Vamos a la Playa...Travel Break (Week One, Part One): MADRID

Hola amigos! Me llamo Cristina y soy de Espana! I spent last week in Spain and it was so much fun! I can’t believe week one of travel break is officially over. Which means that there is only a few weeks left of the semester (!!!) Traveling throughout Europe with my friends really was a memorable experience and will probably remain one of the highlights of this semester. Since I’ve been using my blog as basically my own public journal to remember this trip, I’m going to split travel break up into a few different posts for your own good. I am going to try my best to be concise though, because I'm still traveling right now and when I get home, I'll be buried in homework! We (myself, Mikaela, Kelly, Laura, Caroline, Lexi and Emily) left for Madrid on Saturday afternoon after spending the morning twiddling our thumbs in excitement. All of us packed in a carry on (props to Laura who fit it all in just a backpack) so we knew the trip was sure to be interesting just by the sheer fact that we could only take about a quarter of the things we actually wanted to take.

After taking multiple wrong turns, we finally found our hostel once we arrived in Madrid. The staircase leading up to the hostel looked like an abandoned construction site, but Hostel Barbiara turned out to not be too bad.  Madrid lived up to its reputation immediately –there was a party on the street every night, and we could hear every bit of it from our room directly above. Nevertheless, we got to an early start the next morning. We started our tour of the city at El Rastro, which is the largest outdoor market in Europe. It is also infamous for pick-pocketing. A few of us wore money bags under our shirts for extra security, which is why I look a few months pregnant in every picture. We figured not having our money stolen was worth the nerd alert. We all found some great deals at the market. I managed to barter a little bit with one vendor and got a new scarf for only 1.50 euros! I also bought a pair of earrings, but when I took them out a few days later, I realized they were actually the ugliest things I have ever seen. I had heard that they sell a lot of turquoise in Spain, so I guess the excitement of the day made me buy the first blue piece of jewelry I saw. Don’t ask to see them because I am too embarrassed to show them to you. Good thing they were cheap! We also explored a lot of other places throughout the city. It is a really cool city and is kind of reminiscent of New York City. We spent the afternoon in El Retiro Park, which is beautiful! There is a nice lake in the middle of it with people renting row boats and so many green spaces to just chill out and spend the day. We took advantage of the sun and tried to get some color on our translucent skin as we enjoyed a bottle of wine that cost less than a bottle of water.

Before dinner (they don’t eat until about 10 pm in Spain!), we went to a bull fight in the Plaza Toros de las Ventas. We were all really excited for it, and it was interesting to see what other cultures think of as entertainment. The first time the fighter killed the bull we were a little taken aback. It was gruesome, but everyone around us was cheering and acting like it was totally casual. Six bulls later, it was still a little disturbing to us, so we ended up guessing what time the bull would collapse because the show seemed to be on a pretty predictable schedule (about 20 minutes per bull).

The next day, we decided to take one of the free walking tours of Madrid offered by the hostel (somehow we got lucky and literally stumbled upon the group in the middle of the city). Our tour guide Harriet was pretty awesome (we oddly enough, saw her at the metro station in Barcelona a few days later and called out to her from across the platform…I highly doubt she remembered us, so we probably just seemed crazy), and we got to see all of the important sides of the city including the Plaza Mayor, Madrid Cathedral, Plaza de Cibeles, and the Palacio Real. My lucky streak ended soon after that though when a bird pooped on me in the middle of the tour.

The tour lasted about three hours, so we were pretty tired of walking afterwards, but were determined to see as much as we could in a limited amount of time. Our next stop was to ride the Teleferico cable car, which is basically a gondola ride that takes you to the top of a hill and supposedly gives you a really awesome view of the city. Being on a pretty tight budget, we decided to not buy the roundtrip ticket to the top. We figured that since a one-way option was provided, there had to be a way to walk back down. After we paid, we were handed a piece of receipt paper, so Laura, Lexi and I immediately walked to the trashcan and threw it away. Turns out our “receipt” was actually our ticket. We tried explaining this to the ticket collector, but our Spanish wasn’t sophisticated enough to get our point across. Again, being cheap college kids we marched right back to the trashcan, took off the lid, and literally started digging through it without even thinking about how ridiculous we must have appeared. When we finally looked up (with only 2 tickets found), both the rest of our group and the workers were all staring at us hysterically laughing. This went on for a good five minutes before the ticket guy just let us through. I think he just felt bad for how pathetic the situation was. Anyways, once we got on the cable car, we quickly realized that hiking down might not be such an easy task considering the lift took us over not only a river, but a highway as well. Apparently, this wasn’t a big enough obstacle for us though because once we reached the top (the view was a little disappointing) we figured the only way to make the trip worth it was to find our own way back down. It was only about 2 kilometers back to the start, but it took us a good two hours to get back down. We did a bit of off-roading and traversed through the woods for awhile, stopping every couple of minutes to take a funny picture or climb some of the trees. My unlucky streak continued when I tripped up a rise (it couldn’t even be called a hill), completely ate it and then proceeded to break out in hives from the hay. Somehow we managed to find a path over the river and highway, follow directions completely in Spanish and find a metro station to get us back into the main city. Now that is three euros wisely spent!

We were all completely spent and could barely walk another step by the time we got to a familiar place again. I’m pretty sure we had traversed a good 15 miles (seriously, though) by this point. We forced ourselves to take advantage of free admission into the Reina Sophia museum to get our cultural experience in for the day. I think we all tried our best to act interested, but I’m pretty sure our facial expressions made it pretty obvious that we were faking it. We dropped out one by one, and I think the longest survivors only lasted about 15 minutes. The night ended indulging in some traditional Spanish Paella (can’t say I’m a huge fan…I’ll stick with the potato omelets!).

The next day, we only had a few hours left in Madrid before heading to our next stop. We did some browsing through the shops along the Gran Via (the main street of Madrid) and had a nice picnic in El Retiro Park, where I was pooped on a second time by a bird. Of all the places he could have picked…what are the chances!? The weather began to turn for the worse at this point. We got stuck in the first of many rainstorms, so we took cover in the Prado museum (free entrance for students!) and even managed to last a little longer in this one!