We arrived in Madrid on Tuesday afternoon and checked into our hostel after a long, hideous taxi ride. No, the trip wasn´t long, we just had a super ancient cab driver that didn´t even know where Calle Jesus y Maria (our street) is. He didn´t have a map or anything - he circled and circled and finally asked someone on the street which way to go. It was ridiculous. Old, senile people get away with everything!
We haven´t really done a lot of planned activities while we´ve been here. It´s really hot, and for the first two days the air conditioning in our room didn´t work, so it was pretty miserable, particularly at night. They have free breakfast (toast, coffee, cornflakes!), organized hostel activities (drinking games, pub crawls, tapas bar hopping, flamenco dancer night, etc) where you pay a small fee and get to be entertained for a couple of hours.
We went to the Reina Sofia on Wednesday, which was amazing, and also amazingly long, and then we saw an authentic flamenco dancer with amazing solo guitarist in the sweaty basement of a pub, one street over from the hostel. Thursday was another sluggish day. We walked around... we went to the Palacio Real, a royal palace which was AMAZING, and went to the Museo del Prado for free. And it was mostly oil paintings with similar religious themes. I´m pretty glad it was free. I really only went so I can tell people I went to the Museo del Prado and saw works by Goya and El Greco and Dalí. But really, it was not amazing. The Reina Sofia is totally worth visiting, though.
Our bunks are fun. I get the top bunk! There are 10 girls in my room and I´ve made friends with a few of them. It´s hilarious trying to watch 10 girls passive-aggressively fight for bathroom rights but so far everyone has been really chill. I´m trying to shake this residual cough from being sick this week, I think it´s because of the drastic weather change from Oviedo (temperate) to Barcelona (muggy, sticky, oceany) to Madrid (dry, hot). I think Madrid is preparing me for Utah though.
I only get 15 minutes to use the computer at a time so I´ll wind this up, but I´ll be back in the United States tomorrow at 11:05pm MST. Hopefully the traveling will go relatively smoothly and I´ll be in Utah in no time at all. I´ll come back here and post some kind of reflection at some point, probably. ¡Hasta pronto!
