and where´s that soggy plain?

saturday morning and it´s raining.

yesterday was a lot of walking. so was the day before. my feet are tired. but that´s pretty much all we do so it´s not gonna change.

thursday: free walking tour of madrid for 3 hours. it was a lot of info and history and im sure i got things all muddled up. we found out how tapas were invented and why and learned a lot of other quirks and curiosities of the city.

madrid reminds me a lot of london, it has a lot of the same things going on. there is a lot of diversity- mostly from all the tourists and it´s a large city with lot´s to see and do and eat. it´s incredibly clean. cleaner than any other city i´ve been to in france! the spanish people are very sweet but vee and i look kinda like them so they keep thinking that we speak spanish. and so when i ask for directions like, ¨donde esta la puetro del sol?¨ they answer in spanish and i just go off of their hand guestures.

spanish people are really diverse looking. i can´t look at someone here and say, ¨oh, i know that person is spanish for sure,¨until i hear them speak. everywhere we look we keep thinking that we´re looking at indians, until we hear them start speaking spanish. their babies look different from the adults who lok different from the youth. and i like it- makes for a colorful bunch of really interesting faces.

we got to go to a salsa bar and that was alot of fun. i danced with old, large men who really knew what they were doing. they twirled me around so fast i barely touched the floor!

we also tried some veggie paella yesterday and it was severely disappointing. awful actually. the rice part was al dente and i dont really like my rice that way and there were too few veggies plus it was bland and unflavorful. and i know those are the same thing but the sentiment needs reiterating, that´s how bad this paella was. and we paid 3 euro for a tiny tapas plate of it. it was in this really cool indoor food market with a bunch of tapas stalls. it was so cool and quite expensive. it was packed with the madrid lunch crowd and everyone stood and ate from tiny plates of random meats and seafood. i think we even saw turtle feet! we started at that for a looong time trying to figure out what it was and it was so scary, they go for around 18 euro per 100 grams. the desserts looked so so yummy and they had stuff from everywhere, not just spanish stuff. they looked really carefully prepared and i dunno if this is because i was overwhelmed by all the colors and food, but it did look better than desserts do in bakeries in france.

vee and i particularly suck at taking photos this trip. we´ve taken very few even though there´s a lot to photograph. hopefully this will change.

my favorite bit of everyday has been to go to the puerta del sol with our falafel dinners and sit at a fountain next to everyone else who´s sitting at the fountain, and eat and people watch. yesterday we sat behind one of those metallic spray painted buskers who stand frozen on a box and have people take pics with them. it was so fun to watch the expressions of people who stared at this guy, cuz they didn´t know we were watching. and nearly everyone who gave him some money, creeped up to the can and dropped it in and stepped back quickly! as if he would jump at them suddenly or something! there was also a stormtrooper shooting at people with a gun that made noise, vert from ernie and bert, dora the explorer and minnie mouse walking around and scaring children. i really enjoyed myself but it got chilly soon so we headed back to the hostel. people watching is fun!

today we´re heading to the reina sofia museum since it´s raining. i don´t know anything about art but on our tour we were told of a bunch of interesting paintings that we can find in the museum so we´re gonna check those out.

craving: hot apple cider
currently listening to: this keyboard and mumbles of different languages and accents.