Madrid and Valencia

A lot has been going on since I last updated everyone! On Friday the school took us to Madrid in the morning and we toured the Palacio Real (Royal Palace) where the King and Queen visit occasionally (royal weddings and state dinners and the like) but which is mostly a museum. After the Palacio, we walked up to one of the main plazas and then had lunch at a restaurant. After that we got free time, and I just walked up and down Gran Via (Madrid’s main street) with some boys from Notre Dame. After all our walking we went home to Toledo on the bus with the school, and then Emily, Kate, and I went to the huge and amazing mall outside of Toledo to see Hairspray, which premiered here on Friday. That was really fun because the mall is crazy and Hairspray was all in Spanish except for the songs. Saturday morning we took the AVE high speed train in to Madrid and ran into the President of Brazil in the Toledo train station. We still don’t know why he was coming to Toledo. In Madrid we met up with some of our friends who had stayed overnight and saw all the famous paintings in the Prado. After touring the Prado we went to Reina Sofia, the modern art museum that houses Picasso’s Guernica. For dinner Saturday night we got Chicago-style hot dogs at a restaurant called Chicago Style Hot Dogs Madrid and then made the trek to the famous 7-floor discoteca where we had planned to spend the night, since we didn’t have a hostel. The club was crazy, and we literally partied there from about 2am to 6am, when we went back to the other kids’ hostel to pick up our bags and walk to the train station to catch the first train back to Toledo.

On Tuesday I filmed my first interview for the tv show I work for here. I was told on Monday I’d have to talk about Ramadan in the United States, so I was really nervous, both to talk about Ramadan in a country that is immensely racist towards Arabs and Muslims of all kinds and to speak extemporaneously live in Spanish on television! It was horribly nerve-wracking and I forgot all my grammar and got flustered and sounded awful. My boss told me it was just my first time and I’d be a pro soon enough, but I was still embarrassed. Then when I got home Tuesday night my host family and I watched it on tv and I did just as badly as I thought I had, but they were very excited and proud to have a “local celebrity” in their house.

Friday about 12 of us went to the coastal town of Valencia, famous for its sunny beaches, the America’s Cup sailing competition, its oranges, its paella, and Agua de Valencia, which is made of champagne and fresh-squeezed orange juice (like mimosa). It rained the entire time we were there, but I got to go to their world famous aquarium (their dolphin show was way better than SeaWorld’s) and we did swim in the Mediterranean Sea even though it was rainy at the beach. We also tried paella valenciana and agua de Valencia and I bought fresh Valencian oranges at an outdoor market. Our hostel was a clean and safe, but the best part was the kitchen on the top floor with the rooftop terrace that looked out over much of Valencia. We met lots of people from New Zealand, Canada, Bristol, Sweden, Belgium, and Singapore. We all cooked dinner together in the kitchen both Friday and Saturday nights, and I felt like a cast member of the Real World, swapping hockey talk with the boys from British Columbia while helping the Swedes and Peter the Slovak make spaghetti sauce. If that happens every weekend I’ll have friends from literally every country in the world!