Ice Cream

Ice cream

Ice cream here is pretty expensive and of limited selection, but boy is it good. There's a lovely top dressing on it, so it's like eating a huge ice cream sundae.

Wow, Madrid is in the mountains

I looked out my bedroom window today, and saw snowy mountains on the horizon! I guess it's either been cloudy or else I've been sleeping through the daylight. Either way, there are mountains here, but it's still warmer than the midwest.

Coming soon: Madrid Fashion! Learn what's cutting edge, and what should have been left in the 80s.

Phantom Internets

Our most reliable stolen internet disappeared this weekend, and we were sadly wondering if our days of access from home were over. Gloriously, though, our wireless phantom has reappeared and we are online again! Sorry for the few days without any updates. Here's a short update about Thursday, I'll add more soon.

Thursday

On Thursday night we decided to go out to a bar where an international student group meets each week. We met up with the other girls from our group as planned. Unfortunately, the person in charge of leading us to the bar only had the bar name and street name to get us there. We wandered around for about an hour (in high heels and an outfit far too cold for the night) before most of the other girls gave up and decided to just go to a different bar. Anne and I took the address from them and persisted. We eventually found the place, although it took another half hour. It should have been about three blocks from where we started out, but we had been going in completely the wrong direction. We met up with the student group, but by then it was ten minutes before the bar closed. Not all is lost, though. Everyone was really nice and we're planning to go salsa dancing with them next Tuesday.

Funny culture shock moment -

When we met the other students, we were completely caught off guard when they went to kiss us on the cheeks when we were introduced. We've heard that people do that here, but hadn't really experienced it. We were all able to laugh at us silly americans and our strangely formal tradition of shaking hands, though.

Library Nazis and more pictures

Library Nazis

Some things are universal. Like bitchy librarians. In order to use the computers at the highly-secured computer lab, we have to show our identification cards to the powertrippy woman behind the counter. We're only allowed one hour a day on the internet. For some reason, she thinks that Sarah's stupid, so she is really rude and bitchy to her. The problem is that, like at the movie theater, you have to speak through a little microphone that doesn't work very well. Even though this woman has to repeat the numbers four times for Spanish students, she flips out whenever Sarah asks her to repeat and starts talking really loud. It reminded me of how Mexicans get treated this way a lot in the US.





Our campus. Exotic trees, weird statues of Cervantes, Spanish fashion, fight against SIDA (AIDS)


















The Canadian restaurant.

I am pleased to inform you

It's true. The baguettes at the Bread Oven are better than the widely available ones here (even if they are six times the price). And speaking of bread: today we finally figured out the Spanish word for chocolate croissants (an important part of a balanced Spanish diet) - napolitanas. I'd been getting pretty weird looks when I asked for "croissants con chocolate".

The $15 phone call

Sarah and I bought a prepaid phone yesterday without much difficulty, but had a really hard time reading the manual outlining the charges. Our apartment has no phone line at all, which is not, we hear, rare. Even local calls are expensive and charged by the minute. The rates on the cell phone varied widely - from a euro a minute during the day to nine or ten cents at night. I was excited to read that international calls from 8-12pm were only .18 a minute (about the same as our phone card), so I placed a call right away. After about ten minutes, it told me that my phone was out of money. It turns out that you have to designate your home country, and the USA isn't an option. Bummer. At least we only had 12 eur on the phone!

Terrorism in Spain

Terrorism is an even hotter topic here in Spain. I wrote before about the newpspapers' clear disgust for the war in Iraq. The recent ETA bombing and the protests that follow make the issue pretty relevant. A few days before we arrived in Madrid, there was a bombing at the airport that marked the end of the ceasefire treaty between the government of Spain and the basque seperatists. Coincidentally, the building that was bombed was at the terminal where we landed, and as we waited for our shuttle, we could see the clean-up operation. The bomb killed two people, leading me to believe that it was a fairly small incident. The wreckage was much greater. Our driver told us that there had been warning beforehand and that the area was evacuated. Two young men who were asleep in their car were the victims. The ruined area was huge, with mangled cars and concrete blocks everywhere. But everything was moving forward. The broken glass panels were replaced with boards. I was pretty impressed.

This weekend, we also saw the cameras set up for a huge anti-ETA march in downtown Madrid. I didn't catch much more than that, though.

Siesta

I think I've been a Spaniard all along, but just didn't realize it. The concept of a siesta is perfectly natural for us. I've heard before that a lot of shops close up for the siesta, but I didn't quite believe that it was still a big deal in modern Spain. But alas - during the afternon, almost every store closes to observe this extraordinary event. It's really weird to see every store closed up 0 even pharmacies. Sleeping is really awesome, and Sarah and I are catching on pretty quickly. The whole schedule is different here - after waking up fairly early and having a very light breakfast, we go to class, have a meal for lunch (which is normally the biggest meal of the day in Spain), and then go to sleep. The stores re-open around five, but we normally sleep until six or seven. Most people don't eat dinner until very late, and the night life doesn't really begin until 1 or 2am. We really dig the extra nap, though.

Some more updates

Walking Tour - Sarah's notes

Anne and I were in different groups walking around Madrid. Her group was totally lame compared to mine! For instance: they stopped and starbucks; we made fun of starbucks. It was a long walk, but it was a beautiful day and we stopped in the middle at a little coffee shop/restaurant. I had a tasty piece of almond torte/cake and some water. We went all over downtown Madrid, which is huge and metropolitan, but very clean and with a lot of great old buildings sprinkled in. We didn't bring the digital camera, but I imagine we'll get some pictures at some point. All the trendy shopping places have big sales right now - 50 to 70% off. There's some sort of national holiday where everyone has to have sales. I'm not exactly sure how that works, but I want to go shopping sometime.

