First week in Madrid

First, I want to apologize for the delay in blogging.  I really had no clue how must time it would take to write these very comprehensive posts.  It seems like now that "vacation" has ended and semi-normal life in Madrid has begun, I will be able to publish something every few days or maybe once a week to recap the activities here in Spain.  Besides, I think stories from here can get pretty redundant and the really interesting stuff will occur while traveling outside of Madrid - stay tuned for that!

All in all, week one has been a blast.  Very exhausting, but we have definitely gotten acquainted with life here very quickly.  Last Monday, the day after arrival, was our day of orientation for SLU Madrid.  We all met at the university in the morning and were bussed to a retreat/convention center in the Sierra of Madrid (kind of out in the hills).  We discovered our super-simple commute to school will be extremely convenient.  We can get to and from classes in under 5 minutes, while some people are forced to take the metro and deal with 20+ minute travels.  The biggest thing that we learned the hard way on this first day was the cultural difference in meals.  From the US, we are used to BIG, hearty breakfasts, lunches and dinners, plus some hefty snacking in between.  Here in Spain, we are offered ridiculously light breakfasts, consisting of toast or maybe a small bowl of cereal or a croissant and coffee or juice.  This little meal has to hold us over until lunch, which traditionally does not occur until 2:00 PM, and then dinner rolls around at about 9:00 PM.  While I do think we are slowly getting used to the smaller portions and delayed dining schedule, we have had to do a lot of supplementing this past week.  Snacks are the only thing keeping us going!  Orientation was alright, we got some useful tips from our leaders and got to meet up with all of our friends from SLU, as well as meet other people studying at SLU Madrid.  My leader, Claire, originally from St. Louis, has lived in Madrid for two years now and attended SLUM.  Therefore, she has great insight into life here and our difficulties as foreign students.  On Monday night, a big group of us from SLU decided to meet up in La Puerta del Sol, Madrid's city center, to go out and explore the nightlife that we had been hearing of so much.  The plaza is brimming with club promoters, who will beg you to visit their venue, offering free entrance and often some free drinks.  We followed one promoter to a couple bars, then ended up at Dubliner's, which is an infamous hangout among SLU study abroaders.  It is an irish bar that is always packed and supposedly always fun.  We have been there twice this week and have really had a great time.  Another culture shock that was noted in the bars is the obsession with "chupitos" or shots!  We do not really do shots at home (at least not that often) but here in Madrid, everyone does shots, offers shots and hands them out free with drinks.  They slam them down saying, "¡arriba, abajo, al centro, al dentro!"  Our main mode of transportation is the metro in Madrid, which picks us up a couple minutes walk from home and drops us all over the city.  We are getting better and batter at navigating the system.  The downside is that the trains shut down at 1:30AM, which is right when the bars are getting warmed up, so basically you are stranded until 6AM, when it reopens, or you're left to take a cab or walk back home!  We did not get home until around 4AM on Monday night, which seemed to be quite normal... yikes!

Dubliner's: take 1

Tuesday was the first day of class, I had Spanish Literature, then Sociology (Spanish Culture), and finally another Spanish class on the civilization and culture of Spain.  The classes are longer than normal, 1 hour and 15 minutes, which seems like an eternity in the classroom, but since all my classes are only two days a week, I have Fridays off!  That is well worth it. Our class is held in SLU's large building, Padre Rubio Hall, and basically you just move from room to room throughout the day, bouncing around the same building.  It is a lot of fun and kind of like being back in grade school, where you literally see everyone you know all day long.  We were still kind of injured from the wild night before, so after class I swung into to bookstore to pick up my books.  I got out of there for only 80 EUR, much less than I would have paid at home, and then stopped by the store, Carlin, to get school supplies.  It took me forever to find simple, lined notebooks for writing.  Nearly all the notebooks were graph paper - who even uses graph paper?  I napped for a while after returning home and later Ross, our roommate Alex and I went down the street to supplement our dinner that evening.  Since our host mother, Pilar, works during the day and is busy in the evenings, she has hired a Romanian housekeeper, Cosmina, to manage the housework each day and also prepare our meals for the evening.  So, unfortunately, the housekeeper cooks dinner around 1 or 2 PM and we are left to microwave the food around 8 or 9 PM for dinner.  It sucks! but the benefits of living here (ie. location, nice house, etc.) outweigh this flaw.  We ate at a resaturant called 100 Montaditos, which is just up the street from our apartment and has a menu with 100 tiny sandwiches off all different types, for really cheap.  So we each ordered a couple sandwiches, receiving a big jar of beer for 1 euro with the food.  We were now full (enough) and tired, so we headed home and went to bed.

