This weekend I went to Madrid with 11 other students placed in Catalonia.
As I really have not learned as much spanish as I have Catalan, I was a little apprehensive about the trip, but I really didn't need to worry.
After my semi-early morning bus to the neighboring town where I would meet my friend's mom who was taking us both to the airport, I lounged at a tea place which bragged 50 varieties of tea! for a couple of hours. We made it easily through security, and even had time at our gate to buy really crappy pasta (yay for airport food!).
Once in Madrid we went to the Prado art museum. Now I'm all for art. I don't, like many people my age, die of boredom in every museum I got to, nor do I get too uncomfortable with the near-silence and slow walk of the people who frequent museums.
But this museum was dense. I'm not sure that that is actually a word one would use to describe a museum, but that's what it felt like. I was pretty sure that if I saw one more painting of some half-naked people posing in unrealistic positions, I was gonna die of boredom.
After that experience was over, we went to our weekend host families' houses. I was with one other girl in my house, as well as the turkish exchange student who was staying with them for the whole year. They were awesome! They had only one kid, and three exchange students, and both of the parents were super duper nice. After dinner (a traditional turkish dish) we put on disco lights and cleared the table while listening to jazz.
The next morning, breakfast was bright and early and consisted of churros, which are deeeeeelicious! Then with AFS we took a walking tour of Madrid, which landed us in the end at sort of the Central Park of Madrid. In the middle, there is a small lake, where you can rent boats and so we did, and it felt quite pointless to row in circles, so we made a three-boat chain and just hung out and chatted on the water.
After this the day got interesting.
So now it's like 6:00pm, and we, as a group decide we would love to have dinner altogether in the centre of Madrid. The first problem with this was that our host families had made us dinner because the original plan was that we would be going home both nights for dinner. This could be fixed with a couple of phone calls, if only we had our host families' numbers, which no one did. So we, well they, decided to just skip dinner at our host families' house and apologize. The poor volunteer could not keep a group of 12 teenagers on the right track. The second problem was that we all wanted to go to different places for dinner. This is where this whole thing really got bad because people decided that instead of having a normal conversation about this, they would just leave to where they wanted to go. So one group went back to the park, another went to go shopping, and there were 7 of us left wondering what the hec had happened. One pair started to leave, and since the girl of the pair had the phone number of my "host brother" who was the only way I was going to get home since I had no idea where I lived, I needed to follow her, and she would not slow down enough to tell anyone where I was going. Another girl was having a panic attack since no one knew where anyone was, so the poor volunteer was stuck with her.
Anyways, you get the picture, it was chaos.
I ended up having a really great time, that kind of craziness is fun once in a while (although exhausting).
Sunday was much calmer, we visited a much cooler art museum, and then had the whole afternoon to ourselves. Thankfully, we (my group of friends and I) just holed up in a Starbucks and waited vainly for the rain storm to pass, because we were all pooped from the exhaustion of the night before.
The flight home was uneventful, although very very late, I ended going to sleep at about 3:30am.
Thank you for bearing through that long, not-very-eloquent post, remember I'm running on very few hours of sleep.
I hope you are having a lovely conclusion to your month of April!
