Bienvenido a Espana!

Hola Todos!

Llegaramos en Madrid esta manana a las ocho y media de la manana (tiempo de Madrid)! Being the geniuses we are, we thought it would be a great idea to stay up all of last night in order to get ourselves good and tired for our flight from SFO - MIA - MAD. This plan worked brilliantly for Rachel...me, not so much. But we couldn't waste our first day here sleeping! So what did we do? Explored the town of course! Getting lost 20 times along the way. But what would a first day in a strange city be with out that? So lets start at the beginning:

First we made our way from the airport to the hostel using Madrid's amazing metro system. Seriously, why do we not have this in SJ? It wasn’t more than 10 minutes on the metro before we witnessed our first theft. Hooligan kids stole an old ladies napsack. Made me want to weep a bit for humanity right then and there. Some other dude thought he could outsmart us by reaching for Rachel’s zipper on her duffle bag. She caught him red handed and he ran the other way with his tail between his legs. This isn’t to scare anyone, but just to make you aware that it can happen. Now you could call me borderline paranoid with purse safety. Welcome to Madrid.

Aside from this ill welcome we had a phenomenal rest of our day. We checked into our hostel and immediately went exploring. We ended up getting caught in an extremely random torrential down pour on the way to El Prado Museum but it certainly made our experience that much more fun - rolling up our jeans true highwater style (only Michelle…Rachel wanted to make that clear) with our plaid umbrella which apparently I do not know how to say in Spanish and flip flops (of course, we’re from Cali). We also went to the CaixaForum, which was a free art exhibit with tons of architecture models on past, present, and possibly future buildings in Europe, S. Korea, and Japan. Pretty cool, even for a non ArcE major. Later we got a chance to meet some of our hostel roommates - they all seem like very nice kids. All Americans and one from Britain! Upon entering the room, with no one there, we immediately could tell which of the bunks were claimed by boys by their mess. Lol.

We also got lost on the way back to the hostel from the Prado because we kept looking at and following the beautiful Spanish buildings and the tiny quaint alleys. The streets unfortunately aren’t exactly lined up like a grid but we were able to make it safely back.

A few first impressions: Spaniards are truly a gorgeous race. I feel like any of them could be on the cover of GQ tomorrow. The town is surprisingly immaculate. Cobble stone really dresses up a city. Spaniards are so relaxed and really seem to enjoy the moment - this is something we want to embrace and bring back to Cali with us…

Okay! This is enough of this, time for some tapas!

Rachel & Michelle