Madrid - 5/3/11

Pictures!

As we’d gone to sleep after 4, I didn’t stir when the other girls got up and dressed and out. However, the 6^th girl turned on the light at 9 when she got up, and I started awake. I was not thrilled at her rudeness as I’d only been asleep 4.5 hours and we had been really quiet when we’d come in. Tricia and I went down to breakfast and had toast and cereal and hot chocolate. Tricia had all of these at once in the form of Nutella and Corn Flakes on toast.  And then I went back to bed and tried to sleep until 11 when we had to check out, but it was too stuffy in the room and since I was in the top bunk I didn’t want to climb down to turn on the fan. So I eventually gave up and packed up my backpack and dragged it down the stairs. We left our bags at the desk and went off to find chocolate and churros (which you are supposed to eat at sunrise after staying up all night, but unfortunately the chocolateria was closed from 2 am to 8 am so we had to return after sleeping.

We couldn’t find the same chocolateria we had passed several times, but stumbled upon a smaller one with outdoor booths nestled into the little alley between buildings. We each got a mug of liquid chocolate and a plate of churros and went to town. It was delicious, but afterward I think we both felt ready to give up chocolate for a while.

Before leaving the hostel we had checked the weather. Sunday and Monday were supposed to rain, so we had schlepped umbrellas and jackets around all day but the rains never came. It had even been too warm for our jackets. Tuesday didn’t call for rain, just a warm sunny day. So we left the jackets and umbrellas. Halfway through our churros, it began to get windy, and soon the sky was sprinkling lightly on us. We moved under an umbrella (which was more for the sun than the rain but did provide some protection) to finish eating and then hurried back to the hostel just as the sky let loose and the rain really began coming down in big heavy drops. A few minutes after we were safely inside, it was pouring, along with thunder and lightening. So we set up camp in the lobby of the hostel we were no longer staying at and planned some more of our trip.

Reenactment

Once it stopped raining we decided to take a long stroll in the direction of the biblioteca (library). You may remember the biblioteca as the place I slept my first day in Madrid. After going through security, we tried to find the library portion of the building. We quickly learned (after being turned away by security) that the National Library is actually only for government officials. So we had to make do with the public sections, which were the museum and two art exhibits.

We walked quickly through the first exhibit, which was devoted to various Spanish advertisements through the years. Next we hit the museum, which was much bigger than I’d first thought. I showed Tricia where I’d slept the first day in the theater. The movie was actually quite funny - it looked about 40 years old and was in black and white. The camera panned over the books and architecture and did very little else. We also saw old printing presses, music players (like the phonograph), and a timeline of how printing has evolved through the ages.

The final exhibit was on art from Latin America. It was colorful and depicted commentaries on war and corruption as well as on the people and the culture.

We left the biblioteca and rushed back to our hostel to pick up our bags and get on the metro. On the way we passed the National Archeological Museum and stopped inside for 20 minutes. We saw fossils, sculptures, and pottery from Spain’s history. The coolest thing (to me) was a earthen pot that had been used as a burial chamber and still contained the bones and some possessions of the deceased.

We were heading to our host family, who we’d met on Couch Surfing. The metro took an hour, and we had to transfer from the subway to an above ground train. We had beautiful views from the train. When we arrived, we had some trouble finding the place, but we stopped a friendly man with a baby and he pointed us in the right direction.

Upstairs in the apartment, we met Jose, Sole, and their five-month-old baby Camin. They are learning English, but they can speak it better than we can speak Spanish, so with a little help from the translator app on Tricia’s iPhone we managed to communicate pretty well. Jose showed us pictures from his vacation in Morocco and recommended we visit there next. J

At 10, we had dinner. Sole made noodle soup, a Muslim tapa that was toasted bread with meat that tasted like pepperoni, and big salads with lettuce, tomato, olives, crabmeat, beets, carrots, cucumbers, and corn. For dessert we had pear and kiwi. They were very welcoming and gave us a spare room with two twin beds and even let us sleep in when they left in the morning.