Orientation Part 1: Madrid

Hello, everyone!

I FINALLY have reliable wifi and a second to post! I arrived at my home stay in Sevilla, Spain last night around 7:00 pm, and I couldn't be any happier! To my surprise, my roommate and awesome new friend, Olivia, and I have our own rooms. I am so happy in my new apartment, but I am going to post more details about that a bit later.

For now, I wanted to start writing about my orientation experience. I landed in Madrid around 8 a.m. on Sunday morning and was picked up with part of my student group (API) a couple hours later. We got on a private bus to go to the hotel. Turns out, the hotel did not notify our program directors that there was a huge cycling race going on in the center of Madrid, so cars couldn't come within a certain distance of the area where our hotel was. The bus driver dropped us off as close as he could, but we still had to lug all of our bags (over 100 lbs of stuff) uphill for about 15 minutes to get to our hotel! ¿Bienvenidos a España?

Anyway, it all ended up alright. :) We were so tired, but our program directors told us we should not sleep too much during the day. Doing our best to adjust to our new time zone, my roommate and I grabbed some lunch with some other people in our program and explored the city a bit. Later that day, we had a meeting and a group dinner.

View from my hotel room!

My roommate, Olivia, & me on our first day :)

The bike race!

¡Ay! ¡Qué bonita es la puerta!

Fresh food for my first meal after the plane!

Plaza del Sol, Madrid (right next to our hotel)

The left side is painted! See it?

The next day, we woke up early to go to El Museo del Prado (The Prado Museum). It is one of the best and biggest museums in Europe, and has over 3,000 paintings. We saw amazing (and HUGE) paintings by Goya, Velázquez, El Greco, and other European painters. After lunch, we walked around in the Parque del Buen Retiro. It was kind of the "Central Park" of Madrid-so perfectly groomed and beautiful. Then we had tapas and tinto de verano (the less touristy alternative to sangria) for lunch in a restaurant with an awesome patio surrounded with plants. We took a wonderful siesta and relaxed for a while before walking around and grabbing a small dinner around 9:30. I have already been adjusting to the Spanish meal times! Woohoo! We met up with some of my friends from Boston College who are studying in Madrid later at night.

I couldn't take pictures at El Prado, but this beautiful cathedral was just outside of the museum!

El Parque de Buen Retiro & new friends (Olivia, me, Alex, Laura)

Tinto de verano

Tapas!

BC takes Madrid!

We spent Monday night in Madrid, and then left early on Tuesday morning to head to San Lorenzo de El Escorial and Toledo. I am going to try to post about Tuesday tomorrow. :)

Thanks for reading,
A <3