Thursday, June 5, 2008

Day um...13, I think?

So we went to Madrid for the weekend. It was great! We arrived after a 4-5 hour bus ride on Friday morning around noon. We stopped by our hotel, the HUSA Princesa, which was very nice. I have pictures. When you walk in, you have to leave your card key in a slot beside the lightswitch to use electricity in the room...good electricity saver idea. There´s no leaving the lights on there!

We then went to eat lunch and shop around and eventually met later that evening to go to dinner. Dinner was already paid for, but was not very good. It was a fatty, bloody steak. O, apparently they only do rare here. No way. The waiters were also rude...overall, not a nice place. We also had a salad of scrambled eggs, mushrooms, squid and shrimp. It was very good except for the mushrooms. With the steak we had bread and french fries. For dessert, I don´t know the name, was something with layers of pie crust, white pudding, chocolate pudding, and a flan-like top. It wasn´t bad, just not sweet like our desserts. I think I am just used to Americans over flavoring everything and over here, nothing is as rich. >We had coke, water, and orange fanta to drink. Fanta is huge here.

Reina Sofia: On Saturday, we went to the Reina Sofia, a contemporary art museum. We saw Picasso´s Guernica which is absolutely huge! It is almost 3 meters high and I think 8 or 10 meters long! Yes, they use the metric system here...get out your conversion tables. We then only got to see the Picasso room and the Dali room because we were running behind schedule. Both were amazing though!

El Prado: We then had 2 hours to see the Prado museum. The historical art museum of Goya, Velázquez, Bosco, and tons of others. There was an exhibition of Goya in Times of War which I was super excited about because I wrote part of my final project on 2 of works by Goya showing the war between the Spanish and the French in 1808. I also wrote on Las Meninas, by Velázquez and got to see it too! All three works were so large! They are incredible! El jardín de las Delicias was there too, you have to research this painting by Bosco on the internet. It is incredibly detailed with such strange portrayals of humanity!

Class is about to start now, it´s 12 noon here, so I have to go.

Good news of the week: my host family is buying a laptop this week which means we are getting internet! Or well, that´s the plan. Time is much more relaxed here so "in a few days" may mean, in a few weeks but who knows. ¡Hasta luego!

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