First week in Madrid (part 2)

Ok, so this makes us up to date except for the rest of orientation, January 8-11. Don't worry...they're coming!

sábado el 14 de enero

            This morning I mysteriously woke up at 9:30 and laid in bed awhile, then set out to the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium (where Real Madrid plays, and which I can get to by metro in 20 minutes…again, the metro is the best thing ever and I will miss it like crazy when I come back to Stanford). Our plan was to meet here at 12 (which sort of happened, although admittedly many people were still in recovery mode from the night out and send us texts saying they would definitely not be there on time) and buy tickets for the Real Madrid vs. Zaragoza game next Sunday. Turns out that we can’t but those tickets until Monday, so we popped into a café and had hot chocolate (for me, coffee for others) and chatted for a bit. After, I came back to my casa for la comida, which was delicious as always (and we had tinto de verano, sangria mixed with a Spanish version of club soda). I learned from Mercedes that clara (beer mixed with that club soda or lemon soda) is also a popular drink, and one of her favorites.

domingo el 15 de enero

            Today we met up with los estudiantes españoles (the Spanish students living in Madrid who volunteer their time to come talk to us so we can practice talking to Spanish people our age, and so that we can ask people our age where are the best places to go in Madrid) to go to El Rastro, a kind of flea market that has all different kinds of clothes, shoes, purses, accessories, as well as some electronics or other items, that takes up a massive section of a few streets branching off of Plaza Tirso de Molina. I bought a very cute new hat and two pairs of tights (because it’s quite fashionable in Madrid to have a dress and cute tights with boots or heels and a big coat over).

lunes el 16 de enero

            Flamenco again this morning…a blast as always! We’re getting into some more complicated heel/toe/clapping (and different kinds of clapping) patterns, so it’s fun to learn, and we sound great when we’re all synchronized (which admittedly does not happen very often…much to the amusement of our teacher). We also added on to the paso roble (pairs dance).

            For lunch we had paste with olives and chorizo, filetes de pollo and bread with sliced cheese (we have these last two with every meal…I am in heaven). My Women in Art class went well, we’re looking at women in religious art now, and we started out today with representations of Eve and their development over time. Many of the pieces are in the Prado, and Wednesday’s class we’re going to the Prado to have our hour and a half class there! I’m so stoked to have class in a world-famous museum, and I’m not sure if this excitement will begin to wane as the quarter progresses. Maybe it will be something like having classes in the quad…my first week at Stanford I marveled at the arcades and Memorial Church every time I walked through the quad, but by last quarter it just became another part of my home. Luckily, there are always hordes of camera-toting Asian tourists to remind me how lucky I am to be at such a beautiful place as Stanford, and there is no shortage of tourists in Madrid (and the Prado) to remind me how lucky I am to be there J

            This evening after my Bioethics class (which is also going really well, it’s a smallish class so it’s more interactive than I expected—the professor asks our opinions on a lot of issues and we have some pretty cool discussions, in Spanish of course), I went with my friend Byrd to a special bookstore about a 20 minute metro trip from the Instituto. We got a little lost finding the store (shocking, I know) and arrived two minutes after they closed. Feeling a little defeated, we decided to stop by a café before returning to the metro. They did not have hot chocolate, so instead we had wine (a perfectly reasonable substitution in my mind). We also met someone originally from Basque country who had studied in San Diego for three months and was now living in Madrid for six years. We chatted for awhile and he gave us a list of some of the best places to go out in Madrid (the places that won’t be full of tourists), so I’m excited to try those out. He also said we absolutely must visit San Sebastian while we’re here, which is perfect because I wanted to do that anyway, and now a weekend trip to Bilbao/San Sebastian is officially going on my calendar J

            Dinner with my family today was really fun, everyone was in a good mood (and I had a few glasses of wine right before, so I was pretty talkative) and Mercedes (mi mama Espanola) showed us a book of common Spanish phrases translated directly into English. One of my favorite was “no me tocas a las narices” which is something you say when a friend is nagging you about something but they do that thing to (why didn’t you call me back? Hey, you didn’t call me back over the weekend, no me tocas a las narices), but literally means “don’t touch my noses.”

martes el 17 de enero

            This morning I went back to the bookstore (which is so cute…it had several floors but it a little cramped and has books on every surface), and this time it was open, so I could get the books I needed. I think I might go back sometime in the future just to browse at their books, because there were some very interesting ones about, for example, the political situation in the US written from a Spanish perspective. The US appears a decent amount in the news here, and it’s really interesting to see how my country is viewed from the outside.

Today we went to the bus station to buy tickets to Salamanca for Friday, and while I was waiting for everyone to arrive so we could buy tickets together, I stopped into the café (Rodilla, a chain, there are tons in Madrid). This chain does not serve hot chocolate (the nerve…) and I don’t really like their tea, but I really wanted a hot drink. So, I drank my first whole cup of coffee! It was only a little cup of café con leche (with mostly leche) and I am wired…I think I need to be careful with coffee from now on because I was definitely not expecting this strong of an effect. It is, however, giving me the energy to speed write  this blog at the moment, so you should all be glad I manned-up and finally drank coffee. I bought my tickets to Salamanca with friends, so Friday at 10:30am we will take the bus there for a day/night in Salamanca J

I just finished lunch and am feeling much better…maybe this is a lesson that I should eat along with coffee? I’m having to learn to drink all over again! Anyway, for lunch today we had sopa de lentajas (lenil soup) with chicken, salad, bread, and a mandarin for dessert. I’m pleased to report that I officially like mandarins, so I’m going to have to try oranges next and hope that they’ve grown on me as well.

Tonight for dinner we had small whitefish pan-fried with the bones left in, which I enjoyed immensely but had a slight fail at de-boning the first fish, so Mercedes (after smiling at my efforts) deboned the second one for me. We also had patatas fritas, ensalada con jaiba, pan y queso and for dessert, fresas con nata.  We always watch TV with el almuerzo and la cena, as there is a little TV that sits on top of the refrigerator. In the afternoon (around 2:30 or 3) we usually watch the news while we eat, and Mercedes and Mariu comment on all the goings on and do their best to fill Rachel and I in on whatever is happening (as it frequently has to do with Spanish politics in much more depth than I am familiar with), although the partially sunken cruise ship Costa Concordia (which has had significant amount of time on the news for the past few days) needed no explaining. We also eat those meals together: Mercedes (mi mama Española), Merche (her daughter, 30) and Mariu, (her niece, 25, who is often not there because she finishing her medical training and frequently has “guardia”, very long shifts at the hospital when she can’t make it home for meals).

I also learned a useful Spanish phrase at dinner today, “tu cara me suena” which basically means “you look familiar”. This came up because we were watching the talk show we usually watch at la cena (around 9:30-10pm) called El Hombrigo (the anthill). It brings in famous people and has them do a bunch of silly activities as well as talk about whatever they do, and today, one of the activities was called “tu cara me suena” and the point was to slap out the rhythom to a song on the other person’s face and have them guess what song it was (literal translation of suena, the conjugated form of sonar, meaning to sound). I’m pretty proud because this is probably the first Spanish play on words that I understand :)