I arrived to Madrid in the morning by train and I was really excited to see the city in which I would be living in two years ! This is because of my degree program in school: it’s compulsory to go to a parner uni on your third year. So basically, I can choose the the uni in Berlin, Urecht (the small town where I was during my Holland visit), some town in France, UK or Madrid. It’s obvious for me to choose Madrid so that I could learn to speak Spannish properly, although, after seeing Berlin this summer, it was also a very tempting alternative. SO yeah, gonna be living in Madrid in 2013-2014 :)
Yet again, I had no idea where my hostel was. I just asked whether someone knew, where in part of town my address was located in. Someone told me to get on a bus to Sol. And that I did. When I got off, I probably walked like 2km... just wandered around with my backpack that was starting to kill my shoulders :D Finally I gave in and took the subway and found my hostel!
Oh yeah, when I was looking for my hostel, I came upon this ad (it’s actually the first picture I took in Madrid :D)
After unpacking I was in the dining area/common room sussing out some shit on my laptop when I started to talk to this guy Luke from Melbourne. I decided to tag along with him and his mate Stewie since they were about to go sightseeing. We went to get some ”churros” which were just alright, in my opinion. I wish the chocolate sauce would’ve been sweeter ! I laughed at Luke and Stewie who kept calling them ”Spannish doughnuts”.. How can you call a Churro a Doughnut when it’s not even shaped like one? :D
We saw this protest in the middle of the puerta del sol: if I understood correctly, they were protesting against the unemployment rates? Note the Alien -figure! We also walked to the Real Palce’s park, but I really didn’t like it since it was too fancy pancy for me with it’s clean cut bushes and neat little pathways. We chilled at this other park for a while eating fruit and playing footie (I sucked). Since it was soooooooo hot (+30, middle of the country = no sea breeze = death) we looked for una piscina (swiming pool). We found one but then I realized that the undies I was wearing were maybe not THAT suitable for an outdoor pool :D So luckily I got the guys to change their minds, although we had been looking for the pool for some 40minutes underneath the hot sun.
We came back to the hostel and started to make dinner of the food we had bought together. We made this massive pasta meal with salad and sangría. During our dinner I met this super cool guy called Ray. He was 40-50-years-old (couldn’t really tell exactly how old, since he had a massive beard) English-man that had been biking for 2 months in Spain and was going to do 3 months more. He bikes around 70km a day and thus has to eat 4000-5000 CALORIES _A DAY_ ! Holy shit. So he is eating all the time and actually he says he is so bored of eating but he just has to do so to be able to survive the biking. He told me that he had been traveling the world for 5 years now. The story went so, that he was about to buy this house in France and so he sold his house in England. But just on the final moment, the deal went off and suddenly he was sitting on top of this huge pile of money and no idea what to do with it. He decided to quit his well paid job, sell all his stuff, besides his snowboard and bike and some random stuff, and go traveling. And that’s what he’s been doing ever since :) He was truly insipartional: Ray was just so happy all the time. Each and every time I saw him, he was just all smiles :) We had some really good conversations with him.
I also met this weird, quiet Israeli guy that was waiting for his friends to come to Madrid. He had been waiting for them for a couple of days already and he had just passed the time buy drawing in his sketch book. He had these really abstract pencil sketches, but if you looked closer, you could see female forms appear. It was pretty incredible.
Anyway, me, Luke and Stewie had a good time just drinking Sangría although we wished that my room would’ve had air conditioning! Later on we decided to go look for this rock bar that our receptionist had told us about, but that night there was no live music, only cockroaches crawling on the wall!! :s We went to this heavy metal bar that was packed with goths and metal heads to get a free beer. I might’ve had a feeling slight feeling of not fitting in!
Afterwards we ended up to this funk bar. Stewie was starting to get all lame cause he missed his girlfriend so me and Luke decided to get him drunk. When Stewie went to the bathroom, I went to the bar and asked in my poor Spanish whether the bartender could make 3 ”vodka” shots, but just fill one of them with vodka and the other two with water. Me and Luke were pretty drunk already so we just wanted to get Stewie on the same level as us and make him a bit jolly : D Unfortunately the bartender wasn’t agreeing to put water in the shot glasses. Damn. Anyway, fun night, although we failed getting Stewie on a party mode and I can’t remember coming back home!
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