¡Regreso a Madrid! (Days 6, 7, and 8)

Saturday morning we flew very early from Gatwick to Madrid, arriving at our hostel around 12:30. I was disappointed to find at the airport that the airport express bus has gone up in price from 2 to 5 euros. I guess it couldn't stay an outrageously good deal forever. But it got us to Cibeles quickly and then we walked to our hostel, just a few blocks up the street from my apartment building on Huertas.

We couldn't check into our room for another hour, so we walked up and down the street in search of ice cream as it was very warm and we were a bit hungry. My favorite place had closed and the other one I knew of wasn't open at the time, so we walked down to the alimentación under my apartment. The man who runs the place was there and he recognized me, even with my short hair and was so happy to see me! It was a wonderful surprise and he asked about my roommate and if I was studying again or just on vacation. We got ice cream and sat on a bench out in the street to eat it in a shady breeze.

After we finished we walked back up to the hostel and checked in to our four bed room. We had two roommates, girls who spoke something that sounded similar to German but wasn't. It didn't sound aggressive enough and they didn't speak English, and I've never met a German who didn't speak English.

We took a nap while we had the room to ourselves and then walked back down the street to eat lunch (around 4:30, which is late even in Spain) at Los Rotos, the place Brian and I went to twice during his visit. The food was good as always (Mom got to try croquetas) and we had sangria.

Following lunch or whatever you call eating at that time, we dragged ourselves to the Reina Sofia, the contemporary art museum not too far from where we were staying and managed to look around for an hour before trudging back to the hostel and falling asleep. While there we saw some Dali and Miro and of course Picasso's Guernica, one of the most famous works of Spanish art.

The next morning our not-German roommates left. We had breakfast in the hostel, which was just coffee, juice, and toast or cornflakes, and then went to see Alice in Wonderland the Musical (in Spanish) at a theatre about a ten minute walk from Huertas. We picked that of course because then we knew at least my mom could follow the story even though she wouldn't understand all the words. I did my best to explain the songs to her and the plot points that were different. It also turned out to be specifically made for kids, so the acting was all very physical and pretty easy to understand. It turned out to be a good choice and a fun time for only 15 euros each.

After the show we got lunch at a Mexican restaurant I really like called la Mordida and shared nachos with fresh guacamole and some kind of meat and tortilla dish with a yummy sauce. Plenty of food for the two of us, with a very polite waitress who didn't mind my Spanish. It was nice to remember that in Madrid people are very willing to let you try. The girl at the front desk when we checked in talked to me in Spanish at first and then asked if English was better when she saw my US passport, but I told her I needed to practice and kept up with her Spanish explanation of all the hostel policies.

We walked from the restaurant to go see some of the sights in Madrid - Plaza Mayor, el Mercado de San Miguel where we got gelato, a brief tour of the cathedral, the palace (from the outside), Opera, and Sol all on our way back to the hostel. Then it was time for a rest for a while before joining a group of other hostel residents for a flamenco show.

This show turned out to be something created by some of the people who work with the hostels and was a very budget-beginners guide to flamenco. It was in a cave (a brick room under a building, in this case), and there was a singer, a dancer, and a guitarist. I want totally impressed having seen flamenco before, but it seemed enjoyable to those who didn't have any flamenco experience and we got a free (small) cup of sangria, so it was an interesting experience.

We waked partway back with the guy who had led us to the show from our hostel and hen when I found a familiar street we left the group and headed to San Gines, the most famous place for chocolate con churros in Spain. Good dinner, around 11, followed by bed.

Monday we took things slow, spending the morning repacking our suitcases as we were now halfway through our trip. Around 2 we met my friend Alejandro for lunch at a tapas place in plaza Santa Ana, near the hostel and next door to Cien Montaditos, the old favorite. Tapas were just alright but it was fun to try some new things and Alejandro got to practice his English. We got ice cream up the street from the hostel and enjoyed it in the street before saying goodbye and going to take a nap.

