Guernica, Ladies Night, Tapas

This week was not the world's most eventful week, but I took a few pictures that I thought I would post.

First off, thank GOODNESS we are almost done with this intensive month of language...I'm so tired of all these ridiculous exercises one of our teachers has us do, like we were talking about women's rights in Spain, and she wanted us to respond to different quotes from men in Spain about how women should stay in the house, etc, but we had to do it in the subjunctive, and while we all understood why she wanted us to do this, she still wanted our actual opinions, but none of us could really say exactly what she wanted us to say while putting it into subjunctive. Just frustrating.

But yesterday, we spent her class talking about Spanish film, which was actually interesting, and I'm going to ask my family if they have any dvd's I can borrow (I still haven't seen Volver, but I was the only person in the class that had seen Mar Adentro, which if you've never seen, I HIGHLY recommend it, beautiful film with Javier Bardem) that I can put at least Spanish subtitles on...my comprehension is still not fantastic when it comes to listening. And we spent the other teacher's class talking about Spanish history...I think they're getting bored as well lol.

But here's a great story: Apparently, it is very normal for kids to live with their parents up until their 30's. Partially because it's so expensive, but also because parents like their kids staying close to home. Our teacher Ruben gave us some really interesting statistics:
Minimum salary in Madrid (maybe Spain?) is 587 Euros a month.
Average working day is 9-2, lunch, 4-8.
My teacher works 8am-7:30pm, 4 different teaching jobs, to pay for his living expenses.
I can't imagine working that much at a job that in the US to pay for living expenses; I mean, teaching at a University in a big city, I feel like the pay would be enough to make it on, maaaaaybe needing a second job? Maybe I'm wrong. But either way, I was just like WHAT.
And his 33 year old brother, who's been with his girlfriend for 11 years, is still living with their mom and dad because neither he nor is girlfriend makes enough at their jobs to be able to afford to move out. No thank you.

Went to the Reina Sofia museum on Wednesday with my school...saw some Dali and Picasso; they were the only two artists who's names I recognized, but we did see some others as well.

Here's a picture of a Dali:


And a picture of some Picassos:


In some places we were allowed to take pictures, and in others we weren't, so I only took a couple pictures because I didn't want to get in trouble anywhere.

But here's a picture of the Guernica...very cool. A lot bigger than I expected. If you don't know the story, click here for the Wikipedia article. It's really interesting.


And of course I bought a postcard copy to put in my scrapbook.

Here are some pictures of the outside of the museum:




Thursday night I went out with some of the girls to get some drinks and maybe do some dancing...we started at this Irish pub with free shots, where we ended up running into a couple of guys that my roommate knew from school. They were starting their study abroad programs out with a tour of Madrid before heading to other parts of Spain, and it was really random, but pretty cool. They were with a bunch of guys from their program, so we decided to head out and find another place that would give us free drinks. Upon leaving this pub, we realized one of the guys was HAMMERED...didn't speak a word of Spanish, and would loudly tell anyone that tried to talk to him in Spanish...was also hanging on all of us, just really awkward. We found a club that was having a Ladies Night: free entrances and free drinks every 15 minutes for girls, 5 Euro entrance with two free drinks for the guys, which was a pretty good deal. It was fun, but since I had an 8:30 class, I got home at about 1:30am. Wasted guy ended up getting thrown out of the club by security, which was really embarrassing for those of us that were technically there with him; I have yet to see a Spaniard THAT drunk, so it's easy to see why Americans have such a bad reputation unfortunately.

Last night, I went out for tapas with a new friend from class, which was a lot of fun. I had a great glass of red wine from Rioja (although it was chilled, which I thought was odd...), and we split some croquettas (ham, cheese, deep fried, deliciousness) and some calamari (yes, another thing I never thought I'd be too fond off). Definitely going to figure out how to make both of these for the family when I get home. At least the croquettas. :-)


Then we headed out to find drinks elsewhere, and came across a bar that was a free plate of tapas with any drink purchases, and the special of the night was mojitos, so we wandered in there and ended up getting potatoes chips with jamon...very interesting:


Not sure if I'm doing anything super exciting tonight yet, but today I took a long walk (google maps told me it was about 5-6km) around the Palace and through town. The palace and the gardens are gorgeous and I will definitely be going back to take some pictures. It's nice to get out and just explore on my own without a map, just kind of know the general direction of where I need to get back to, and if I get lost, I can always ask.

Other than that, not much more to report. I love that kids are the same anywhere...I watched a little boy plunk himself down and cry in the middle of the sidewalk, refusing to move. Our host dad is working on his English and was trying to figure out how to pronounce the differences between fail, fall and fell, which was really interesting; not something I'd ever thought of before, I guess. But I know I have similar problems in Spanish with things like that.

Here's a picture of a traffic jam on our street. It gets really loud outside our window, and I can't wait for it to cool down so we can sleep with the window closed. It's amazing how busy our tiny street gets.



1/4 of the way done as of today. I'm looking forward to October when I'll actually get to start going places and taking excursions with my program, and I know that time will start to just fly. I am loving my time here, but I miss so many random things from home! Like grocery shopping. And hanging out at peoples houses (THAT'S one thing that is really weird...personally, I prefer a night in at someone's with a few friends and splitting a couple bottles of wine...but teens here don't have friends over, they always go out...I do not care for this on a regular basis, I am too much of a homebody).

I also cannot wait to get home and do some cooking. I miss cooking!!!!

Love you all lots, only three more months!! CRAZY.