Estoy aqui!

SPAIN-MADRID-January 25

So I arrived yesterday after about 20 hours of travel. All my flights were on time, and we even arrived early to Madrid, only a 5 hour and 55 minute flight, still way too long. I watched Baby Mama, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and some Dark Night so it made the flight go by way faster. I also sat next to a girl in my program, Christina, who is one of my good friends here now. We got into Madrid right before 10 am, so 3 am Kansas time, I was exhausted. I have 4 friends so far that I spend most of my time with (yeah I’m pretty popular with four friends, I know, but it’s hard to learn so many names and all that…). They are Leah, my roommate, who is a senior at K-State; Molly, a junior at K-State (real weird that one person is from K-State, let alone two, but despite being wildcats, they don’t suck!); Christina, a junior from UMass; and Grayson, a junior at UGA and from North Carolina. They’ll be in tons of my partypics and the things I post on here, soooo yeah.

Once we got sort of settled in the hotel (really nice, surprisingly), we decided to go out to lunch for our first Spanish meal. IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE. We went to a random tapas bar, which is just small portions of random food, and the menu was entirely in Spanish (duh, I guess), and it was definitely not the same words for food I had learned in Spanish throughout high school. I ended up ordering Papas Bravas which is just like hashbrownish french-fry things covered in a red sauce kind of like pasta sauce and salsa combined, pretty awesome. I also got some bread with blue cheese on it and some olives. My friends ordered some food on accident that was covered in squid looking stuff, yikes. We went back to the hotel to nap since we were so tired and then got dinner with the whole API group at a really good restaurant. They brought out 10-12 different dishes for us to try, and it was WAY too much. We thought we would only get about 4 or 5 plates, so after gorging myself with those, I of course continued to stuff my face with the second half of even more friend and battered food (I have NO idea how the Spanish stay skinny, bread is served with every meal and lots of things are fried). Ham is very common and so is cheese. One of the dishes was squid that was battered, but not like the calamari rings they have in the US. It looked like a piglet fetus and it looked bloody as well, it is safe to say that I refused to eat this and made pretty inappropriate comments to my friends.

After dinner we got ready to go out for the night. Since API provided us with a map, we tried to find an Irish Pub called O’Neils that was on the map. My friends and I are all apparently directionally challenged and got lost…but right as we were about to go find a different bar, a man came up to us and told us to follow him to a different Irish Pub (weird that there would be 2 of these within about 2 or 3 blocks since it was IRISH, but whatev), so we did! O’Reilly’s was the name of the bar and we ordered a bucket of Corona for the 5 of us, since it had six bottles, we passed the last around (I’m sure this looked REALLY cool). This bar played LOTS of Eminem and other good music, we were loving it. We left this bar and were headed to find O’Neils when we got intercepted by a pair of men. We walked with them for a while since they said they were headed to a bar, but then decided that it was a bad idea and said ADIOSSSS ! While walking we were approached by another man asking us to come into his bar, they offered my friend Molly free shots for all of us, so our hands were tied, we had to go in. They gave us tequila and it wasn’t SO bad. We ordered another bucket, and passed the 6^th around, pretty awesome. OH, also, this pub was also an irish pub (so not only 2 irish pubs within 3 blocks, but 3 irish pubs, even weirder), it was called Dubliners. We met a lot of Spanish men at this bar, and they were so much fun. Some bought us shots, but we mostly stuck to our beer buckets. Also around 12 at night they brought out papas bravas and CHICKEN WINGS to all the tables at the bar, it was probably my own personal highlight for the night. They played 100% American music in the bar, it was awesome. Spanish men LOVE it! One of them, who I promise was straight, loved Beyonce and had tickets to her concert in May, awesome. They played rap as well, and after I saw one guy dancing to “Bird Walk” (Lauren Kimball, you will appreciate this most, probably), I of course approached him and Grayson and I birdwalked with him. I decided to ask him about my main man Lil Wayne, and he LOVED him. We talked about The Carter I and our mutual adoration for him. I can’t remember this guys name, because I couldn’t understand him when he said it, but after accidently calling him today (my phone is in Spanish, I have no saved numbers…) he texted me and he and his friends want to hang out with me and my friends tonight again, so we’ll see!

We left the bar around 2 or 2:30 since it was our first day and we had to get up the next morning for some tours. We went to the Prado Museum and saw awesome Goya’s and painting by El Greco. Afterwards we got lunch and then went to the Royal Palace, which has over 2,000 rooms and was the home of a bunch of Spanish royalty. It was incredible. I think that’s about all for now. I will try and figure out pictures and stuff soon! Adios!