That evening we took advantage of the Prado being free at 6 and spent an hour or so seeing all the famous works I could remember anything about. I did my best to give my mom an informed tour of all the greatest hits including Goya, El Greco, Velazquez, and Rubens.

Then came my favorite part of our time in Madrid: dinner with my Spanish family! We met them outside Parque del Retiro and had cold drinks outside under the trees first (Nacho and Jaine mostly played futbol while the grown ups talked) and then we went to a seafood restaurant for dinner around 10. Since we drove in their car, mom got to see lots of different parts of the city. It was really great to see everyone again, we spoke in a mix of English and Spanish to try to accommodate everyone, and hopefully they'll all be coming to New York soon. I'm really glad my mom finally got to meet them, my favorite part of Spain. Perhaps the best part of the evening was when I got to give Jaime the double decker London bus full of chocolates I had brought as a gift for the family. I mentioned that I had a present at the beginning of dinner and Jaime didn't forget. He got so excited when I finally said it was time since he had started to think I didn't really have a present, and was very happy to find candy inside. I told him he had to share but who knows if he will.

When we finished dinner the family drove us back down to Huertas and we said our goodbyes. Even Jaime who was practically asleep in the backseat got out to give me a hug and kiss goodbye. It was such a joyous occasion, I'm incredibly grateful.

And so we headed to bed one last time in Madrid, off to Barcelona the next morning.

A Punto de Salir

So it's about 3 am, and my flight from Madrid leaves in about 5 hours. I'm leaving my apartment in a couple hours. It's that weird period of time where you sit in a place knowing you're about to leave it, trying to drink in everything with your senses to paint a full memory.

Tonight I just hung out with Isa and Yasmín, later also with Nidhi and Leigha, and briefly several other NYU-ers came over before they headed out to party up their last night in Madrid. I was happy to chill out here with my friends, watching youtube videos, reading stupid tweets, and just passing the time together, laughing, taking funny pictures, and so on. Madrid is a beautiful city and I will miss it, but more important to me than the place is the people I've gotten to know here. I can't think about it too much right now because every time I think about leaving my Spanish family indefinitely I want to cry. (I cried far more than I'd like to admit throughout Wednesday, both in anticipation of and after leaving their house.)

Most likely I will need a little time at home before I can fully appreciate all that I have learned here, putting it in perspective with my return to America. Still I am so grateful for every experience I have had here, good, bad, frustrating, painful, incredible... I think it still hasn't fully hit me that I just lived in Europe for almost four months and have started to create bonds around the world. I have seen ancient artifacts, not just behind glass but in the streets where they first existed. I have become nearly-fluent in a second language, an invaluable skill. I have made some incredible friends and together we have done some amazing things.

Yeah it's definitely too soon to try to analyze all this. I feel the experiences of the whole semester still simmering in my blood, just barely starting to settle. Really, school just ended yesterday. I had two exams and a final presentation just yesterday. The end of the semester here is so compressed because of the Spanish holiday schedule.

I am unspeakably thankful for so many things, experiences, people, perspective. The reminder that the whole world is a place in which to learn. Classrooms are so often confining, but the world has everything, in a much more hands-on manner. I have been so, so, so lucky. I can't wait to get home and see my family and my dog and sleep in my bed and speak English and use American money. At the same time particularly over the last few days the thought of leaving has gotten harder. I was way more ready to go home in October than I am now. I wish Chicago and New York and Europe were not so far apart. Seriously, who is getting started on making apparition happen? Because I know for sure now that if I could have one special superpower, that would be it - the ability to instantly transport myself between places, like my home that is New York (hogar), my home that is my family (tierra), and my new home in España (casa).

To those of you reading this that I have met on these travels, thank you so much for the fun times we have shared, whether at NYU, in Madrid, or elsewhere in Europe. I cannot yet know exactly all that I have learned from all these experiences, but I know that you were a part of it.