As far as Wednesday and Thursday went, class was just the same, with the addition of two new classes, Art History: Modern Art and Theology: God and Human Experience (this class is 99% St. Louis students, so it will be a lot of fun).  After class on Wednesday, Dan, Lauren, Ross and I hopped on the metro to go explore Sol in the daylight.  I must mention Madrid's excellent metro system that I keep referencing.  I have heard it is literally one of the best around and we are quickly discovering why.  We live just near (a few blocks from) the stop Islas Filipinas "Philippine Islands" haha!  We can begin here and easily travel to Sol and really anywhere in the city with ease.  Once downtown, we were hungry (as usual) and were on the lookout for some good tapas for lunch.  We walked around La Puerta del Sol and wound through a couple side streets and settled on a little tapas place.  The food was alright, tapas are like little appetizers ordered in large quantities with drinks that serve as a whole meal.  We had things like croquettes, spanish omelets, and various other portions of meat and fish.  We all got a big jar of Sangria, which was delicious!  After lunch, we walked to La Plaza Mayor, a famous, square in the heart of Madrid.  Then, we decided to stop for churros and chocolate, a famous Spanish dessert.  I remembered a place that I visited last time I was in Madrid, but had no idea the name or location.  I asked a lady in Plaza Mayor for a churros restaurant and, by chance, she directed us to Chocolateria San Gines, the exact place I was thinking of!  The churros were good and revitalized us for awhile.  Afterwards, we walked to the Royal Palace, Palacio Real, for some views of the outside.  That evening, we met up with our group of friends outside a bar relatively close to our apartments.  The place was called Orange and was being advertised for it's drink specials.  For that reason, there were a couple hundred people waiting outside.  We decided to hop back on the metro and head to Sol, once again.  We followed a promoter to another irish bar for the free shots and champagne.  The girls were dying to go to a large discoteca, The Palace, so we followed them there until we discovered there was a large cover charge for us, so we bailed out and took a cab back home - not until stopping for a slice of pizza near the club!

Churros and Chocolate de San Gines

El Palacio Real - The Royal Palce

Thursday is the new Friday in Madrid.  Since I do not have class on Fridays, it makes for a great Thursday night and wonderfully long weekend.  Class went well on Thursday.  I am hoping that these classes will not require too much busy work, aside from preparing for lecture and studying for exams.  It is appearing that way, but I will keep my fingers crossed.  My two Spanish courses are challenging, since it is really the first time I am fully learning other topics in the Spanish language, like literature and history/civilization.  After class, Dan, Lauren, Ross and I decided to go in search of a local cell phone.  The university sells them, but we were told we could get better rates through other companies.  Right near our apartment was a Vodafone store, so we decided to check it out.  On the way, we ran into a store called "Taste of America," which carries all sorts of imported food from the US, like Aunt Jemima syrup, Ocean Spray jellied cranberries :) and much, much more!  We freaked out, scoured the aisles and definitely plan to return for a little, but expensive, taste of home! The cell phone store was closed in the afternoon, like so much of the city is, we headed down the street to 100 Montaditos for a 1 euro beer while we waited.  After, the store was open and we were able to get tiny, prepaid, flip phones for use in Spain and in Europe to stay in touch with our friends.  That was a must!  After, Ross and I stopped into the grocery store to pick up some snacks and he got a cheap bottle of wine for dinner.  We noticed the eggs and milk are not refrigerated and the seafood section smells so bad, it is hard to walk by!  yuck!  We had intended to go out again with everyone Thursday night and stay in Madrid all weekend to get acclimated, however our plans changed over dinner.  We decided it was silly to waste any time and wanted to get straight to traveling.  Toledo is a small, historic town just outside of Madrid that we were interested in going to, so we puled the trigger and made plans to leave early Friday morning and potentially spend the whole night in Toledo.  Therefore, we did not leave the apartment on Thursday night.  We polished off the wine and went to sleep to rest up for the first day of travel from Madrid.

