My feet hurt and it's 2 am...

It is almost 2am here in Madrid and I am so exhausted. Today was packed full of sight-seeing, walking, eating, more walking, and having lots of fun with cool people. Our morning started with a visit to el Museo del Prado. It's this famous museum in Spain where they have the collected the collections of previous Spanish kings and put them all in one place. I got to see paintings by Francisco de Goya, Diego Velasquez, and El Greco in this museum. Our tour guide was amazing! The whole tour was completely in Spanish and I surprised myself by understanding even minus a few art words. It was a great self-confidence boost. Another plus was that I got to see painting by El Greco who is one of my favorites and most important of all I got to se Las Meninas de Velasquez. This is a painting that I learned about in high school Spanish and have always wanted to see. It was just a great experience and the tour guide taught us a lot about the painting that I had never heard before.
After el Prado--which is basically on the same street as my hotel here in Madrid--we headed to la Reina Sofia which is another art museum but it's contemporary art only. I'm not going to lie I am a big fan of realism and not much else so this wasn't my favorite place but I can now say I've seen works of Picasso more importantly I've seen Guernica. I learned the history behind the painting but I still couldn't see how it depicted this bombing of women and children on market day during the civil war here in Spain until she started to explain the weird figures and things I was seeing. I more so enjoyed hearing the history than seeing the painting. Although it was pretty funny to see the two attendants on either side of the paint jump up and run at people who were attempting to take a picture of it. I also think another reason I wasn't very impressed by this museum was that by the time we got there it had been 2 hours walking around and standing and then we spent another 2 hours walking and standing around at Reina Sofia too and that was only the beginning of my day of walking around....
After the museums it was around 2pm--which is lunch time here in Spain--so we were pretty hungry since we had eaten breakfast around 9am. And by we I mean my hotel roommate Maggie, her friend from college Morgan and five other girls all from different places around the US. We were all ready for lunch but wanted to go somewhere not on the streets near our hotel so we ended up somewhere near the Gran Via which is a major street in Spain.
Getting to Gran Via was an adventure. One girl had told us she was a metro guru so we decided to take the metro from our hotel to the street where we wanted to eat. After figuring out the ticket machines we were heading to the metro station at Gran Via or so we thought....it turns out that today they had shut down part of the metro between two stops and Gran via was the next stop between the two. However we didn't realize this until one of us noticed the train had started to go the opposite way that it had just been going. We ended up and the station that we had just come from so we thought 'okay it's just weird Spanish trains and we just stepped onto the wrong one and so we got off and got on a train that was heading back the way we wanted to be going. I'm not sure how but someone realized that we maybe weren't going to go to the Gran via station but once again back to where we had started so we all jumped off and just decided we'd walk. It actually wasn't a super long walk to Gran Via from where we got off the metro which was nice. From there we just walked around looking for a place to eat it took us a while but most of the restaurants have people outside that will hand you a menu and try to get you to come eat at their restaurant. We finally settled on one that had an very very attractive guy trying to get people to try his restaurant--I mean we were a group of 8 girls so of course we picked that restaurant....
The food was great! I had a beer and some of the other girls had sangria and we just each ordered what we wanted to eat and than passed it around so we could all try everything that we want. I've discovered my new favorite food--croquetas. They are basically similar to hush puppies but they can be stuffed with all different kind of pureed combinations. I had ordered curried chicken and apples and it was amazing. You get like 4-6 depending on the restaurant and they are like thumb-size only wider. Some other girls ordered croquetas as well and I got to try a vegetable and a seafood one.
After lunch we sort of split up a bit and narrowed the group down to six of us. From lunch we decided to find the Plaza Mayor. It's this huge square where they do lots of important things in Spain--yeah I know such a great explanation. I mean it was pretty cool but there were lots of people dressed as different characters like Puss in Boot and Spiderman and they would walk up to you and ask if you wanted to take a picture with them and if you did they expected euros. I ended up attempting to take a picture on my "new" phone that I received the night before. Below you'll see the sign of Plaza Mayor and maybe not much else. On the building where this sign was there was a mural of lots of naked people. The group of us got our picture taken in front of it by some other tourist. It wasn't my camera because like an idiot I didn't think to bring mine....but yeah so below is the bad picture from my phone and the only picture I took today unfortunately...

Plaza mayor was just okay for me. Mostly I was having a great time getting to know all the girls I was walking around with.

MORE LATER....MUST SLEEP....

Madrid...continued...

