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!
A few mysterious visitors... I'm SO excited!!
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