Within the Reina Sofia Museum of Art

 Picasso

 A touristy Square in Madrid

 Each painting is of a different mythological god

 The Invisible Man

 A Weird Street Performance

 On the way to el Rastro

A Spanish Pigeon!!

The Second Week

My second week has flown by. Everyday in Spain gets a little more fun and goes by a little bit more quickly. A lot of the people in my program talk about how they miss Dr. Pepper and the U.S. in general, but I don't miss anything (except the people). I think I am adapting very well since my room, my host family, and Alcalá all feel very homey already. Alcalá is a really great city. When I was looking up study abroad programs, I immediately thought I would prefer one of the big beach cities like Valencia or Barcelona, but I really love how safe and simple, yet historical and beautiful, Alcalá is.
In school, I am taking Comparison Between the U.S. and Spain and Advanced Spanish and they are both very rewarding classes. In the comparison class, I am learning a TON about the history of Spain and the U.S. (Meama will like that) and in advanced Spanish, I am with a lot of girls that I really like and we are reading a great spanish novel, Sabor a chocolate.
This week, I also finally found a great place to go climb. It took a lot of navigating maps, subways, and busses, but I now know of a small but awesome bouldering gym that has really nice locals. Hopefully now that I know some locals, I can go out and see how the outdoor climbing in Spain is!
This weekend, I had a really fun dinner with some girls from the group and then today, we went to the famous Madrid fleamarket, el rastro, and the Reina Sofia Museum of Art. At the rostro, I got a couple of gifts, and at the Reina Sofia Museum of Art, I saw some really beautiful Picasso and Salvador Dali pieces. I couldn't take any pictures of Picasso's Guernica, but it was really impressive. It is huge and much more detailed than I had previously thought. On the wall next to it, there were some photos of Guernica as it was being created, and one things that is so interesting is that Guernica actually went through multiple, radical transformations from Picasso's first drawings on the huge canvass. It was like the painting had its own life story and was the culmination of Picasso's different thoughts on the tragedy that it represents.
Next weekend, after midterms at school, hopefully, I will be able to go the Barcelona to enjoy the beach, the architecture of Gaudí, and the famous Las Ramblas Street.
More pictures are slowly but surely on their way. . .

El Escorial y El Palacio del Pardo

Our first field trip was this past Friday. We visited El Escorial  and El Palacio del Pardo. El escorial was amazing. It used to be a monastery, castle, fortress, and tomb. The location of Escorial is breathtaking. It is in a mountainous region of Spain not far from Madrid. Directly behind El Escorial are beautiful, tree-covered mountains. Below Escorial is a small town (all with orange roofs) nestled around a large church. Outside of the town, there is nothing but hills, a lake, and in the distance, you can see the four skyscrapers of Madrid. Photography was prohibited so I got these photos from the internet, but I made sure to pick things that I actually saw.

 This is a picture of the tombs, which are on the lower level of escorial and contain almost all of Spain's kings and his close relatives. There was even a room reserved for dead infants of the kings.

 

This is of the church inside escorial. It was breathtaking, especially the ceiling, which was the tallest in all of escorial and contained intricate paintings of angels on vaulted ceilings.

 This is of the library which had such old globes that one of them showed California as a gigantic island off of the coast of the U.S.

 This is an example of the paintings on vaulted ceilings that is so impressive.

 Los jardínes

This is a picture to give you an idea of the size of escorial.
 Muy bonito, no?


El Palacio del Pardo was the home of Francisco Franco Bahamonde, one of the most infamous kings of Spain. This palace was actually used mainly for hunting trips until Franco lived there. Because it was in a part of Spain that gets very cold and because it is much smaller than most palaces, it was not the "ideal palace" for Franco. But Franco did a lot of things differently than other kings and his is one of the only bodies not in the tomb of Escorial. Instead, he demanded that he be buried in a valley. But inside the palacio del pardo, everything is extremely opulent. Everything is covered in gold, tapestries designed to look like paintings line every wall (which is actually a trick to keep the palace warmer), and there were the most beautiful chandeliers I have ever seen.

 The ceiling here is actually a new addition.

 Many of the tapestries are related to hunting

A few other interesting facts I learned on my tour of the palacio del pardo:

1. They used to dress boys and girls in very feminine dresses until the boy reached the age of about 7. In paintings of the children, a red or a blue rose would signify the sex of the child.
2. Franco had one of the first televisions in Spain, quite a few years later than they were introduced in the U.S.
3. Franco and his wife slept on two twin beds separated from each other by a couple of inches.

El Sabado al Parque

This past Saturday, I went to the city's main park for an annual festival. Here are my pictures

el amor!

I actually think that flamenco dresses are rather clownish, but they do have their own charm

My first couple of days

I had wonderful flights and arrived in Madrid, Spain yesterday. Unforturnately, the ticket I had purchased had an arrival date 1 day before the study abroad program actually started (the first of my many mistakes). I e-mailed my study abroad family, and luckily, they could accomodate me early, but not until 7 pm and my plane arrived at 10 am, so I had to hang out for 9 hours. You might think, it would be fun to hang out in Madrid for a day. . .

However, I did nearly everything wrong to have any fun. My second mistake was that instead of storing my unnecessary carry-ons and my suitcase in a locker for the day, I only stored my suitcase so I had my backpack with my computer and two other bags to carry around.
My third mistake was assuming that the Madrid airport had free wifi. My original plan was to stay at the airport until it was time to go to Alcala to save my money, however, I quickly realized that the airport in Madrid is very different from the ones in the U.S. It is not nearly as commercialized, so there are no stores to visit, no free wifi, and only 1 place to eat. So after 5 hours of doing nothing, I took the bus to Madrid to escape the airport and because I needed the internet to get directions to my host family's house. My fourth mistake was that I left the airport at the wrong time and arrived in Madrid during siesta so I could not find any place with free wifi that was open. Finally, I found a Starbucks that was open, but to my dismay, they had no outlets for electronics, so my computer died after 15 minutes. With all of my heavy bags and my increasing yearning for a safe place to sleep and relax (I got no sleep on the overnight plane flight), I was not having a great time, although Madrid is MAGNIFICENT! I ended up laying on a bench at a park and then I waited for about an hour for a bus (I didn't realize that the bus I was waiting for didn't exist). Everything worked out in the end (now I am at my host family home), but it was difficult. . . and my Spanish needs a lot of work!

Tomorrow, we start classes and I am so ready for that!
and pictures will be coming soon