Toro!

I'm surprised that I've lived in Madrid for seven months now and have yet to write a post about bull-fighting. I am personally against the sport because of how they slaughter the animal. Before the matador fights the bull, they usually put long rods into the bull's spine in order to weaken him. The bull exhausts himself while chasing the matador and is finally finished with a sword through the skull. I have heard many of my students defend bull-fighting, saying that the bull is later cut up for food, but I cannot reconcile the demonstration of violence and prolonged suffering they inflict upon the bull.







I definitely cannot recommend attending this brutal sport, but I can recommend walking around outside the stadium. It's located in Ventas, a metro stop on the eastern side of the city. THe stadium was built in the 1929. Here are some pictures of this beautiful stadium.

There are also several outdoor statues to commemorate past matadors, which are pretty interesting.







I must say that the outside of the stadium is more interesting than the inside. Personally, I wish that they would do away with bull-fighting and just keep the building for sports or less-deadly activities.

Sorry to give such an opinionated view of the sport. It was a lovely building! We will have more pictures and stories soon!

Ill-fated trips

Do you ever start a day with a list of errands and the drive to complete them all, only to have silly little snags stymie your chances of even crossing one item off your list? This happened to us a lot when we first moved to Madrid; I would wake up, energized and ready to accomplish the menial tasks that would help improve our daily life, only to return home with a sunken heart and a long list of pending tasks. It got better and we slowly learned when shops open and close, or the word for "measuring cup" in Spanish, but those first failed attempts are always the worst. Now that we have lived here for several months, we can successfully stroll home with our duties completed. But even now, we can have a botched day...



Spring has arrived in Spain! The flowers are blooming, the sun is shining, and you can almost walk outdoors with a jacket (but not really). In honor of the changing seasons, we decided to embark on some more exploration of Madrid. We all traveled together on the renfe to Escorial, a town an hour north of Madrid where a famous palace is nestled between the mountains-San Lorenzo de Escorial. It was built in the 1550s by Felipe II as a mausoleum to rest his father, King Carlos I of Spain. When Felipe was king, he ruled not only Spain, but also several parts of Italy, the Netherlands and the New World. The building is quite majestic in the mountainous landscape. Here are some shots. The last one is from one of the cute city streets.









We arrived in Escorial around 2pm and decided to have lunch before touring the famous edifice. After perusing around a few local places, we decided to settle into a small restaurant that had a menu special. Little did we know that we were going to remain in this restaurant for another 2 and a half hours! It was the worst service I had ever received in a restaurant: we first waited a half and hour before they took our order, then we had to wait another hour between our courses. I was sure that we were in the middle of a "Seinfeld" episode. We were all annoyed, but it was nice to speak in English, so we could carry on with our language and morbid sense of humor without disturbing anyone. We casually began to discuss burning the place down in order to vent our anger and have a laugh at our terrible misfortune. Even though we were all trying to improve our Spanish, we weren't completely confident enough to fully complain about the service, or lack thereof. Some other customers were nice enough to complain on our behalf as well. We finally received our bill and departed the restaurant close to 5pm.

We went to the palace entrance, only to discover that it closes at 5. Here's a picture of one in our group cursing our luck.



We returned to Madrid in a despondent mood. We had traveled an hour north of Madrid only to eat mediocre food and experience a terrible wait staff. It was such a disappointment; we had planned to travel to Escorial for weeks, and now we missed our opportunity to see the palace/monastery because we were at a short-staffed restaurant. Normally, I hate days like these, but the company and our jokes made it worthwhile.

The following day, we went to Quevedo in Madrid to meet up with our friends for some afternoon coffee. Here's a picture of the statue at the Quevedo metro stop.



Quevedo was a prominent Spanish poet in the 1600s. Most Americans have no idea who this man is, but he is regarded as one of the great writers of Spain alongside Cervantes and de Vega.



It was appropriate that we went to Cafe Literario, a small Spanish bookstore that serves lovely rich desserts. We indulged ourselves with chocolate-orange cheesecake and the purchase of some Spanish books. I am now the proud owner of the Lope de Vega play Fuenteovejuna and Cervantes's Don Quixote. Yes, I am probably not going to read these in Spanish, but at least I have them for my collection!

So, all in all, not a bad weekend!

More culinary fun...

We had another quiet weekend here in Madrid. The weather is slowly becoming warm and beckoning us outside.

While the weather oscillated between bitter cold and mildly warm, we decided to try to make sushi at home. In Madrid, there are some sushi restaurants, but the sushi is usually a bit expensive. We are hesitant to try out a restaurant for sushi when we are used to paying much less in the states.

