Posts
Two weekends ago, CIEE took our program (well half of our program...the other half had gone the weekend before) to Madrid and Toledo for the weekend. We left bright and early Friday morning, couldn't resist grabbing a mcmuffin at McDonalds at the train station on the way out (yum.) and took the high speed train to Madrid. I was glad CIEE payed for it because apparently round-trip tickets for that thing are 150 euro or something crazy like that. The train was really nice and surprisingly really comfortable. I turned to my Bon Iver playlist on my ipod and was asleep in less than 5 minutes.
I like Madrid way more than I thought I was going to. For some reason, I had this image in my head that it was going to be this huge, dirty city with no beach and no mountains. It was actually a lot smaller than Barcelona (at least the central area that everything is located in) and the buildings and plazas are a lot prettier and brighter than Barcelona. We could walk from one end of the town to the other so we never even had to buy a metro pass (obvious bonus since we have to take the metro everywhere in Barcelona). I also felt much less hated for not being local. And they speak SPANISH! as their first language, not Catalan. Lastly, and most importantly, they give you free tapas when you order a drink anywhere. So everytime you order a mug of beer or sangria (for 1 or 2 euro) you get a plate full of tapas. Heaven.
We were in Madrid for the start of Carnival. AKA: all the weird people come out and feel as though they have an excuse to be 12x weirder than they are on any other day. The street acts were just straight up creepy (see below) and strangely, there were Disney characters everywhere. It was strange.
Friday night, there was a big parade and ceremony to kick off Carnival and then a "performance" (I guess that's what I'll call it since to this day, I still have no idea what exactly I was watching) in Plaza Mayor. Basically there were a lot of crazy costumes, masks, the occasional firework, and people in spandex bodysuits (that covered their faces) climbing all spider-like and such on this metal structure.
After we had enough of the creepy spider people, we hit up a few tapas bars. One of our favorites was El Tigre. For 5 euro, you get a one liter mojito and plates on plates on plates of tapas. It was a typical tapas bar in that it was packed and there are no chairs or tables, just ledges along the wall. As it started getting later, they started pumping up the jams and the little tapas bar turned into a little dance floor. Even though I felt like I needed to run a marathon afterwards, it was a lot of fun.
On our way home, we had a brief Taken style moment when we accidentally ended up on a sketchy street and walked through a group of prostitutes that were...soliciting themselves alongside the street. What I can only assume to be their pimps were suddenly walking RIGHT behind us, quickly whispering to one another. I don't know if they were going to steal us or just steal Taylor's camera, but either way, I didn't feel like sticking around to figure it out and we "stopped to look at something" so they passed us and took the first street out of there. Sketch.
Saturday we went to Toledo. It was absolutely beautiful. CIEE gave us these headsets with this ridiculous looking walkie-talkie looking object to wear on LANYARD around our necks as we walked around. We didn't look like tourists or anything. After the first cathedral tour that lasted an hour and a half (and was probably the 37th cathedral tour I've been on since coming to Europe) we decided we weren't feeling the cathedral/museum thing and split off to explore by ourselves. That turned into a lot of shopping and eating, but eh I'm not complaining.
The extent of our Saturday night was eating at an amazing Italian restaurant (finally) and then a lot a lot of dancing at Joy, one of the local clubs just down the street from our hotel. We still weren't feeling the museum thing on Sunday, so instead we went to Parque del Retiro, rented a rowboat and floated on the little pond for a couple hours. Pure. Bliss.
Coming out of the park SURPRISE there was a protest of hundreds of thousands of people and SURPRISE the only way to get to our hotel (where we had to meet our group to go home) was straight through it. They were protesting labor reforms and spending cuts and it looked a little like this http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/19/spain-protests-labor-reforms_n_1287491.html
We all got separated and it was more than a little stressful since we were running late, thought we were going to miss the bus, I had no phone, and the people would. not. move. I was even speaking it my best polite spanish and it just wasn't happening. The only way to get anywhere was when they lifted up their hands to clap, and you had to duck under there elbows and get as far as you could before they stopped clapping. It was crazy.
No comments:
Post a Comment