La noche en blanco

Well I have some updating to do, I suppose...
Last Friday: Had an outing with Agnese, one of the monitores who´s paid to be our friend and went to a bar with sand and a flamenco bar to listen to the men in the basement singing and playing guitar, etc. As we were leaving the flamenco bar, some madrileños in their apartment above the street called to us about a fiesta they were having and agnese invited ourselves in, so we went there and chatted with them for a while in their very nice apartment before deciding it was time to head home (I was spending the night in caitlin´s apartment because her parents had a wedding to go to and she´s afraid of the men in her neighborhood) to relax, watch a movie, you know. on the way home we encountered a certain sick soul in the street and spent the next 2 hours getting said person home... hmm so that was a fun night.
I spent all of Saturday (after paseo #3 with Mario in the morning) sleeping and getting some work done and Saturday night was the noche en blanco (2nd annual). it´s an event where basically the entire center of Madrid is closed off to car traffic and museums and sights are open late for people to visit and bars stay open really late and there are concerts, etc. A group of 6 of us decided to start at the Estadio Santiago Bernabéu, the Real Madrid stadium for a tour and perhaps to see the "spectacle" on the field there. We showed up at 9, waited in line until 11, and only got to do the tour but it was pretty neat. We saw the dressing rooms, the field, and the museum of the team/history of the team. Afterwards, we decided to head towards the center in the PACKED metro and decided there were too many people where we went (Ópera) so we went to Abbey´s apartment for a snack at 2:30am. After waiting for an hour for a bus to go back to Gran Vía to see the Daft Punk concert, everyone lost motivation and I ended up going home to sleep until 2pm.
This week we haven´t done anything all that exciting other than find a great place to get a menú del día for cheaper and tonight we´re going to the european mixed curling championships!

Link to Facebook

For those of you who don´t have facebook, here´s the public link to see my pictures. So far, I just have ones from italy, so sorry about that, but it should improve. and i still can´t get some of them to be upright.
http://carleton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2015870&l=27d53&id=19102934

First weekend

So here are my updates from the first weekend here in Madrid.
As it was our first weekend, we weren´t allowed to travel yet, which was fine in order to see the city, but I am excited to travel also.

On Friday night we found a bar that has a dinsoaur theme which was great for a Jurassic Park lover like moi and also as a reminder of my experiences in first grade. Heavy music, though, and everyone was wearing black except for us, which made it a little canteo (awkward) at first, but then we made friends with some madrileños that smoke like chimneys and spent some time with them before taking the nightbuses (búhos) home.

Saturday we had a class that involved talking a walk through a part of the city with our most laid-back professor, Mario. Really the architecture in Madrid is not all that fabulous, but I guess it was a nice way to spend a Saturday morning. Later on we met up with the monitores (our hired friends that help us to know the city) to eat some tapas in a bar and spend some time with them.

Sunday morning I went to El Rastro, a huge market that has every single thing anyone could ever need (or mostly stuff you will never need, and that´s what makes it what it is) and I bought some good things, like pashminas and a spanish flag (not the controversial political one with red, yellow and purple but i´ll have to do that). then we went to the museo de america where they have objects that conquistadors brought back from the New World but we had to walk through it quickly and missed a floor so we could eat lunch in our houses.

Today we had classes and ate another wonderful lunch from a menu del dia for 10€ and tonight i´m going to a flamenco festival that is free and in one of the metro stations (chamartín) where they have a lot of events. it´s happening all this week and should be really neat to see if we can get a seat. hasta luego!

Sorry...

Ok so it´s much easier to put fotos on Facebook. if you have it, they´ll be there for now, until i can find an easy way to do so. and if anyone knows better than i do how to do it, please share.

nothing much has happened since last time i wrote... more exploration, some classes, chocolate and churros, another wonderful lunch out for 9€... same old.

the big order of business now is to find a pool or a team that we can swim with. even I´M getting antsy to swim. Craziness. I´m also getting excited to see some new things during the weekends and do some trips to other towns/cities. if anyone has any suggestions, let me know!

Finalmente una biblioteca!!

Well i´m in madrid and finally found my biblioteca so i can use the internet for free for 45 minutes (this time at least). i arrived on saturday in the afternoon from italy and my padre and hermano were in the airport waiting for me although we were supposed to find our way to their houses on our own. que suerte! my dad´s name is Kike (like "Quique") and my mom is Lucia and lucia has 2 kids, Ivan (15)and Victoria (11) and Kike has 2 kids, Lucas (15) and Bruno (12) and now they are a new big happy family. our house is a work in progress because they moved there in july and a dentist and his family lived there before and Kike is making many changes so right now our kitchen is outside of our house and one day i didn't have hot water for a shower because it was unplugged so he could work on things in the kitchen. it's very interesting, though, and pretty crazy around the house with that many kids of those ages and all in school now and a house that is under construction and 3 dogs and we live basically in the suburbs. it pretty much takes me 40 minutes to get anywhere (or longer) by metro. I have a 10 minute walk to the nearest metro stop, too (Arturo Soria, for those who know madrid). it´'s nice though because it's a more residential area, but we are still in the city, so it's quieter but it's not like i'm out in la mancha (think don quijote).

we started class on monday and they all should be alright. i´ve done all my reading in parks and seen a fair amount of the city so far. when i have to travel so far, it´s easy to know a lot more about the city. this afternoon i have class in the prado museum to see some el greco works. last night we have a welcome dinner that carleton paid for and that was wonderful- i made sure to get the most expensive dessert at the end, too. then we went out with the monitores (madrilenos who are in their 20s and are there to help us acclimate and experience the city, and whatever else we need help with. and then i had to go back to my house really late by one of the night buses and i was a little lost, but it only took about 5-10 minutes to find where i was supposed to be.

p.s. i promise i'll do my best to keep in touch and get some pictures up here...