The world is a remarkable place if we open our eyes. I know this part, the leaving part, would be hard if I stayed a month or a year, and I know I'm ready to go home. And I know I will come back. There's not much else I can say right now, as I'm feeling pretty emotional and simultaneously exhausted but attempting to not fall asleep before going to the airport. This is not the end of this blog at all, but quite likely the last post from Spain. So I leave you with this:

"Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes."

Henry David Thoreau

Madrid, te echaré de menos. Besos y abrazos.

Things I Miss About America

Just had my penultimate English lesson with my Spanish family and need to remind myself why I want to go home, because I'm really going to miss them. Thus I give you:

THINGS I MISS ABOUT AMERICA (Besides, obviously, my family)
Dryers
Dishwashers
English
A cellphone with a qwerty keyboard
Cuddling with my dog
Bagels. With cream cheese, egg and cheese, whatever.
David's breakfast cart on the corner where I buy said bagels.
Mom's pancakes and french toast
Mom's chili
Watching Modern Family with my dad
Playing video games with my brother
My big, comfy bed
Communicating with my best friend in sounds rather than words
Ridiculous late night antics with Joe/Harrison/Vince/Amy/Hollis/Grace in Laf
Bizarre existential/artistic/theological/philosophical (that was hard to spell) discussions with theatre kids
Everything about Playwrights Horizons Theatre School
The Brooklyn Bridge
The Fire Cat Gang etc.
American Christmas music
NoHo at Chrismas
My books
$1 slice pizza from 2 Bros/any pizza in New York
Falafel
The Art Institute of Chicago
Theatre in English, especially downtown NYC theatre and Playwrights shows
MAKING THEATRE MAKING THEATRE MAKING THEATRE (acting, lighting, and maybe even directing a little bit)
The Chicago skyline
UU churches, especially First UU Brooklyn and my kids that I teach
Fuerza Bruta!!!
Coffee dates with Bob
Navigating without thinking about it
Stores like Target (who would have guessed?)
Prices being in dollars

Okay so I can't wait to get home and see my family and my dog and sleep in my bed and eat food and have real breakfast and understand all the words people say and not have to convert prices in my head. And I can't wait to finally get back to New York and Playwrights and see my friends and make theatre and never sleep and sometimes cry and sometimes be really happy and in any case know I'm doing what I love.

5 days, America. 5 days.

Madrileño Life

Look, I have pictures of my Spanish family!

This is Nacho. He's 10. I had to fight him to get him to take pictures.

Then he didn't want to stop.

Because he wanted a picture like this.

This is Nacho and I with Iciar. She's 14.

This is Iciar, Nacho, and I with Lola. She's a dog.

Nacho, Marta (16) and I.

We smile!

And this is Jaime. He's 5 and super adorable.

I'm so lucky to get to hang out with them. They're super cool and the whole family is so nice to me. Although the boys are sometimes mean to me, as little brothers are to sisters... Last week Nacho and I were playing hangman and he managed to call me stupid in Spanish and English. And Jaime seems to like to draw on my arm or shoot nerf darts at me. But generally they're pretty nice. I'm gonna miss them so much!

Life Between the Weekends

Okay so I'll write probably three essays about Berlin soon, but in the meantime I thought I should catch up on oh, the last month of my life. When last I wrote of something that wasn't my travels, other than Fuerza Bruta, Brian was still here. And that was the first week of October. So let's see how fast I can tell you all about my life considering I'm obsessed with details.

Okay. Flashback to Wednesday, October 5th. I had class in the early afternoon, but I met up with Brian after for lunch again at Los Rotos. We tried a couple new dishes but of course ordered muerte por chocolate once again. Still perfectly delicious. Back to the apartment for a short nap/rest, then off to the theatre! We went to see a play called Venticinco Años Menos un Día, a play about an English play called The Tea is Ready. It was about the final performance of the play (one day before the 25th anniversary of its opening, hence the title). Because it was about an English play, a lot of it was actually in English, and there were some theatre jokes. I enjoyed it a lot. And we had great seats, for pretty cheap, in a beautiful theatre. And yet another theatre within ten minutes of my apartment! I had actually walked past it before and didn't even know...

