Madrid- ¡Muy Bueno!

When I finally got to Madrid, it was glorious. I had a great hotel room with my good friend Christina, a group of people that spoke English, and scheduled tours of museums that I got to ride a bus to. It was heaven. And here are some of my experiences:

• In many parts of Madrid, you don´t make left turns. You go around these circle intersections, sometimes backtrack a little, and always try to make a right turn. I think that the bus drivers must be navigational geniuses to get around some of the places they did.
• When they are doing construction work on buildings, they cover the side of it with a large tarp. The tarp often has an advertisement on it, or somethings a fake painting of how the building will look when they are done. This tarp is not only to protect the workers on the side of the building, but to protect the street from falling objects and to make the building under construction look more appealing. I thought it was a great idea, with a nicer effect than looking at a gutted building.
• Castles and palaces have a lot of useless rooms. They are beautiful and ornate and fun to look at, but who needs a room plated in gold and lined with 10 ornate tables and Persian rugs just to walk through it to get to another useless room? That whole system baffled me, but if it was what the King wanted, then I guess that´s what the King got.
• The Prado Museum was pretty cool. We got to see older Spanish works of art by Goya, Velazquez, and another one that I can´t remember. It was very cool, and our tour guide told us the stories behind the paintings and the secret symbols the painters used to express their feelings.
• Spain is approximately the size of Oregon.
• We passed by a big cross on the way to Salamanca, and our directors told us that it marked The Valley of the Fallen. The cross is huge and made out of stone, with a basilica built underneath it. The basilica is the longest in the world and it built into the mountain. Francisco Franco and other Spaniards killed in the Spanish Civil War are buried beneath it.
• The Spanish have a unique snack called tapas. It is a thick piece of good bread with all sorts of stuff on top. It can be meat, seafood, a kind of potato salad, vegetables, anything. You can eat these around midday as a snack or a light lunch. You simply go into a tapas bar, pick out one that you want, and keep ordering depending on how hungry you are. I have yet to try one yet though, as the only ones I found so far we seafood-alicious. Not for me.
• In Spain siesta time is usually from around 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm. During that time you can usually find something to eat, but don´t bet on shopping anywhere. Most stores are closed while the workers are resting or eating.
• They don´t bring you your check while dining in a restaurant in Spain. You need to ask the waiter for it, because it is considered rude of them to interrupt your meal if you aren´t done. Make sure you pay, or you might do an accidental dine and dash, and feel terrible when you can´t go back and actually pay!

That´s about it for Madrid. We did some other things, like go to the Museo de Reina Sofia, which has modern art and lots of Picasso, and we went to Salamanca, which is the oldest university in Spain and one of the four oldest in the world, and that was very cool.

Right now I am in Valencia, enjoying the beautiful and not-too-hot-yet weather and fun sights. I´ll make sure to have another post soon about how classes and living with my new Spanish mom is going.

¡Adios!