to rain a lot on us. I think we brought the rain here! After we took the train home, I went to Courtney and Christina's apartment, and Courtney and I got ready to go on our trip to Portugal in the morning! Courtney's "mom" Ana helped us call a cab, then Ana's visiting teachers who happened to be there at the time helped us find a tienda where we could print off our tickets and check in to the airport. We decided that I should probably sleep over at her place, so Courtney and I rode the bus back to my place, had dinner (American hamburgers!) with Santi, packed, then took the bus back to her apartment. Quite the night! It was bad planning on our part, but we went to bed around 12, only to have to wake up again 3 hours later to catch our taxi to the airport! Whew... Just livin' the life!