El primer día

Hola everyone! I miss you all and am soo sorry that it has taken me this long to get to it, but last week in Madrid, we did not really have too much time to be on the computer all day...so I have been keeping my journal up to date, so hopefully here in Segovia, I´ll be able to write regularly.

First let me tell you about Madrid...I love it! It is such a cool city...it is kind of full of tourists, but there is so much to do and see. When we arrived on Sunday morning, we headed straight for the Colegio Mayor (a dorm like place where we stayed all week). We drove through downtown and got a taste of Madrid. Later that afternoon, we had our first meal there...I don´t really know what it was, but it was some sort of mix of cold vegetables, and then the second course was fish...it was ok, but we knew we were in for a week of Koster´s-like meals (our cafeteria at BU). The rooms we stayed in were soo small and we thought the beds were going to be so uncomfortable, but we slept just fine. But the showers and the bathrooms were a different story. The shower was in our room, so that was a plus, but they were so tiny. I could hardly bend down to reach my shampoo, and they definitely were not big enough to spread my arms out all the way...it was kind of funny, the shower curtain attacked you when you were trying to take a shower, and MacKenzie and I always got the floor soaking wet after a shower. haha!

Later that afternoon, the three professors split us into groups and took us on the official tour of Madrid. They showed us how to use the metro and the metro buses. We visited Puerta del Sol, it´s one of the main streets with lots of shopping and restaurants and stuff like that. We went to the Plaza Mayor and stopped in the tourist office to get a map, and then just kind of wondered around the city some more. But we all felt kind of rushed, because our guide was the program director and she didn´t really let us stop to take pictures and explore. But we were tired anyway so we went back to the Colegio Mayor to hang out. Earlier that afternoon we had heard American music playing in the room next to us...really loud, so we pounded on the walls, and got some pounding back, haha...we played that game for a while. But that night as we were getting ready for bed, we heard a knock on our door. It was Lauren and Ashtin (our classmates from Bellarmine) and two Spanish boys that were staying in the dorm for the week, while they took finals. Our neighbor who we had played the knocking game with earlier, was Alberto and he was from the Canary Islands. Nico lived down the hall and was from Bilbao (in the north of Spain). So we sat and talked to them some more...and we met some of their other friends who lived there too. So the four of us American girls sat and talked to all of the Spanish boys until about 1 a.m...so much for catching up on our sleep! But we promised them we would go out with them the next night.

So our first night in Madrid turned out to be pretty fun. We saw the sights, learned how to use the metro, and even practiced a little Spanish with the boys! We knew we were in for a week of fun in Madrid!