Viva la España!!!

Hello all! I realize it's been a while since I last posted, but November has been insane! If October was about exploring Paris, November has been about living in France and traveling to its neighbors. So, the quick version of events is that I went to Madrid for a weekend with a friend from my class, got sick, got better, finished my second class of the quarter, went to London with a friend for a few days, went to Edinburgh to meet a friend for a short visit, and am now back in Paris. Woo-hoo! Keep reading if you want to read the more detailed versions (I think I'll split this up between a few posts to keep this from getting too long).

So, for today's post: Spain!!!

A few weeks ago, my friend Ariana and I planned to go to Madrid for a weekend, where we would meet up with her friend, Ankita, who is studying in Toledo. We left Paris Friday afternoon, landed in Madrid, got directions from the friendly info desk guy at the airport, and made our way to our hostel, which was clean, friendly, and in a great location - and served free tea and coffee all day! For dinner, we went to a Mexican restaurant that had fabulously colorful wrestling-themed decorations:

The food was pretty good too; I had some sort of cheese filled empanada with a sauce on top.

That night we went out for drinks and found an Irish bar to hang out in that was seventeen times bigger than it appeared from the outside - it had two floors and tons of space with comfy chairs and couches and booths and tables. We loved it!

We wanted to have a lot of energy for Saturday, so we turned in relatively early and woke up at about 10 on Saturday ready for exploring. We had an early lunch at El Tigre, which Ankita found online in her search for an authentic Spanish tapas bar (tapas are small snacklike foods that are served for free when you order a drink at a lot of Spanish bars). El Tigre was a small packed restaurant (and I mean packed, you could barely walk) where you don't even sit, you stand at small counters around the edge of the room. At first, Ariana and I were worried about whether we could eat there - I'm mostly vegetarian, though I've started eating chicken, and she has a lot of food allergies, especially to fish - since there was definitely fish being served and there wasn't much control over which kind of dish you were served). But we talked to the waiter and he brought us potatoes and bread with cheese and some kind of tomato sauce, and it turned out to be cheap and delicious. Although I was disappointed that Spanish food isn't spicy, we still loved it there!

Sangria and tapas!

The rest of the afternoon was spent wandering the streets of Madrid without any real plan, which I love doing (we were heading in a general direction looking for sweets made by nuns in a convent, but we never found them). We picked up some souveniers, looked at the gorgeous architecture, saw some very odd street performers, picked up Indian samosas at an international food festival, and found an indoor fancy-shmancy food market surrounded by glass that had some of the most expensive produce I've ever seen.

This building was decorated so colorfully with figure paintings - so cool!

We made our way down to one of the most famous art museums in Madrid: the Reina Sofia. They had a fantastic exhibit on an artist who sews/embroiders world maps with each country colored by its flag, a new one each time world borders change. The detail is incredible; I can't even imagine how many hours it would take to embroider that.

This museum also housed many of Salvador Dali's and Picasso's work (including Guernica!!!) but I was so entranced that I forgot to take pictures. They were amazing, I promise! I did feel like I didn't know enough about Dali to appreciate what I was seeing, but I was still in awe. There was also a lot of modern art, really beautifully complex works that clearly took vast amounts of time and effort on the part of the artists. The technical skills exhibited by these testaments to the astounding genius and capabilities of the human race just took my breath away:

 

I will never understand the appeal of modern art.

After the museum, we went back to the hostel, ate dinner, and changed to go out for the night. We found a fun club that was oddly playing mostly American rock songs, but we had a great time anyway. 

Sunday morning we woke up, checked out of the hostel, and went exploring in Madrid's biggest flea market. It was fabulous, I got a great pair of pants and lots of souveniers, and we found a small corner shop that was selling intricate Moroccan, Spanish, and Middle Eastern objects. I wanted to take the entire store home with me. We saw an immensely talented street performer who played water glasses, and I found tiny sculpted vignettes of jewel-toned Spanish doors that I either want to recreate or find somewhere to hang in my room - they were so realistic!

We parted with Ankita, who went back to Toledo, and Ariana and I visited the biggest park in Madrid, the Retiro. It is a relaxing haven within such an energetic city, and we sat down to have tea outside of a fountain, and found a cute wooden bridge over a stream before coming upon the Crystal Palace, a glittering building in front of a glassy lake with trees whose leaves were in the middle of turning colors. It was fantastic. As we made our way out of the park, we came upon a church that had a copper dome with cris-crossing metal bits, which the years had weathered beautifully.

After this, we ate dinner at Maoz, the chain falafel place, and then relaxed at the same Irish pub until we had to leave for the airport. There was a duo of a fiddler and a guitarist in the pub, and they kept us entertained while we waited.

Our flight was at 6:30 am, and since we had to be there about two hours beforehand, and Madrid's public transportation shuts down late at night, we decided to just sleep in the airport, which, in retrospect, was probably one of the worst attacks on our immune systems and sleep habits we could have thought of, since we had to sleep in shifts to guard our stuff. We went straight from the airport to class, thus concluding our whirlwind visit!

I fell in love with Madrid, as did Ariana. It was such a colorful and vibrant city, and compared to Paris, absurdly friendly. I think at this point both Ariana and I (and the rest of our class) were going through a bit of a homesick phase, and were glad for a change of scenery, but I don't think that was the only reason for our favorable impression. Even though I was only working with the garbled bits of Spanish I vaguely remembered from eighth grade, I still felt that I managed to communicate better with the Spanish than I ever have with the French, and the general atmosphere was more relaxed and, frankly, happier.

After that trip though, I came down with quite a headcold, probably because of the lack of sleep, but I chugged grapefruit juice and managed to get better before London, thank god (more on that next time!)

Today has been beautiful. It was a sunny warm day in Paris (middle of November? says who?), and I had a lazy morning, then walked across half of Paris just for the hell of it, and sat in a cafe and read for a couple of hours, then came home and started a new knitting project. I'm about to make dinner (fancified macaroni and cheese - I've taken to sauteeing tomatoes with garlic and cumin and cayenne and mixing that with the noodles and cheese mix), and then I'm meeting my friend Emily for the evening - a perfect day in old Pareee.

Love, Naomi