Dia 3: Caminamos muchisimo

Hola guapos,

Today was quite the busy day! It started out with waking up at 830am and opening our window that overlooks el Parque Retiro to another beautiful day in Madrid. The first activity was a tour of El Museo del Prado. I was super excited to go back to the Prado because so much of the art has been in my textbooks from class so it's surreal so see the originals in person. Now before I start talking about my experience INSIDE the museum, I shall describe my experience OUTSIDE:
I'm wandering around outside the museum with our whole program taking pictures of the scenery and buildings and then I feel a woman come up close to my left side so I turn my head to my left and as soon as I turn I feel another woman brush up on my right side. Basically, they sandwiched me. When I felt the woman on my right I quickly turned to look at her and she was reaching into my purse!!!!! Ahhhhhh! Okay maybe it doesn't sound scary to you, but I've never been robbed or nearly robbed because I'm from little old Indialantic where my parents don't even lock the front door so this definitely shook me up. Sadly, I did the whole deer in headlights thing where I just stared at her. THANK HEAVENS she didn't steal anything because I have cat-like reflexes and caught her before she had a chance. THEN, a different girl on my program said she was walking across the street earlier and felt something on her back so she reacher her arm around into her backpack and caught someone's hand in her backpack! This is all too cray for me. Just to keep in theme, I'm going to jump ahead to when I was at the Mercado de San Miguel for dinner tonight (the same market I had pictures from yesterday) and I saw a woman trying to steal something out of another woman's bag. When I was in Spain last time no one ever tried to steal from me so this is a whole new experience. Needless to say I am guarding my belongings like a hawk now and am VERY VERY prepared to beat someone up with my purse (which is pretty damn heavy) if they try to mess with me.

Alright no more drama, onto the museum!
The most important thing that I want to impress upon all of you is that we had a tour COMPLETELY in Spanish. It was awesome! I can honestly say that I understood everything. I felt quite pleased with myself about this and it made the tour feel that much more authentic. To avoid being verbose here is a list of some fun facts I learned and some of the masterpieces I saw:
- "El Lavatorio" by Tintoretto is a massive painting of Jesus washing the feet of the apostles and when you stand on the right side of the painting it has the perspective that everything looks far away and then when you walk to the left side it looks like everything is right in front of you and doesn't have much depth. We were all quite impressed with that optical illusion
- There are tons of statues all throughout the museum and all of the male statues have perfectly chiseled bodies (literally). Which is how I came to learn how Spaniards refer to a 6 pack of abs, they call it "una tableta de chocolate". This translates to "a bar of chocolate", which if you think about a Hershey bar, it has 6 connected blocks which looks like your 6 abdominal muscles. Americans may have abs of steel but Spaniards have abs of chocolate... and mama likey chocolate :)
Sorry I don't have any pics from inside the museum but it was prohibido.

After our visit to the museum, we had a walking tour of the city of Madrid (still all in spanish!). They took us down all the main roads and we saw the Capital Building, the Metropolis (National Bank), the US Embassy, Puerta del Sol (the heart of Spain) which is where the Mile 0 of the city is located and finally Plaza Mayor. 

 (#nofilter)

(I have stood on the HEART of Spain)

(rocking the power point in Puerta del Sol)


After our walking tour I went and grabbed una cerveza grande por solo uno euro (a big ass beer for only a buck!) and had a Mediterranean salad that was super delicious with some amigos. 

