The First Couple of Days

Alright everyone. While I really have nothing of great significance to report, I have a feeling a few of you are itching for more information. Let me recap the past 4 days for you...

Day 1: Friday.
Arrived in Madrid, got the keys to our apartment and picked bedrooms. Oddly enough there was no fighting over rooms and it all just fell into place. I have a room with an extra little alcove/nook that really isn't big enough to be of significance. I think I might find some floor pillows or something and turn it into a little reading spot... or I'll just keep the hamper in there. We'll see. After we picked rooms we took about a 2 hour siesta then walked around a little bit and found a small market to buy some food. Came home, ate the food, went to bed. Like I said no big deal.

Day 2: Saturday.
We ran some errands, like finding groceries to put in our cute little fridge. While at El Corte Ingles for Melanie to grab a hair dryer we asked if there was a market around, and the ladies asked what kind of food we wanted to buy. We explained that we wanted it all, fruit, meat, everything. They said no. This was a major lie, as we soon found out. After eating a quick sandwich we crossed the street to the other half of El Corte Ingles, and found a supermarket in the basement. Yep, a supermarket. The kind of place you could buy fruits and cereal and meat all in one stop. Needless to say we were kind of peeved by the "no" we had received earlier.

After stocking up on stuff we went to dinner with our friends Meagan and Theresa. They also were on our abroad semester and are in the same program. They actually live on the same street, just at number 103, which is supposed to be a 15 minute walk. We went to the Cuban restaurant that was popular among our abroad friends. A few things have changed, like they now have an English speaking waiter and a woman in a "traditional" cuban style dress as the server. I would be more pissed about the de-authentication if the food wasn't so fabulous.

After dinner Meagan and Theresa went home to battle their jet-lag but the three of us raged on.
We found a beer bar with a few hundred beers on the list, mostly German and Belgian. Because I went to the International Beer Festival in Portland this list wasn't near as scary as it could have been. We sat and drank and chatted for a little. Then moved on to see what we could see, we ended up at a second bar and continued chatting and whatnot. When we left the second place, Melanie realized that we were near a place we had gone when we were here 2 years ago. Sure enough a few blocks away was this bar. We went in, but it was way crowded and we only stayed about 30 minutes. It was at this point that we called it a night and walked home. The walk was pretty manageable, I think that our piso(Spanish for "apartment") is in a great location.

Day 3: Sunday.
I was rather lame and did not get up until about 1 in the afternoon. Then I proceeded to bum around my apartment until about 7 when the three of us went to an Irish pub to attempt to catch an American football game (Melanie is a New England Patriots/sports fan). We walked to this bar also, which was way further than the internet lead us to believe, but still a manageable walk. This was uphill, so it felt way worse going than it did coming home. We ended up watching the Real Madrid fútbol match. Just as one would expect, the bar was full of Spaniards who love the home team. For the majority of the match there was just a murmur of conversation, but when Real got close to scoring you could hear the fervor building until, finally, "GOOOOOAAAAAALLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!" then a few minutes later things would be back to normal.

I tried to go to sleep early so I didn't waste the day sleeping, but it was probably the worst nights sleep I've had in a long time. I lightly slept from midnight til about 2 or 3, then I was up and stayed up through a thunder storm until about 5. I woke up at 11:45 and had some breakfast, but then went back to sleep for another hour.

Day 4: Monday
Like I said, last nights sleep was awful. I got ready to go out and get a few things, but as I was walking out Melanie was coming in and she told me that it was raining pretty heavily. Just as she finished telling me about the great locations she scouted out for us I could hear a downpour begin. I waited it out, then ran my errands. These were to buy an umbrella since the weather report indicated rain for the next week, and to get my Coca-Cola Light craving satisfied. Both were accomplished, but the second I walked out of H&M with my umbrella the rain had cleared and it was actually sunny. I guess that is the way these things work, when you don't have an umbrella you need one, but when you have one you don't need it.

So that is the excessively long report on what I have been up to. I'm pretty sure that once I've started working in the school there will be less time for these drawn out posts, along with probably having more interesting things to post about. Until then you can read about my errands! I hope to get out to IKEA sometime soon; I need to replace my desk lamp and the sheets on my bed. Plus who doesn't love some good Swedish design?