Madrid Trip

Right now I am enjoying my last night in Madrid. Oh, being in Spain, what a joy!

To start with I would like ot say that all my flights went very smoothly and one of these times I simply have to have a scary plane trip. That is other than my mad rush in Toronto in July. Before I got onto the plane to Madrid I met a girl name Brenna who is going to a different city on my same program. So that was exciting, then I had one face I could recognize!

It is currently almost 9pm here and I still have yet to eat dinner! I thought this would be hard for me to adjust to, but at least thus far it has been fairly easy. I am hungry right now, but no more hungry than I am a 5 before a 6pm dinner time. They have been keeping us really busy, so we don't really have toime to think about being hungry.

The first day we had a lot of free time with one meeting in the evening with our respective coordinators/resident directors and then a group dinner. That was Monday. Tuesday we went to the Palacio Real (Royal Palace) which was really neat. I enjoy going through palaces and seeing all this neat art and decorations. Some rooms look very gaudi and others a very pretty.

That afternoon we went to El Museo Prado with some very famous artists there. Such as Goya, Velázquez and El Greco. Velásquez's famous painting of the royal family of the time is there (called Las Meninas). It is the one of the King in Queen in the reflection of the mirror as Velázquez paints them. Then there is the rest of the family and servants standing next to Velázquez in a group. It is also one of very few painting with perfect proportions. Here is a link to see it, let me know if it doesn't work. http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/velazquez/velazquez.meninas.jpg

Then we had more free time. That evening a group of us went to find food together and we ended up going to La cafetería Iowa. That was odd. I wasn't personally excited to EAT there though I thought it was funny to see it. The food was alright there, but we definitely could have gotten better Spanish food for cheaper. There are a lot of Nebraskas here and they are resturaunts as well.... Odd huh?

This morning we went to El Escorial which is a monastary with a school. There is a very neat Basilica with four organs! How cool is that? I really enjoy organ music, unfortunately no one was playing them while we were in there... There are also the graves of past kings and queens in the basement behind the basilica. You go down a marble stairway (everything is marble, the stairs, the walls and the ceiling) into a marble room with contains marble caskets. There are two wooden doors before entering that room that are known as the decomposing rooms. There three (maybe only two though) decomposing in there right now with their marble caskets waiting for them in the other room.

In the afternoon a group of us decided to go to the Reina Sofía museum and find food on the way there. We found this truly hole in the wall cervecería that got our orders completely mixed up. It was a lot of fun though and it did taste good. Then we found the museum where they having a special Picasso exhibit. We were able to see Guernica by Picasso, which you can see at this link: http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c186/simonquilty/guernica.jpg This famous painting depicts the town of Guernica after Franco allowed Hitler to practice bomb it.

Right now I am sitting in a café next to my hotel. We had our Sevilla orientation meeting tonight and that went well. We all received maps about where the university, program office and our host families are located (each with only their own host family or resedencia marked on it though). I am really excited and I have been thinking about what activities I want the coordinators to help me find to do there. In order to meet more Spaniards I need to get involved and be active!

Classes won't start for another week for me. We have a week of language review and training before we go to classes. So this is all very excited and I cannot wait for things to finally get started. I have enjoyed my time in Madrid, but I am exciting to get things started!