October 23, 2009

October 23, 2009

We are now headed to Barcelona after a fantastic two days in Madrid and day in San Sebastian. I loved Madrid! Definitely not as much blatant Spanish culture like Sevilla, but it was a beautiful city. It’s amazingly wonderful how barely anyone speaks English and how un-touristy Madrid is even though it’s a pretty major city. Our hostel was great, actually all of our hostels have been so far, but our Madrid hostel was very central and our favorite. The first night we walked around after arriving late and grabbed dinner at an Italian restaurant—haha we love our Italian and didn’t feel guilty eating it since the Spanish aren’t exactly known for their cuisine. It’s still hard adjusting to the late dinner hours though!

Tuesday we started the day by going to the Palacio Real the palace in Madrid. It was pretty large since it contains a mere 2,800 rooms! Each room was ornately decorated; one even had walls covered in detailed porcelain. It was funny because on the train we had picked up a Spanish tabloid magazine and got all the latest hot Spanish gossip! Supposedly the Prince of Spain is dating/engaged to a gorgeous soap opera star, which is ruffling the feathers of the Spanish people because they don’t want an actress to possibly be the Queen of Spain…BIG drama! Anyways it is this prince that lives here.

Sadly our arrival to Madrid brought cold, wet weather! Literally up until the day we got there it had been warm and beautiful! But we still loved every second! We walked through Plaza Mayor and Puerta de Sol (the city center and geographical center of Spain).

We met up with my friend Leela Harpur who is studying abroad with SMU in Madrid for a late lunch. It was so fun seeing a familiar face! It was great hearing about her life in Spain. Jillian and I then headed to the huge park in Madrid called Parque de El Retiro. It is gorgeous!!! It’s like a smaller version of Central Park but is still big! It has fountains, a lake, statues and winding pathways. It was so picturesque since all of the leaves were changing colors to beautiful fall shades! I just loved it!

The famous museum to see in Madrid is called the Prado and has free admission from 6-8pm so we walked through and saw lots of beautiful paintings by Vasquez, Miro, and Goya to name a few. My very favorite part though was stumbling across a painting I knew a lot about! It was a painting by Raimundo de Madraza that had been in SMU’s Meadows Museum my freshman year!!! I had had to write an essay about the painting as well as deliver a speech while standing in front of it in our museum. SMU’s Meadows Museum has the largest collection of Spanish art outside of Spain! So that was really amazing!

The hardest part about staying in hostels is that you normally want to spend as little time as possible there. Meaning you get up early and go go go all day and night long. But ended up loving this hostel and felt comfortable taking siestas! It was really nice that everywhere we went we had plenty of time to do and see everything we wanted to!

Tuesday night Jillian and I were planning on doing a “Pub Crawl” with our hostel, which is basically where they take you to several (up to 10) different bars and clubs where there are free/discounted drinks. We were waiting in the lobby and this really cute guy came and asked us if we wanted to join him and his friends in the kitchen for some wine. We joined them and low and behold 3 of the 4 guys live in Newport!!!! What are the chances! Two of them even are currently living on Spyglass Hill in Harbor Ridge in the neighborhood right next to mine! One of them works at the Wine Bar in Corona del Mar and the other works at CB Richard Ellis on Jamboree and knows who my uncle Drew is who works there too! They were all around 26 years old and honestly such great guys! We had so much fun hanging out and talking with them all night! They made me really miss American boys! We also hung out with two Australians we met that night too! We all did a Pub Crawl together that didn’t even start until midnight! The guy who worked at our hostel led us to a total of two bars and one club before the group of us separated from him. The whole night the guys were beyond amazing and fun and not letting us pay for anything. They were so easy to talk to and not awkward at all. We all ended up heading back to our hostel at about almost 4am where we hung out for a few hours then Jeff, Jillian and I ended up staying up until almost 7am talking! It was crazy but so fun! Jeff even decided to stay in Barcelona Friday instead of leave with his friends so he could meet up with us once we got there.

Wednesday we were pretty exhausted after only getting like three hours sleep, but we got ourselves up and to the Reina Sofia museum that is famous for its abstract art collection. It was so interesting! We saw tons of Picasso’s works including his extremely famous anti-war piece “Guernica.” After spending a few hours there we gathered baguettes, turkey, cheese and fruit and had a make-shift picnic in the Retiro Park. It was freezing cold, but the autumn leaves were just too gorgeous to pass up!

Later on we met up with Matt Furman the Fiji from SMU who I took as my date to my Kappa formal last February. He is studying abroad in Madrid too so he and some other SMU guys met us outside the Real Madrid soccer stadium for drinks because they were going to the game after. The atmosphere around the stadium was crazy! The team bus drove by and the streets went wild! It was so fun to see! It was great to see some of the SMU guys too!

Thursday morning early we managed to barely miss our train to San Sebastian because we couldn’t find the platform so we had to take a slower train that ended up not getting us there until around 4pm. We had heard such amazing things about San Sebastian so we were really sad that we had less than 24 hours there. It was cold and rainy so it made it a little bit better to know we weren’t going to be missing out on sunny beach weather because San Sebastian is a gorgeous beach town. I just loved the town though! I will definitely 100% come back hopefully in the near future! It reminded me of Nice on the French Riviera, but I think even prettier. It has a huge beautiful bay with an island surrounded by hills. Even though it was really stormy it was absolutely gorgeous! At one point there was a full rainbow that started from the huge Jesus statue that is on the top of one of the hills overlooking the sea. It was unbelievably beautiful. We tried to see the whole town since we were only there one afternoon and night, but even though I would’ve loved more time there, given the weather and our time crunch we still got to see most of it! But I cannot wait to come back here someday!

I’m so excited to finally see Barcelona today!!! I’ll keep you posted on my adventures!

Xox K