When last we met, I was in a terrible mood due to the Spanish class situation. I'm still stuck in my original Spanish class (we're moving on to - wait for it - more review of things I learned in Spanish 1 next week), which is unfortunate, and I was in a bad mood Wednesday too, but that has now passed. Despite an impossible number of little things going wrong on Wednesday, the world has stopped wreaking havoc on my life and now things are pretty nice.
Tuesday night, our couch surfers arrived, later than expected, but well. Nate and Aliska (that's not a typo) were a married couple in their mid-twenties from Salt Lake City, and my roommate and I spent a nice couple of hours chatting with them before we finally went out for dinner (around 11:30). We took them to Cien Montaditos, named for the 100 little sandwiches that comprise 95% of the menu, which range in price from one to two euros each. They also offer glasses of beer for a euro and tinto de verano (red wine and sprite, my new favorite thing) for two euros. Cien montaditos is a favorite among the NYU crowd. Or at least those of us whose parents aren't lawyers or medical doctors (sorry Dad). We spent about an hour and a half or so sitting outside, chatting, drinking, and trying new sandwiches - I got crema de queso y salmún (cream cheese and salmon, wonderfully similar to a bagel with lox) and tortilla de patata con salsa brava. Tortillas de patata are really common here - the one I had on my sandwich wasn't good, but the one I had the next day was, so more on that later. Our couch surfers were kind enough to pay for our (extremely cheap) dinner, and then we walked a little further to show them the Royal Palace and the Royal Cathedral (which are across from each other). By now it was about 1:30 in the morning, but even at night the buildings are really majestic. Here's a couple pictures I took in the late evening our first week here:
That's the Cathedral and the Royal Plaza
Side of the Royal Palace
Front of the Royal Palace
(The flag on the left is the Spanish flag. On the right is a flagpole for the king's flag, which is only flown when he's there. Which he never is, because there's like five palaces.)
Cathedral (which apparently isn't allowed to be as pretty as the palace; they had to "simplify it")
Top of the cathedral over the wall of the palace at dusk
Every member of the program had to choose one of three cultural activities (it's was a tiny bit like Amazing Race, but without the stress): food, wine, or dance. I chose food, and I'm glad I did because we pretty much got a whole free meal, everything smelled delicious, and I learned how to make some new things. We cooked paella (of course), tortillas de patatas, and made the filling for croquetas de jamón. Then we got to eat the paella and the tortillas as well as some already cooked croquetas (the filling has to refrigerate and set so it can be cut into pieces to be fried) as well as gazpacho, sangria, and a tart that as far as I could tell was made mostly of almonds, vanilla, and powdered sugar and was incredibly delicious. So you probably know what paella is, but I had never heard of tortillas de patata before - it's an incredibly simple and popular dish of potatoes and onions fried in olive oil and then cooked with eggs and salt to create something that looks like an omelet but isn't. It's surprisingly tasty, considering the simplicity. Makes sense that it's a staple of the Spanish diet.
It was a good thing I had the food class that evening because later I went to what was called a "welcome cocktail-dinner" for all the member organizations of APUNE, the Asociación de Programas de Universidades Norteamericanas en España, which includes about thirty universities. It was hosted at Gabana, an apparently famous dance club, and was neither a dinner nor were there cocktails. There was tons of free wine and beer (and soft drinks) and a few appetizers that were impossible to grab because crowds of people were swarming the waiters. I had a good time and met a couple of guys who go to Marquette University in Milwaukee of all places, but it wasn't what I was expecting at all. Though now I can say I've been to Gabana, which I guess means something to some people. The lighting was interesting.
Yesterday I had class all day. I actually went to school early (before my 9:30 class), got a croissant and a cafe con leche from the café up the street, and sat at a table on our school's patio (a nice big open area that connects the two townhouses that make up NYU in Madrid). I had about half an hour to just relax, enjoy my coffee, and get a little homework done before class. I think I might do that more often.
Classes were pretty good: I am in LOVE with Federico García Lorca, I argue a lot in class and talk probably too much because I'm the only theatre major in a class of 14 people who haven't studied theatre. I told my teacher after class to tell me to shut up if I'm talking to much, and she said she was grateful that there was someone who didn't act like a high schooler when talking about love and death and sex and passion (which is all Lorca writes about). We've had four classes, and she said I was a "joy to have in class." So that's nice. :) My Spanish culture class that's taught in Spanish is definitely getting me to talk in Spanish more, which is great. I'll be giving a presentation in a little over a week, in Spanish, but it only has to be 3-4 minutes, which is nothing compared to the 20 minutes I frequently had to present about things last year. Playwrights kids have no problems with presentations. My Spanish class is still really boring. I finished our quiz 20 minutes before class was over, which used to happen to me all the time in school, but now that I'm in college, it means I get to leave early! I took the bus home and got to spend a little time eating lunch before walking the five minutes to the Prado Museum for my art history class. This week we got to see Caravaggio's El Descansamiento/The Deposition, an extremely famous painting that usually lives at the Vatican and is leaving the Prado on Sunday. I also went on my own to see Velázquez's The Crucifixion of Christ, which I think usually lives at the Prado but is also leaving Sunday for some reason.
The Deposition The Crucifixion of Christ
It was really nice to get lost in the Prado by myself for a while after the class was over. Eventually I wandered home and spent the rest of the night relaxing with my roommate, as we were both exhausted after two nights of going out.
AND I FOUND SPANISH THEATRE! I was in fact going to see something tonight, but I'm still tired (especially after being productive all day) so I'm chilling home again tonight and going to the theatre tomorrow. There's a theatre less than ten minutes from here that shows new work, often many things at the same time just on different nights, and it seems like - for you theatre people - it might be the La Mama of Madrid. I hope so! Tickets are cheap, and tomorrow I'm going to see something that got extended through this weekend that seems to be a political satire. So I'll be lost the whole time because it will be in Spanish AND be about Spanish politics. I'm excited. I've also found some Spanish productions of works by Ibsen, Oscar Wilde, Christopher Durang, Pinter, and Moliére, so I'll probably check some of those out as well as all this new avant garde stuff I've found. Next week I think I'm going to see something in a theatre that produces its works in an abandoned church. I have no idea what the show is about but it looks pretty. If I get bored I can just watch the lights like I always do. Plus, it's in an ABANDONED CHURCH.
I think that's about all for now. Hopefully another post tomorrow about previous activities. Now I'm going to eat dinner and then enjoy an evening of A Very Potter Musical as a reward for being so productive today: two loads of laundry, swept the apartment, did dishes, made egg salad, went grocery shopping, got a better phone plan, withdrew money to start saving cash for next month's rent. (This is probably just because I can't deal with not having class on Fridays. Friday still has to be a productive day. I'm used to having no weekend, so three days is just way too much. It's like I'm getting all the weekends of my college career in one semester. Oh my God, I'm like Dobby when Dumbledore offers him a huge salary and tons of time off.)
Face it, I'm a loud and proud Ravenclaw.
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