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!

Weekend Getaway/Scavenger Hunt

Work is going well, but it leaves us exhausted at the end of the day. When the weekend creeps up on us, we look forward to sleeping in, contacting family and watching terrible American tv shows online.

It was high time we took another vacation, so we made plans to visit another part of Spain. A few of my students and friends highly suggested that where ever we plan to travel, we stay in a Parador. Paradores are government-owned buildings in Spain that have been made into 4 star luxury hotels. Many paradores were formerly castles and monasteries, but others are modern buildings. These places have affordable prices for hotel rooms--especially for young people. It was the first time I have ever seen a discount for people over 18 and under 60.

I cursed myself for buying train tickets that departed from Madrid at 8:45 in the morning, but we reached our train with little time to spare. The train ride takes about 2 1/2 to 3 hours. Salamanca is now a large modern city, but if you take a cab from the train station, you'll reach the historical area in a few minutes. Here's a picture of a rather interesting sculpture that greeted us upon exiting the Salamanca train station. It looks like a scary unicorn.



We went straight to our parador to check-in. Most of historical Salamanca has signs like this: red calligraphy on golden sandstone. Quite a nice touch. The parador itself was actually a modern building and not an old castle. Still, it was quite beautiful. Here are pictures of the main lobby and our room!









This last picture is our shower faucet. We thought it was worth pointing out because the knobs had specific temperatures you could set the water to (in Celsius, of course). I've never seen anything like it!

From our room, we had a great view of the city! The big building on the hill is the old and new cathedral.



The cathedral is pretty interesting-it's two cathedrals built into one another. The first one, the Cathedral Vieja (Old Cathedral) is more plan and was built in the 12th-13th centuries. In the 1500s, King Ferdinand V decided to add a new cathedral to the edifice in order to house more worshippers. The Cathedral Nueva was the built with a mixture of Gothic and Baroque architecture. When you walk inside of it, you can take some amazing pictures of the city.



Before we went to Salamanca, our students informed us that we had to find the astronaut that is sculpted on the entrance to the New Cathedral. Apparently, while constructing the New Cathedral, they wanted to have pieces commemorating more modern achievements. It doesn't quite fit in with the traditional saint portraits and decor, but it was still challenging to locate...kinda like a Where's Waldo for art and architecture. A spotted him after a few minutes.



After checking that off our list, we proceeded deeper into the city and found a building called Casa de las Conchas-literally, House of the Shells. A knight named Rodrigo Maldonado built the edifice in the 16th century. The shells are a symbol for the Order of Santiago, a Spanish military and religious order. The building is now a public library.




We proceeded farther north, where we found Salamanca's Plaza Mayor. It was built by King Felipe V as a sign of gratitude for the city's support during the War of Spanish Succession. At one point in history, it used to hold bullfights. It is very similar to Plaza Mayor in Madrid, except that the entire square was constructed with golden sandstone, which is said to look lovely at dusk. Unfortunately, it was quite a cloudy day and we weren't able to judge it for ourselves.



We saw this tower through the trees and knew it was something important. In fact, it was Torre de Clavero, a tower that is the remains of a palace from the 1400s.



Whenever we walked from our parador to the city, we would have to cross the Puente Romano. This is a Roman bridge that was built over the Tormes river in the 1st century AD. It's definitely the oldest site in the area. It's simply amazing to see such a conglomeration of artifacts from different centuries that makes Salamanca what it is today.



We had only been in the city for 10 hours and we had already accomplished a lot; however, there was still one major landmark we had yet to discover-the university entrance. This is one of the most famous aspects of Salamanca. It's the oldest university in Spain and one of the oldest universities in Europe (dating back to 1218!) When we entered the historic city, we did find university buildings, but we failed to find the entrance. The next morning, we headed to the front desk of our parador to discover where the entrance was. Their directions helped us to find the gate in no time.



When you visit Salamanca, this is the main attraction-specifically, the ornate entrance, which has a portrait of the Catholic monarchs. Our students informed us that we had to find the frog hidden in the entrance. There are many stories about this frog: some say that if you find the frog, you will pass all your exams, others say it brings good luck, etc. A was able to find the frog, sitting on the skull. Can you see it?




We then proceeded back to Madrid, elated with the items we accomplished! We had a wonderful trip, but we were happy to return home!

Are you ready for some Fútbol (Americano)?!

I realize that it's been a few weeks since I've posted anything. Last night was of course the time-honored Super Bowl in the U.S. Usually, it's very difficult to watch football games here in Madrid; all the bars show soccer matches, since that's what the customers want to see. Once, A and I headed to an Irish bar to watch some of a Ravens game. The bartender later changed the channel once an important soccer game was about to air that the majority of the barflies wanted to see.

But yesterday was a day for the United States of glorious America--it was the Super Bowl! Of course because of the time difference, this meant the game would be starting at 12:30am for us, but it didn't matter. Many ex-pat Americans (and a large number of Spaniards) flooded the Hard Rock cafe in Madrid to watch the much-anticipated face-off between the Saints and the Colts. Although I only learned which teams were playing about 15 minutes before arriving at the restaurant, I was excited to watch football.

After living in Spain for several months, I have become more patriotic about the U.S. I was impressed with Queen Latifah's performance of "Oh Beautiful" and I loved hearing Carrie Underwood sing our national anthem. One of my American friends who joined us made me put my hand over my heart like I was in grade school again. It's amazing--I'm not even a big fan of football (I usually pester A and try to understand all the complicated calls), but that night, I became nostalgic for home.

Unfortunately, we missed the most important part of the Super Bowl--the commercials. Apparently, they showed UK commercials instead, which lacked the vulgar, stupid, senselessly violent characteristics that I have grown to admire in my American advertisements.

We stayed in the bar until a little after 2am. We had initially planned to stay awake all night for the game and then attend work the following day, but we became quite tired after The Who performed. It was a smart idea to leave early, especially since we had a full day of teaching Monday.

While we watched the Super Bowl, one of my friends was interviewed for an online Spanish newspaper. Here's the link to the page. If you click play on the picture, you see the guys interview a few people including a young woman who speaks English (my friend, of course). You can see my curly hair in the background as I am watching the tv and the delicious food passing by.

We are traveling next weekend! Can't wait!

Temple of Doom

After our adventures in Africa and late-night antics with friends, we resumed teaching. It was quite difficult to adjust to our teaching schedule again since we really relished sleeping in until 11am, but all good things must come to an end. Our weekend was pretty low-key as we recuperated from a rather busy week.

Last Friday, I began taking Spanish lessons from a woman who lives downtown. I thought that this would be a good opportunity to focus on my personal language issues and improve with a native speaker. Her price was perfect, so I scheduled a class. The teacher is a bit older and she speaks Spanish very softly. She mumbles her words, which makes it even more difficult for me to understand her. To put it in perspective, think about how difficult it is when you strain to hear what your grandmother is saying in a language you are comfortable with--now imagine that it is a foreign language! I'm not sure how to proceed; perhaps I'll keep with this teacher for another week and see if things improve...

Since we didn't have much of an eventful weekend, I thought I'd post up some pictures we took while our friends came to visit Madrid. Our friends' desire to see Spain influenced us to finally go to Plaza de España and see the Templo de Debod. This is an ancient Egyptian monument given as a gift to Madrid. Spanish engineers rescued the temple, which was in danger of being ruined by the Aswan Dam flooding. The temple was built in the 2nd century B.C. I had been recommended to visit the site at dusk, which made my pictures more beautiful! It' quite an awesome sight in Madrid.





Hope you have a good week!