On the bright side, you can generally cook a lot of international cuisine at home-all of the ingredients are available in the major supermarkets. We headed over to Alcampo, to fetch the proper tools and ingredients for the Japanese delicacy. Alcampo is mostly a large supermarket, but it also sells shoes, books, bedding, laundry machines...it reminds me of Target or Walmart. I became a little nostalgic for home as I entered through the sliding doors.

In any case, this store had a small section for world food items. We were able to buy everything we needed here, including the little rolling mat to roll the sushi.

After a few hours of cooking and cutting up raw fish, we accomplished making sushi! Here are some pictures of our achievement!





Not to shabby for sushi-novices! We paired the raw fish with a Spanish white wine from our local wine shop, which was perfection!

To top it off, we were able to watch "Invictus" (one of our bosses had the movie). We also have "The Hurt Locker," but I have to prepare myself for the suspense.

We will be traveling in our upcoming weekend, so check back soon!

100 Things to do on a Rainy Weekend

I realize that my posts have been few and far between. I think our cold adventure to Salamanca has caused us to hibernate in our cozy apartment until Spring arrives.

When every weekend approaches, we begin to speculate how we will make it both relaxing and eventful. It becomes difficult to do the latter when you open your curtains and see persistent drizzling ruining the day and your mood. On those days, we have no motivation to venture out into the world; why go out and have wet clothes when you can stay in and enjoy the comforts of home? On Friday, I decided to try my hand at Indian cuisine and I successfully made some aloo matar with roti!



I know what you're thinking: why is Annie cooking Indian food when she's in Spain? I'm amazed at how easy it is to find and buy Indian spices here in Madrid. At Lavapies, a metro stop just south of Sol, there is a large population of Indian immigrants with stores for all your cooking needs. While there, you can find tumeric, garam masala and mustard oil for pennies! This all makes Indian cooking much easier!

On Friday evening, we headed out in the rain to JJ's bookstore for quiz night, a weekly event they hold for the drunken English teachers. We hoped that the bad weather would dampen people's spirits for attending, but they came in droves. One of the reasons we came to quiz night was that two of our good friends had created the quiz for the night. Over the weeks, we had commented on the difficulty level of the quiz and that there needed to be other categories where the participants could make an educated guess with the chance of being correct. The girls took the initiative and constructed such an exam. We tried our best to win the coveted prize, but landed in fifth place. It was a good quiz!

The following day was once again dreary outside and we spent most of the time playing games or speaking to family on Skype. Chats on Skype have become a regular part of our schedule here...we have to make sure we devote some time to seeing/talking to our family and ensuring them that we are doing fine. In the interim of my conversation with my mother, I realized that I would be missing the Oscars this year. Back at home, it was a tradition: I would watch the show with my friends and then we would comment and criticize (mostly criticize) people. I became nostalgic for those times. Also, I hadn't seen many of the movies nominated! Since it was a rainy, terrible day, I told A we needed to see a movie. Fortunately, Cine Ideal, our theater with movies shown in the original version, was playing all of the Oscar nominated films. We perused through the trailers and realized that we didn't want to see anything too heavy, so we skipped the Oscar noms for Men Who Stare at Goats.

We don't do it much, but I love going to the movies here in Madrid. I think they have a better system than the U.S. First, we ordered our tickets online from the theater. Next, we were able to choose our seats online! On busy movie nights, the theaters give you specific seats. After we booked our tickets, we went to our atm to print them out! It was that easy! We merely strolled into our theater right when the movie was starting. Our movie was quite funny, which was exactly what we needed!

On Sunday, I had the opportunity to meet up with a friend for an intercambio. You may remember that back in January, I tried to get a Spanish teacher for weekly lessons, only to meet an older lady who I couldn't really understand and left me floundering for the appropriate words. Well, I decided to post an announcement on a website that I would be interested in a language intercambio (or exchange). This is when you meet up with someone and speak English for half of the time and Spanish for the other half. It's relaxed and basically free-plus, you meet new friends. I had to filter through a lot of emails from 30 year old men who seemed to want a different kind of exchange than what I was looking for (I had specifically asked for a woman around my age, too). Finally, I found a nice girl who is a Spanish teacher in Madrid-the perfect intercambio for me! We meet weekly and chat about life over coffee or beer (mostly beer). It's a nice addition to my life here.

Well, we hope to do more in the upcoming weeks. We just bought our plane tickets to Rome in April! We will be visiting A's family and eating lots of Italian food. Before then, we have a few visitors coming to town!