España

Posted by Emily

Hello again!

I'm finally back after my disappeance into Spain. We haven't had quite as much down time here so I haven't been frequenting the cyber cafes as much.

We left for Madrid on April 8, and let me tell you, we were none too sad to see Morocco go because he had become quite fatigued with the men harassing us in the streets. They are not afraid to stare, comment, whistle or generally make you feel uncomfortable. Not very much respect for women so that make us happy to leave, which is quite unfortunate really.

We arrived at the airport in Madrid in the afternoon and had quite a time finding the Metro. They had apparently built a whole new portion of the airport since Nicki had last been there and we had to take a shuttle bus to the old part of the airport to get on the Metro. This doesn't sound too complicated but somehow we managed to walk the wrong way several times before actually making it to the bus and to the old airport, which was actually about a 15 minute ride away. Once we found the Metro, we had an obstacle course to get to our hostel, including several train transfers, long stairways and crowded cars, all while lugging our lovely, HEAVY packs. After much sweating and silently cursing ourselves for having too much stuff, we made it to our hostel (4 flights up and no elevator). It was quite cute and like living in an apartment because the people who run it live in one portion of it.

Madrid is a lovely city with beautiful architecture everywhere. Even without visiting any formal sites you can see incredibly intricate and interesting buildings. We unfortunatly had a lot of errand type things to do there, like mail a huge box of my crap home from the post office and try to figure out a bunch of stuff for the next part of our journey down to Sevilla for the week before Easter. That was quite a fiansco because Semana Santa (holy week) in Sevilla is one of the largest Easter celebrations in Europe and since so many people go there for that week, we had some issues with transportation and bookings.

Other than the boring details of organizing our travels, we had quite a lot of fun. We visited the Reina Sophia, a large, very famous art museum where Picasso's Guernica is housed. It depicts the bombing of the city of Guernica, Spain during World War II. It's a very powerful painting to see in person because it's probably about 7 feet high and 16 feet long (his largest work). There are several other Picasso works and also many Dali paintings, which I find quite creepy but very interesting to look at.

One of the only other formal sites we saw was Parque Retiro, a huge park in the urban expanse of Madrid with a little lake with row boats, many many trees and various grassy alcoves. It's a very nice excape from the busy streets.







We spent a lot of time just walking around the city and seeing the previously mentioned arcitecture, shopping, eating lots of tapas (small plates of Spanish food, kind of like ordering a bunch of appetizers) and drinking sangria, which is SO tasty and made much better here than anywhere in the States seems to manage.

In contrast to Senegal and Morocco, I am struck by how comfortable life is here and how much disposable income there is. We can drink the tap water, take hot showers (provided that the water heater isn't overloaded) and not worry about getting sick from the foods that we eat. I wasn't even in the "developing" world for all that long and I still realize how lucky we are just because of the resources at our immediate disposal, of which money is perhaps the most important. And boy do the Europeans have it made in that way because the dollar is way down! I think it is safe to say that Americans are losing their spot as the "richest". Silly €uro.