La Zarzuela y el Camarero Rodrigo

Wednesday night in Madrid did not start out so well. We were going to a Zarzuela performance in the center of Madrid, and the professors just told us to meet them there. The performance was at 6 and we had to catch the bus there. So groups left at different times...the earliest being around 5:15, but still about 20 of us ended up waiting at the bus stop. There was also another big group of middle school kids there too waiting for the bus. So here we are all dressed up at the bus stop waiting...until about 5:40...we were going to be late and we thought the professors were going to kill us! So we got off the bus around 3 minutes before 6 and were running around the streets trying to find the theatre. We all hurried in and tried to find our seats...we just made it, but we were scared to look at our professors. It turned out to be fine though...they understood the bus was late.

So anyway, back to the Zarzuela performance. It is kind of an opera-play-musical type performance. But only about an hour long. We saw two of them. The music and dancing and costumes were beautiful...but we couldn´t really understand what they were saying! They were speaking very fast and sometimes singing opera, and even the times when we could read what they were singing (there was a screen above the stage) the words were unfamiliar because they used a different kind of speaking and sometimes shorten the words...so it´s hard to understand. It´s kind of like trying to understand Shakespeare except in Spanish ;) So we watched two of these performances. The second one was easier to understand than the first, but we were still pretty lost. López was cracking up and the rest of us were just sitting there like, ha ha (????)

So after the performance, we decided to go out to eat since we were all dressed up and lookin´good. We (the 6 BU girls) went into a restaurant called Cañas y Tapas. We sat down in the back because there was no room in the bar, and we were the only ones back there. Our waiter brought us our menus and sat and waited for us to order. We took kind of a long time to order (the waiters in Spain expect you to know your drink order as soon as you sit down) so we thought he kind of hated us. but he warmed up to us later.

We were talking and laughing and started to kind of mess with us (he sneaked up behind me and scared me when he brought us our food...then he was making fun of Ashtin because she was laughing so hard she was crying). So by the end of the meal we were making conversation with him, and he was asking us where we were from and what we were doing in Spain. His name was Rodrigo, even thought he had come back in to the room two more times with two different name tags. He finally showed us his I.D. to "prove" that his name was really Rodrigo. haha. He was from Uruguay and was studying in Spain.

The next time he came in the room, he shushed us...we thought we were in trouble again. But no! Rodrigo had six glasses in his had and a bottle...he poured us all a shot of this liqueur that had a buttery, almondy type taste...I still don´t know what it was, but it was not very good. But the thought was nice and it was on the house :) And we made a new friend. It was a night full of a lot of fun and a LOT of laughing...we will always remember Rodrigo, our favorite "unfriendly camarero (waiter)."