MADRID!!!!

The ride to Madrid was long but the time managed to pass fairly quickly as I switched between reading my book and sleeping...if you have ever seen me sleep while in a car, you can only imagine how entertained the Spanish people must have been with my head rolling all around...

I will continue to be proud of myself for making it all the way from the train station via the metro and some walking to my hostel without asking for directions!!!!! To all of you who enjoy making fun of me for being bad with directions - I can now prove you wrong! Ha! The hostel was pretty cool - it had tons of people in it and was more like a hotel than anything. I shared my room with two Italian girls and we had our own bathroom which was really nice! I went out and consulted the map the lady at reception gave me and started to go and see some sights she suggested. I bought myself some lunch that consisted of fruits and veggies because it's been hard to get those into my diet lately. I also went and bought two books in Spanish to help me learn the language more efficiently. I walked to this gorgeous park and had lunch then walked all the way through it to the other end of town with a pit stop back at the hostel to grab my jacket because it was actually fairly chilly in Madrid. I spent the better half of 3 hours looking for a Christmas market but of all the places she circled on the map and I thought was it, I could not find it =[

The nest morning something amazing happened - I DID MY LAUNDRY!!!! I finally had a hostel that had really cheap laundry machines and washed all of my clothes. I don't think I have ever appreciated clean clothes that much before! Had some breakfast then packed up my things and left it in the hostel storage closet. Joined a walking tour that started around 11:30am. We started off at the center of Madrid where the guide showed us what the city has that is equivalent to the Statue of Liberty or Eiffel Tower - a small statue of a bear getting some berries out of a tree. Not quite impressive in size at all but the story behind it is that the particular berries ferment on the tree so every season, the bears and other animals go eat them and essentially get drunk and as the guide liked to say - that's how they do it in Madrid. We moved on to the opera house and how Queen Isabel 2 put a lot of work in to establishing the influence and presence of art in Madrid (according to the tour guide, this was because she was a lonley old lady who needed to put her love somewhere). Next, we moved on to the governement building that was once and old Moorish building but when the new king took over (originally from France) he had is destroyed and built this new giant building instead. From here, the offical church of the city is literally right across from the government building and is pretty ugly from the front but from the other side, it's beautiful. This was because in these days, if your building was to be more beautiful than the ones around you, you were being a snob and could get in some serious trouble from that. We carried on to a park/church so we could see the influence from all the other cultures only to talk about the Spanish Inquisition. Another fun fact was that when King....took over, he wanted desperately to do something that people would remember him by so he changed the capital of Spain from Toledo to Madrid. This then involved moving all the nobles to Madrid and when there wasn't enough space to house them, this king decided to make a tax that required the local people to house the nobles. Long story short, a lot of the houses had tons of extra windows to confuse the king when he went around trying to determine if one was able to hosue the nobles. Trickery! Finally, I found the Christmas market! It was a lot different than what I thought it was going to be so I wouldn't have spent a lot of time there the night before anyway.

I then made it to the airport in time to hop on my flight to lovely Roma!