A Trip to Madrid (Day 1)

Street view of Madrid.

This weekend my host family and I took a 6 hour road trip to Madrid. Now let me just tell you the trek there was nice, but no piece of cake!

We all woke up at 5:40 AM on Saturday morning to hop into the car for a relatively long trip. We were groggy and tired and poor Ana had a bad cold / cough thing going on. Once we were all in the car we drove... for two minutes until we reached town were we stopped for a lovely little breakfast of croissants and hot chocolate (well the Spanish equivalent of hot chocolate which is called Cola Cao).

Once we were fed we all hopped back into the car for the real deal. Being that it was all of 6 AM (practically the middle of the night here in Spain) us kids took a nice long (on and off) nap for the majority of the car ride. In between sets of naps we played various games on the iPad and some pretty intense games of Go Fish.

Side bar! When looking out the window on this 6 hour trek from one side of Spain to the other you see many different types of terrain. There is a good amount of desert. There is the occasional set of really tall rocks (I wouldn't exactly consider them mountains). There are some plains and some cool little places where houses are actually built into the really impressively sized rocks. Last, but certainly not least are the windmill farms! There are about two between Barcelona and Madrid and there are hundreds of windmills in each!

Anyway, we stopped at a little rest stop at the half way mark and it was very cool! It wasn't the kind of rest stop like we have on the highway with a McDonalds or Dunkin' Doughnuts, it was more like a whats that place called? Nice n Easy or something? Well anyway, this place had a little wrap around counter with tortillas (which are basically omelets) with many different things in them! I had a tortilla con jamon y queso (I'll let you figure that one out) and it was delish!

Fast forward to arriving in Madrid! Once we got to the city we headed straight to where we stayed, which was basically an apartment. When you walked in the main door there was a little hallway that led to the stairs and the inner part of the stairs was hollow so you could see the roof, which was just one big window, and the doors to the other apartments!

Then we hit the streets! We went to a restaurant to each some tapas. Unknowingly I ate the stomach of a chicken, or maybe it was the intestines... same thing, and rice cooked in pig blood. I did not like the stomach, intestines thing, but the blood rice was not too bad! In addition I had some fried eggplant which is really good, and some other little foods I can't remember, but they were good! Then I had Arroz con Leche, which is really, whipped milk with rice and sugar. And let me tell you, the portion size issue that American's stereo typically have of European food, not actually an issue! The bowl that this stuff was in was like a bucket!!! Other proportions of other foods are just as similar to that of the U.S.

Then we went to some museum with lots of art and a really pretty garden with the ever famous Spanish tiles embedded in benches and stuff around the fountains. Next we went out into the world to do a little bit of shopping. We stopped at a variety of clothes stores and then we hit up some very cool Vintage shops that Mari would have loved! I mean this street that we were on was ONLY vintage shops! In these shops I learned that after my current Aero sweatshirts or sports sweatshirts / jackets get a little aged i can just bring those suckers to these stores because that was actually the most common merchandise! Sweatshirts and various sports jackets.

We walked the street of Madrid's equivalent to Time Square, which is a street right off of Puerta del Sol, and saw some pretty cool street performers. When we were walking this specific street all of a sudden TONS of motorcycles started driving by. We are pretty sure they were trying to set a world record for most motorcycles to cross the country or something like that. How cool would it be to live to say I saw a world record broken in Madrid? Very cool, that's how cool.

Dinner was suppose to be eaten at this very good Spanish restaurant that is very popular, so popular in fact, that we couldn't get a table on Saturday night so we got take out (or take away as what they say here) instead. We had fried Calamari subs in our nice little apartment building. Apparently these sandwiches are world acclaimed and it was pretty good, until I got to that point where I couldn't handle the texture anymore and got slightly nauseous.  After dinner I was pooped and called it a night, sleeping in one of the two bedrooms in a single bed rooming with Emma, cause we didn't want Ana's coughy germs (which we ended up getting anyway).