After the show we stopped for drinks and snacks at 100 montaditos (the mini-sandwich place) for Wednesday's euromania - where everything on the menu is a euro. I had my usual tinto de verano, Brian had a classic Spanish beer (Mahou), and we both sampled various sandwiches before heading home. In general quite a successful day, I'd say.

Thursday, Brian's last day here. I had class all day so Brian did a bunch of sightseeing on his own and then met me at the Prado, where I have class every Thursday. My class gets over around 5:30 and the Prado is free beginning at 6, so we found each other and did some wandering through the galleries before heading to El Tigre for those famous giant mojitos and some true Spanish tapas, which Brian still hadn't gotten to try. We stopped for ice cream just up the street from me on the way and then headed home for the night a little early to sit around and chat before we both prepared for an early morning trip to the airport. Brian was flying back to China (via a night in Moscow?!) and I to Mallorca, having just booked my flight that morning and my hostel that night thanks to much toil on my mom's part to get my debit card unlocked. (They know I'm abroad, but apparently the card automatically locks if you try to use it for foreign airfare... Secure, but a pain in the ass.)

So up an at 'em, long before the sun, which rose while we were on the bus to the airport, and then you know the whole Mallorca story. :) It was such a bummer to say goodbye to Brian. I was really glad to have the weekend trip to distract me from being by myself once again.

So. Skip ahead to post-Mallorca... Just a typical week at school, I think, trying to get everything done and get some sleep and take in Madrid and whatnot. Hardly left the apartment over the weekend though, actually. Went grocery shopping, which is always an adventure - the closest chain supermarket (where prices are much cheaper) is a 15 minute walk away, so I can't go often. But that means carrying two weeks worth of groceries almost a mile home, which is a whole body workout, since I buy vegetables and that's where I get my less-than-a-euro-1.5-litres of tinto de verano. :) Also did laundry, lots of homework, yoga, cleaning. Productive weekend! AND I got to see Alejandro on Saturday, which was nice because it's hard to only talk via facebook - so much typing - or via skype, because I have a hard enough time understanding Spanish without internet connections causing more trouble.

The following week midterms began. I've never really had serious midterms like this before. I mean, I've had a few in some of my theatre studies classes, but we mostly just write essays about things we've read, maybe define a few theatre terms, no big deal. But I have four academic classes and four midterms this semester. Crazy. The first was my Lorca midterm, which was really easy, as all we had to do was write two essays about the two Lorca plays we'd read up to that point. And as we'd spent multiple weeks on each, there was plenty to write. (In my regular theatre classes, we usually read a couple plays a week and compare them in discussion and it feels like we never have enough time to talk about everything, but such is the pace of Tisch.) I got an A, but I think everyone did, because my teacher thinks grades are stupid.

My other midterms were all the following week, once one of them got moved, so I had three midterms to look forward to post-Paris. Remember in my Paris post how I talked about doing lots of studying for my midterms? Oh, no? Exactly. So Tuesday rolls around, and I have two midterms. For my Spain Today class I had to give an oral presentation of 15 minutes (in Spanish) with two other members of the class, again based on Spanish news articles. I haven't gotten the grade back yet for it, but I felt like it went pretty well. Then Tuesday afternoon I had the midterm for my art history class. This I did some cramming for both Monday night and Tuesday during the lunch break. Fortunately thanks to two years of art recognition tests in high school (hi, Rado), I have some practice studying for this kind of test. I felt like it went pretty well, though I wasn't totally sure... We got them back today though, and I am happy to report that I got an A-, which was a little better than I expected considering my last-minute studying. Though I guess PHTS has made me really good at doing things last minute. SECOND YEAR...

