Study Abroad
Day 13
January 30th, 2006 (Happy half-birthday to me!)
3:53 PM

Wow, a lot to catch up on. I’ll just dive right in:

The weekend definitely started Thursday night, pretty much as soon as classes were done. Robin, Danielle and I had some dinner, then when Amy got back to the Fund from her family’s house we got ready to go out. We spent a couple hours basically fascinated with Robin’s music collection, which includes a substantial amount of what we’ve dubbed “middle school music.” We were surprised to discover I can still sing all of the words to “Foolish Games” in the “Jewel voice,” that Danielle can still rap all of “Gangster’s Paradise.” We were not so surprised that we can do the same with the Spice Girls. Let’s face it, they’re still a favorite.

We headed down the street to Bodega, where we hung out with a group of Notre Dame kids who were (despite the rumors) not stuck up. Because we had to get up early for the excursion and Danielle had a headache, we headed back before Amy and Robin, who went to the discoteca.

7AM came to soon and we were up and on a bus again, heading up to El Escorial. Luckily the group was (slightly) smaller than the Madrid excursion. We spent the morning touring El Escorial’s main attraction, the monastery/royal residence. It’s a huge, very simple and symmetrical granite building. Our tour guide, Angel, explained that its simplicity was to suggest that even the king tried to live as a monk. The king spent his summer months in the building (he spend the remainder of the seasons split between 3 other residences), and monks took up most of the rooms year-round. We saw the library, lots of bedrooms, the church, rooms of paintings, and the crypt where all the kings and queens of Spain are buried. There are bunch of other rooms where all the other random relatives and illegitimate children are buried as well.

It was a good tour with a lot of interesting rooms, but there were a LOT of us and it was hard to hear and ask questions. Also it was incredibly cold all this weekend, but especially in that drafty castle. Brr.

We had lunch at a nearby restaurant, where we were smart enough to sit at the table right outside the kitchen, so we were served first. I ate with Robin, Danielle and Mariko, one of the students from Japan. She was so cute, and her Spanish was great—her accent is way better than mine. She told us about how she’s studying art and Spanish, with hopes to be a librarian. I asked why she decided to study Spanish (somehow I thought it was odd for a Japanese student) and she told me she loved Spanish art so much she wanted to learn the language. She was fascinated by my small hands and light hair.

The tour bus dropped a bunch of us back in Madrid so we could travel. We said goodbye to Mariko, who was going with a group of people to Salamanca, and went to meet Amy at the train station. She was waiting and suggested we go to Cordoba, and we went to stand in line for tickets. After about ten minutes we discovered we’d really like to see what else there was to do in Madrid, so we left the station and went back to the Hostal Continental.

We chilled for a bit in our room, then decided it was time to eat something, though it was still early (damn Spanish time). We went to Tio Pepe, the Chipotle of tapas, because it was nearby and we were hungry. I had two bocadillos (sandwiches): one with tortilla Espanola sandwich and one with chicken and brie, plus some potatoes with garlic mayonnaise. Then we ordered every dessert on the menu and ate it all.

Then a man tried to take Robin’s purse off the back of her chair, but she shouted “Hey!” and jumped up, so he dropped it and walked out the door. It caused quite the commotion among the people in the restaurant, and the four of us, still shaking, went back to our room.

We’d planned to spend the evening going to see a movie in Spanish, but both Robin and Amy had fallen asleep before the 10:30 showing, so Danielle and I went by ourselves. We saw “La Joya de la Familia” (“The Family Stone”), dubbed in Spanish. Neither of us had seen it, and we figured it wouldn’t be hard to understand. Jose Luis from the Fund had explained to us how every American actor is assigned a Spaniard to dub his voice--so Brad Pitt will have Carlos’ (or whoever’s) voice in all of his movies. Unfortunately, all the Spanish voice talents tend to sound the same. And Luke Wilson isn’t as funny in Spanish. But it was fun.

We spent Saturday shopping a little—we walked down Gran Via and went to Zara and H&M. None of them really had our style, and the stores were super crowded because it’s sale time. Robin did get a good winter jacket, though. We had lunch at the restaurant next door to our hostels: mostly little skewers of things of bread. We headed over to Corte Ingles next and looked around. We got some school supplies and a bunch of food, which we ate when we got back to the hostel.

That was the night we were going to go out, so we spent awhile getting ready. Amy did all of our eye makeup so we all looked cute. We headed out at about 9. Of course we had no plan. We ripped a page out of Amy’s guidebook which described a scene of “gypsy bars” over in Puerta del Sol where we could eat some tapas, so we took the Metro over there, planning to ask people where they were. I tried to reign in the three of them, who, having consumed large quantities of Absolut and Fanta, had no trouble wandering up to a group of Spaniards and blathering to them about wanting to find a bar. The three men they approached took our guidebook page away (calling it “bullshit!”) and said we could join them down the street. We did for a little while at a bar which served no food (at least long enough for them to praise our Spanish skills), then kept walking. We found a kid from the Fundacion as we were walking; he was just coming back from the theatre. The bar we were standing next to invited us in. We asked if they served food, and they said yes, so we went in.

We soon discovered that this tiny bar was where the English-speaking residents of Madrid came. There were no tourists, many Spaniards, but the bar was mostly filled with the English and the Irish, who had heard about Paul, the bartender, through word of mouth. We hung out there for the rest of the night, learning the life story of basically everyone in the bar: Daniel, whose father was Spanish but grew up in Boston, lived in L.A. working on the Kerry campaign and moved to Madrid a couple of years ago to go back to school for business. Alan from Ireland, who was with a large group of aeronautical engineers hanging out the bar, who moved to Madrid a week ago from Berlin and has worked all over Europe.

Paul the bartender played great music, got us a bunch of food (including the best tortilla Espanola I’ve had since I’ve been here) and kept telling Amy “Why are you trying to speak Spanish to me? Don’t you know I’m Irish?” Alan taught me the Irish phrase “Squeal amok le bubaline” which means “Enjoy yourself” which pretty well described the evening. Daniel was nice enough to walk us back to the hostel, where Robin and I went to bed exhausted. Amy and Danielle decided to stay out with Paul and Daniel and came back when the Metro reopened in the morning.

Sunday morning I dragged everybody out of bed before check-out time (dispensing Advil and water) and we went next door for some breakfast (they had chocolate but no churros. Bummer). Next we dropped our backpacks at the train station and went over to El Rastro, the big flea market Madrid has every Sunday. We walked around and I found some earrings and some tights, so I considered the outing a success. By then it was 3 and we were ready to get back to Toledo, so we waited in line for an hour trying to get tickets, then waited another two for the train to leave. The ride itself was super short—we were back in our room at the Fund by 7. Dinner at 8:30, then we bummed around awhile before a needed night’s sleep.