Cooking

Being able to cook in a real kitchen is really nice. Well, usually Anne cooks and I do the dishes. But I did manage some scrambled eggs. We had some friends over after the tour and made eggs with cheese, hash browns, fresh pineapple, and fresh bread. It was a lot of fun.

School

School seems like it'll be just fine. We're both taking 12 hours, 9 in Spanish which will finish our Spanish minors. We don't have any classes on Fridays, and are done the rest of the time either at noon or at 3:30. The schedule's nice, hopefully it's not too hard. It doesn't seem like it will be. The campus is small, but nice. I guess we'll know more once we start classes Monday.

Our Apartment

Like Anne said, we're really happy with our apartment. It's furnished and even came with sheets, blankets, towels, cooking utensils, etc. The pictures don't really show it, but it has a lot of nice dark woodwork - shelves, doors, etc. It also has all wood floors and two bathrooms, although only one has a shower. We even have a washing machine, hooray! No dryer, though. Instead, there's a clothes line out the window of the laundry room. We're on the 15th floor of the apartment building, so we better hope they gave us good clothespins!

More pictures

Captions - figure it out!: Making silly faces for the camera; our personal kitchen; furnished living room; view from our bedroom

Touring the City

We have been in Madrid for three days now. Now that I've caught up on sleep, the city is new and exciting (rather than foreign and overwhelming).

The USAC orientation that has taken most of our free time (and energy) over the last few days is finally over. We finished today with a walking tour of the city with an intercambio (Spanish friend). The historic plazas and grand buildings started to blur together after awhile, and by the end of the three hours, I just wanted to eat and sleep. Central Madrid is fairly touristy, so most of the shops and restaurants were expensive and gimmicky. I am suprised by the saturation of American products and brands. The potato chips were made by Lays, the toothpaste by Colgate, etc. One of the things I like best about the city is the diversity of stores and restaurants (Spain has the largest number of bars and restaurants per capita than any country in the world), but one of the sorority girls in my group just HAD to go to Starbucks (despite the dozens of local cafes around the are). Except for the higher prices here, Starbucks sucks just as much in Spain as it does in the US. I wasn't really in the mood for a $5 hot chocolate.

Funny restaurants

1. Nebraska Restaurante - to my horror, downtown Madrid has no shortage of this chain. We passed four or five in our tour. I got my picture taken in front of this window to my home. The only thing about the menu that reminded me of Nebraska was its generall boringness - pasta, chicken, meat, salad.

2. Restaurante Canadense Iglu - Outside our apartment, there is a Canadian restaurant that we'll have to try someday. "Iglu" seems to be referring to igloos. I had to pass this on to a few Canadian friends of mine.

Our apartment

To our delight, the apartment is beautiful and much larger than we hoped for. It may take a while for the novelty of our big kitchen and living room to wear off. Today, we had a couple of friends over to eat eggs. Our room mates - Amanda and Sara (there are two Sarahs) are nice and funny. After encountering the abundance of drunk sorority girls that make up the study abroad program, I was thrilled to luck out.

Wireless internet is just catching on in Spain, and since we don't have a phone line in our apartment (even local calls are charged by the minute), luck was our only chance to get online. Fortunately, we're at the top of a 15-story apartment building, and we can access (steal) a few unsecured networks. There's one particular spot on the floor in my room where I can get a passable connection. The challenge is to sit absolutely still.

Twilight Zone moment: Tonight, as Sarah and I were returning from a trip to the bakery (our bread habit is outrageously enabled here), we both stared in each other in shock as we saw tha tour apartment door had a different lock. We checked to see that the floor and apartment numbers were right, and eerily returned to the bottom floor. Finally, we saw that the painting in the lobby was different. We were in the wrong building. Everything else looked the same. We felt really stupid.

Food

The food here is just wonderful. It's not so much that I love the Spanish fare (although I'm sure I'll get used to it), but that fresh food is more available in the grocery stores. Baguettes for .40 euro ($.53) is nothing out of the ordinary (compare to Jean's at the Bread Oven for $2.95). Wonderful cheeses are inexpensive and available even in convenience stores. I knew to be on the lookout for cerrano ham, but I couldn't have missed it - it's everywhere. I was really suprised by how good the ham is here. I've never liked it too much, but the sliced meat here is of a much, much higher quality and, like the other "gourmet" products, is cheap.

Instead of frozen pizzas, they have refrigerated ones that are much fresher and better. We also got something that looks like chocolate mousse for $.23. Soda is expensive, but a bottle of champagne was $2.00.

The only thing that is a little weird is the milk. Although I like the idea of milk that keeps for a few months and doesn't need to be refrigerated, I'm not quite used to it in practice.


Newspaper

The Spanish newspaper tries its best to be nonbiased, but it can't really hide its scorn for the US policy in Iraq. Naturally, Sarah and I love it. If only we could have studied this kind of Spanish all along! Our favorite lead was with "Bush sends more troops to Iraq and hopes that the plan will work this time." A graphic described how the money for the new troops could otherwise be used (curing AIDS, helping the poorest countries, etc.).