Madrid!

Top 5 Things About Madrid:

1) No pigeons

2) Yemen "Princes"

3) Aqueduct (okay, that was in Segovia. oops.)

4) Museo del Prado with a great tour guide

5) Amazing weather

Kim and I met at a mall in Madrid after a bit of a stress: in short, imagine me attempting to use literally every payphone in the Madrid airport to try to get ahold of her (she was running late getting back from her day trip so our plans were changing). We are both struggling to get used to the European "no paso nada" attitude...but everything worked out fine. Then Kim took me to see Plaza Mayor (every Spanish city has a main plaza), and we got dinner at a Museo del Jamon (aka, Ham Museum). Apparently Spain is obsessed with ham because this is not actually a museum but a chain restaurant. I also had some ham flavored chips on Sunday which were surprisingly tasty. This is a picture of all of the ham legs (or is it pork legs?) hanging up at the restaurant.

We spent Saturday in Segovia, a small city to the north of Madrid.  The bus ride there was amazing because we got to drive through some snowcapped mountains, which of course I loved.

There we saw the Roman Aqueduct which was built in the latter part of the FIRST CENTURY! Can you believe it's still standing?

We also saw the cathedral, which was built in 1525 and was the last Gothic cathedral to be built in Spain.

Finally we saw the Alcazar of Segovia, a castle built in the 1100's. We also climbed to the top of its tower!

Then we headed back to Madrid, regrouped at Kim's apartment and headed out to dinner and to experience the city's legendary nightlife. We went to a delicious restaurant called Bazaar that was way cheaper than anything I've found in Paris. Good find, Kim!

The night started at El Tigre, a bar Kim and her friends like to go to because they have a) cheap drinks and b) free tapas. One of the other students from AU who is studying from Madrid is from Yemen and has an extremely wealthy family..they call him a prince. On Saturday night he splurged on a table for eight (300 euro...) at Kapital, a huge seven-floor club. It had a movie theater, a hip hop floor, a reggae-ton floor, the main floor played house/techno and had a huge thing that sprayed out cool mist every 10 minutes. Needless to say Kim did a great job showing me the nightlife because the entire night was totally free.

We were out until about 5:30 in the morning so Sunday morning we slept in a bit before heading to the Museo del Prado. Kim goes there for her Art History class every week so she had lots to say about all of the important works! It's always nice to see things that you actually recognize too, like Adoration of the Magi. The museum had lots of works by Spain's three most important painters: Goya, el Greco, and Velazquez.

To round out the day we had a picnic at El Retiro park.

Kim probably got pretty sick of me raving about the weather all weekend...lets just say it was great to see the sun and not have to wear a heavy coat! My flight was delayed about an hour leaving Madrid so I got home later than I would have liked, but it's Monday afternoon and I'm still going strong. Hopefully I can catch up on sleep tonight!