flight + MADRID!!!

Okay, so, its finally real now. The nine-hour flight from dallas to madrid was pretty treacherous, but it was filled with spanish children and adorable spanish men (there were women too, but, yeah). Everyone was speaking spanish and mom kept asking "are you sure this is spanish?" because the accent is so different. The view of spain from the plane was not what we expected so much, it was all seperated into crop areas. Oh yeah, i love seeing all of the cities from the plane because you can see the way they are organized =). Okay, so, we fiiiiinnnnaaalllyyy landed in Madrid at like 11 o'clock (madrid time). The Barajas airport is incredible, we're gonna take pictures when we come back. The hotel guy who drives us to and from the hotel and the airport (where we catch the metro) is really nice and speaks slowly for me. Im getting used to my spanish and realizing that i can really say a lot more than i thought i could, i'm like thinking in spanish at moments, it's pretty cool. So, we checked into our hotel, which is awesome!!, Meg would looooove it, pictures have been taken but they don't really express the place adequately.

After we checked in, we were excited to get out and see madrid, so we looked in our spain books for a good area to go to for tapas, got a map of madrid from the hotel, and sat in the lobby trying to figure out where we were. Thats when the shuttle guy looked at me and said "el metro? cinco minutos", and thus we discovered that we had a ride to the metro, which was awesome. Once we got to the airport, the shuttle guy explained to me (using had gestures) where to wait for him when we returned, buuuuut i should have asked him where to go to get to the metro because it took us like 15 minutes to come up with the bright idea to ask the information desk people. But finally we did, and got our day pases for the metro. Mom, who doesn't ride lightrail and bart all the time, took a while to understand it, but the organization of it made it really simple to understand. the metro here is pretty ornate, and has a different platform for every train with plenty of signs telling you where to go. san jose really needs one of these. Anywaaaaaay, we finally got to "El Centro" which i guess is just the area which is pretty much the center of madrid. It was totally like classic from a movie. when we first got off it reminded me of berkeley right when you get off bart. we pretty-much immediately abandoned our map and took off walking down whatever little streets we liked the most. The plazas were beautiful, i really want to be here during some kind of festival because i could just see them packed with people and people on their balconies and stuff. The streets that were made for walking were all cobble-stoney or whatever and they were narrow with tall, classic buildings.

After walking for a while, we decided to look for the place that we wanted to go to from the book, but, of course, we had gone the opposite direction. by that point it was raining pretty hard and we had, of course, left our umbrella at the hotel. mom was getting frustrated with my lost-ness but we soon semi-figured out how to get to this one place that we had passed that looked interesting. We went into the little restaurant which was halfway underground, and we sat by a window and watched thebottom half of people as they walked by it. Our waiter was adorable, and i don't know if he spoke slowly for me or what but his spanish was really easy to understand. So, when we got our menu, we realized that we had no idea what tapas were; we just knew that we were supposed to eat them. we basically ordered three random things and sangria, because mom had heard that the sangria was amazing here. IT WAS. it was the most incredible wine that i have ever had. they served it in a mettle pitcher thing; it was cold and fruity and had some spice... it was amazing. So, our tapas ended up being some potatoes with some delicious sauce on them, these things which we think were black-beans and rice, but like squashed together and put in sushi shape and wrapped with some unidentifiable thing and served with some little peppers. the third tapas looked kinda like jalepeno poppers but had like, i don't even know what, in them. i know that they were supposed to be ham flavored or something but they were white and squishy and soft. idk, but the whole meal was delicious.

 we left there feeling warm and happy from the sangria =) but this soon turned in to exhaustion as we navigated our way through the metro. at one point i closed my eyes for a couple seconds during which we went two stops. we didn't get robbed or anything tho... i think. we finally got back to the airport, found a bathroom, and then ended up coming out at the exact perfect spot and our shuttle came like 5 minutes later. When we got back, i went on the internet to let people know we were alive, and then we passed oooooouuuuut. it is now about 5 in the morning here (we went to bed around 7) and we are getting ready to find food and then catch our plane to roma!! every second is awesome here, lol.

 - TC
      - detailed enough for you, dad?? <3