After our free time in the Plaza Mayor and Puerta del Sol, we trekked back to our hotel to hop on a bus and drive 1 hour outside the city to El Escorial. This is a giant building in the mountains that has 3 barrios (areas): a monastery, colegio (school k-12, NOT college) and a basilica. I am proud to say that I have visited what is considered the 8th Wonder of the World! And sí, it indeed was wonderful :) The monastery and colegio are closed to the public so we just spent our time in the basilica and we couldn't take photos inside but LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING fue magnifico! You wouldn't believe all of the detail they put into constructing this basilica. Por ejemplo, it took 3,000 workers 21 years para construirlo (to construct it)!! The basilica is as tall as a 34 story building, aka IMMENSE! Alright para conservar tiempo voy a crear una lista de las cosas interesantes: 

- The basilica has a biblioteca (library) that is the 2nd most important library in the catholic church (second to the Vatican, obvi) 

- Casi todos (almost all) of the kings and queens of Spain are buried in a panteon al fondo (crypt at the bottom) of the basilica. We actually went down into the crypt and it was SUPER creepy because you're basically surrounded by dead bodies in fancy ass tombs and everyone that's buried there was extremely powerful and it's as though their power is palpable when you're down their looking at all of the grandiose decorations and listening to the guide describe them and their accomplishments. I deff had a National Treasure/Da Vinci Code kind of moment. 

- The building is decorated with white tiles that have blue paint on them and they are called "azulejos" which is a fusion of the words "azul" and "lejos" (blue and far) because from far away all you see is blue... super guay ("really cool", I know it looks like "super gay" but FALSO it means really cool y todo el mundo de espana se usa la frase!)  

 (en route to El Escorial)

 (standard jumping photo because I would have died if I took another hand on the hip pic in front... El Escorial is sparsely decorated on the outside to symbolize that all the beauty lies within)

 (the basilica inside El Escorial)

 (nuestro grupo!!!)

 (outside the basilica...I know you're digging the hand on the hip)

Onto the night life:

We got back from El Escorial and decided to go eat en el Mercado de San Miguel (we are finally to the pickpocket event I described earlier). Apart from that, nothing too cray happens here, it was a Friday night so everything was pippity poppin off. Interestingly enough, there was an outdoor opera being performed in the Plaza Mayor for free! We stopped and watched por un ratito (for a little bit) and then kept on heading back to the hotel. We stopped in a cerveceria to chug a caña (a small beer) just to get the juices flowing for our !NOCHE LOCA¡

(on our walk back to the hotel from Plaza Mayor after dinner)

We quickly got ready for the night and then went to another cerveceria that sold those big beers we had drank earlier for lunch... I drank 2 :) . It was a rather large group of us at this specific bar, probably 12, and we stuck out like sore thumbs all speaking english and looking like americans. We sat down at a table near these guys that were deff european but we couldn't figure out where they were from. Well 30 seconds go by and they ask us "de donde eres" (where are you from) and when we told them America, they said they thought we were European.... maybe this was just their pickup line, but it was damn good one because it was EXACTLY what we all wanted to hear since we are trying to blend in and look like spaniards. Come to find out they were 3 Irish boys (Dean, Lee and Finbar... yea you read that correctly, the kids name was FINBAR), 1 British boy (we called him Oxford) and a French kid.. They were all in their early twenties and had come to Spain to teach English. They were awesome! Their accents were really heavy and they were making us try to mimic them, which we were pathetic at.  After chatting for like 20 minutes they told us they were going to go to an area called El Tribunal where the real spanish people go out at night as opposed to staying in the heart of madrid where they said everything was an overpriced tourist trap. 

Feeling adventurous y borracha (drunk... lolz), 6 of us hopped on a metro with them. The streets were COVERED with all different european people: spanish, british, italian, french.. todos. We went into a bar that was a little hole in the wall where our irish friend Dean was treated like a local celebrity. Clearly, we had found the right tour guide. We hung out at this bar for a while meeting all of his different friends who were mostly from the UK and also randomly chatting with strangers. We were on Cloud 9. We didnt get back till 345am and had to be up at 730am. #worthit

Sadly, I didn't bring a camera with me out because I didn't want anything stolen in crowded bars so I don't have any pics. PERO, my friends took pictures so they should be on facebook soon enough :)

If you have made it to this part of my post then MUCHOS GRACIAS for reading it all because I knew this was a long one.

!Vamos a Toledo mañana¡

Hasta luego,

Raquel

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