"Taste of America" - Aunt Jemima, Betty Crocker and Hersheys

Our trip to Toledo began at 8AM on Friday.  We got up, choked down our measly piece of toast, grabbed our bags and headed to the metro stop for a rather long ride to the bus station.  We knew the busses left nearly every 30 minutes, so we were hoping to catch one just in time.  We power walked from the metro to the busses and happened to arrive within 5 minutes of one leaving.  We fumbled with an automatic ticket machine and then boarded the bus for Toledo.  It was about an hour ride, so by 10:30AM we were sitting down for breakfast in they city.  Toledo is very old and historic and sits very high up, so we had to tackle a pretty big hill before earning our meal.  We got a map from a tourist center, then began to walk around the city, stopping at each tourist attraction we encountered.  I mentioned that we were considering spending the night.  Therefore, we each had big backpacks filled with clothes for a night's stay, which was terribly hot and annoying after a couple hours of walking.  Our first stop was the Cathedral - a huge Gothic masterpiece in the center of the city.  We had to pay 8 euro for the entrance and were initially turned off by that, however after seeing the inside and all that the place had to offer, we were happy we went inside.  Several people are buried inside the building and if they were bishops, their caps hang from the ceiling above their grave to protect their spirit (I overheard a Spanish tour-guide and got some free info).  We walked from the Cathedral, down to the Jewish district.  Toledo is unique in that at one time, Christians, Jews and Muslims coexisted there and their distinct influences to architecture and the culture of the city are still evident.  We toured the Jewish mosque and then stopped for lunch.  The last major attraction that we toured was The Church of the Jesuits, quite fitting since we attend a Jesuit institution.  The church was very nice, but best of all was its "twin towers" that we could climb for incredible views of the entire city.  We encountered a woman at the top, from New Zealand and chatted with her for awhile (well... I did).  She took a couple pictures of us and we began our marathon walk out of the city.  We decided it was not really place to spend the night and was better suited as a day-trip, since the major attractions are really viewable in a day and as my host mother said, the city lacks "marcha" or liveliness/nightlife.  We, along with our now seemingly 50lb backpacks, scaled the cliff on our way to the train station.  Even though we arrived by bus, we thought we would try the train, either for a ride to another nearby city, or a cheap and efficient means back home.  Unfortunately, the trains from Toledo only travel back to Madrid, so we bought three tickets, had a beer during the wait and enjoyed the 25 minute ride back to Atocha station.

Catedral of Toledo, Spain

View from atop the Twin Towers of the Church of the Jesuits

Photo thanks to the New Zealander 

Once back in the city, we intended to just go back tot he apartment and siesta, however we were at Atocha station, literally across the street from where I stayed last time in Madrid, with Jenna and our classmates, and very close to the famous Parque del Retiro.  Since we had walked so much, we saw no harm in continuing the adventure and hiking through Retiro, stopping for some ice cream near the huge pond and catching a metro ride back home on the other side.  The park was beautiful and filled with people!  Coming from Springfield, I think we are not really "park people" but I can definitely see the attraction here in Spain.  Back home, we rallied again to go out with our friends (who were not exhausted from a full day of walking).  We did the same ole thing, beginning at Dubiners for drinks, then the girls were again dying to go to a club, so we all headed there, with the same horrible outcome. The place, Pacha, was busting at the seams and required an exorbitant cover charge.  Plus, I got screwed into riding in a cab with two girls from SLU that I didn't know and after they bailed, I was stuck with the 8 euro fare.  I can't wait to see those two around Padre Rubio Hall!  Frustrated, we got in cabs and returned to our neck of the woods just to have some friends over for drinks at our place (since mamá was gone for the weekend, haha!).  A very good night's sleep was in store after this exciting week!

Pond of Retiro Park