Thursday brought the Spanish grammar midterm, which I kinda refused to study for, as I thought I would just get more confused trying to compare tenses and endings and prepositions and things. My friend Isabella (my closest friend here in Madrid for sure) came over to study though, and I studied a bit by trying to answer her questions. I got that test back yesterday (really not much longer than the quizzes we have every other week, anyway), and I got a happy 88.5, which I'm pretty proud of considering we're trying to learn grammar of a foreign language in that foreign language, which is ridiculously hard.

Thursday evening after Prado Isabella and I went to a cute little cafe around the corner from my house to do some of our homework before we both traveled for the weekend (she to Paris, I to Berlin), and successfully got all our homework done for one of our classes. We read an entire four-page interview in Spanish and only found 25 words we didn't understand, so really we could understand the whole article without using a dictionary. We were quite proud of ourselves.

Thursday night I finally got my abono, which is this card you need to apply for in order to get a monthly travel pass for the bus/metro. I submitted mine on September 21st, meaning it should have been ready while Brian was visiting, but it wasn't. And a week later it still wasn't. And a week later, it still wasn't. It took nearly five weeks, and now I'm only using it for November, but at least I have it for this month. It means I can travel as much as I want on the metro, which is already nice, in just the two days I've been using it. It also means I don't have to pay an extra fare to go to the airport on the bus or train, which is important for all the traveling I'm doing. Woo!

So. The final development of October is a wonderful one - halfway through the month, I got a job! I'm "teaching English" to a family of four kids. I put that in quotes because the oldest two, both girls, Marta, 16 and Iciar, 14, studied in London for a semester last fall, so their English is just fine. The ten-year-old, Nacho, has English in school and speaks quite well. Sometimes I have to repeat what I say, or he'll ask me how to say something in English (a constant test of my Spanish vocabulary, which is good for me), but he's great. He reminds me a lot of my cousin Josh who is the same age and looks quite like him, in addition to being similar in personality. The youngest, Jaime, is 5, and is hilarious. I mostly speak to him in Spanish, and it is certainly a test of my abilities to try to understand him, as he speaks very fast and like a five-year-old. Think about how little kids talk in English, and then try to understand that in a foreign language. Yeah. But he's a lot of fun, and his favorite phrase is "I'm fine thank you" which he says all as one word. He knows the English names of lots of animals and can count at least to 15. We played Simon says last week - his idea, not mine - and he seems to know body parts pretty well too. (Put your hands on your head, point to your nose, raise your right arm, etc.) The boys are both always fighting for my attention. I spend 15 minutes with Jaime, then 45 minutes with each Nacho, Iciar, and Marta. Jaime and I just play games, or I end up chasing him for some reason, Nacho always has something to show me that he made (he's really good at this lego engineering set he has), and I just chat about school and life and whatnot with Iciar and Marta. During which time Nacho always has to come by for some reason. And when I'm with Nacho, Jaime never wants to go away. That's always the time he must also be in the same room doing his homework (he's practicing writing letters of the alphabet).

They also have two dogs, Klaus and Lola. Lola is some kind of terrier, little enough to sit in my lap, which she does pretty constantly. It's quite a crazy house, but I love the family. And every time I come back from a trip, they ask me how it was, or tell me to have a good weekend before I go. Yesterday I mentioned that I ate lots of chocolate in Berlin, and I guess because now they know I like chocolate, my glass of water (because I'm always offered something to drink) was accompanied by three different pieces of chocolate. They spoil me, really. AND I'm getting paid to hang out with their kids and speak English. I'm so lucky. I can't believe it. The dad (also named Alejandro) does something with computers, and they're very well off - and four kids is a lot for a Spanish family - but I still feel a little guilty getting paid to basically just hang out. Not gonna complain though. :)

So. That's my life now! Berlin post soon to come, as well as Paris pictures, of course. The editing process has commenced. ¡Besos desde España!