So after visiting the Plaza Mayor we had to decide where to go next. Most of the group wanted to go see the Palacio Real or Royal Palace...and I mean a group full girls?? Of course we want to see the Royal palace!! This place is very reminisceint of Buckingham Palace. The gates really reminded me of the gates at Buckingham Palace. I wish I had taken a picture because it was really cool to see. They have tours of the inside because the king and queen of Spain don’t actually live there. It’s got about 100—I think—rooms and that’s just too much up-keep but they do hold a lot of important events at this palace. It shares a square or plaza with what the Spaniards call the ugliest cathedral in Spain. I'm not going to lie to you it's not the prettiest I've ever seen but the ugliest? I'm not so sure. Despite it's ugliness the Prince of Spain got married there so it can be too bad of a place....
In the plaza there were a lot of people sitting on the stairs on the cathedral because it's a gorgeous view of the palace and also there was a guy playing a violin so looking at the palace and being serenaded was pretty great....
There was one place the we wanted to go before it got dark. Right across from our hotel there were botanical gardens that were way way bigger than Phipps (shout out to my Pittsburgh people). BUT in order to get back to the gardens and essentially our hotel it was necessary to find a metro station to catch it back to our hotel--no way were we walking back to the hotel...it would have taken us at least an hour actually probably more than an hour. Thankfully one of the girls in our group had brought map of Madrid and that made it easy to get around and find everything we wanted to find. It also conveniently had the metro stations marked on it. So after heading in the wrong direction once--that was all my fault--we were heading towards the metro station. It just conveniently took us through the gorgeous park with a beautiful fountain. The best part was there were shrub mazes and there was a little kid chasing a wiener dog through one of them. It was adorable and they were both having so much fun.... We stopped for a little just to enjoy and then made it to the metro and after 2 trains were back near our hotel and the gardens.
It only cost us 1,50 euro to go in because one of us had a student ID. The gardens were great and beautiful but at that point it had been about 7 to 8 walking at standing so my feet were just screaming at me... Thankfully there were fountains all over that I could just sit down on as you'll see in the picture below courtesy of Maggie. We were listening to one of the girls talk about her college.

 I'm not sure but I feel like you can just see my exhaustion. But anyways I'm sitting next Morgan--Maggie's friend from college--and Natalie--the one who brought the map. Obviously the girl talking was telling us a shocking story but I just wanted to show the fountain....

After a while even one was ready to head back to the hotel and hopefully a little bit of rest before going to dinner and maybe going out in Madrid so we left and headed back to our hotel across the street.

We decided to meet in the lobby to head out for dinner. About six of us went together and there was another group of six that we had decided to split from. We ended up just walking around for a bit and eventually found a place that had outdoor seating. The food was just okay...nothing special but seriously expensive for what little we got. Dinner ended up getting ruined by a group of guys--American from California. They had decided they wanted to hang out with us and we were just interested in getting to know the girls in our group and turned them down. They took it personally and ended up shouting at us and calling a names and insulting all of us. It was an experience I hope never to repeat and by the end we were more than ready to just leave. Most of us wanted to head back to the hotel because not only was it mean it was a little scary because they were huge guys that were very angry and they didn't seem interested in leaving us alone.... 

So after that disappointing end to the night we headed back to the hotel and just shared a bottle or two of wine. Maggie, Morgan and I all headed to bed while the rest decided to venture outside again. I didn't end up falling asleep until 4 though and our wake up call was at 7:30 so we could head to Toledo....

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The First 48....

.....although I think this will just cover about the first 24--hours I mean--but there's a TV show that's called the title so I wanted to use it. Anyways I've finally made it Madrid, España! It was quite the ordeal. Right now I'm just hanging in my hotel room by myself--my roommate hasn't arrived in Madrid yet. I have time to kill and I'm at that point of being so tired I'm basically hyper and there's no way I could nap. Besides I'm pretty sure to avoid jetlag you're supposed to stay awake anyways.
So since I have the time I'd love to fill you all in on what's happened so far. I'll warn you this may go into detail but most likely my other posts won't be so much like a timeline.

Anyways! I had this idea to do a tally of bad and good of today simply because it was just a roller coaster kind of day with no brakes. So here goes!
Not so good: My Thursday morning started out early (5am). I'm the person who doesn't sleep when they're excited so I didn't end up staying asleep for very long.
Good: I was able to download one of my favorite Meg Cabot books in Spanish onto my Kindle for the flight--which I didn't really end up using because I mean the plane had awesome movies.
Good: My mom really helped me reduce the size of my pieces of luggage--something I had been fretting over for the last couple of days.
Bad to good: We left later than I had planned on but it actually worked out perfectly and I had more than enough time to get to my flight.
Interesting: My mom and I had planned to hit an Urban Outfitters before heading to the airport because I needed to replace a pair TOMS and take them to Spain with me. I attempted to navigate us to a UO that was on Broadway somewhere in what I think was supposed to be SOHO (is that even a place?) but I ended up taking us to Brooklyn. We drove through some pretty unique looking neighborhoods and some bad traffic before realizing the store wasn't at the address the GPS was taking us to. Thankfully GPS is something you can change and I eventually got us to the proper Brooklyn UO! I got my TOMS and we picked up and picnic type lunch from Trader Joe's just down the block before heading to the airport.
Bad: As I was unloading my suitcases from the car to head into the airport I was looking for my credit/debit cards because we thought we might need one for flight check-in. Lo and behold--not sure if that's used correctly--they were nowhere to be found. It seems when I was being responsible and making photocopies of them I forgot to take them out of the printer and put them in my purse so they stayed in Danville while I headed to Spain. :/
Not so great: So we parked at gate/terminal/lot 8 to check in for American Airlines because my flight info said American Airlines but I didn't think about the fact that in smaller print it said operated by Iberia. So that meant we had to jump on the tram thing to head back to a different terminal.
GOOD: The guy who weighed my checked bag let me put lots of more stuff in after he weighed it the first time. I'm pretty sure it was way more than 50 lbs but he didn't seem to care nor did he charge me. It really made my carry-ons more manageable. I'm so very thankful for that.
Good: The girl I sat next to on the plane was SO nice. She was helpful and friendly but not too friendly. She's from New York but her family live in Sevilla and some in Granada so she does now too. She was impressed that I had chosen Granada because so many students go to Madrid or Barcelona. She also told me that Granada has become very much of a young persons' city and that it's a great place. I'm glad that I sat next to her because it calmed me a lot.
Good: The movies that had on the plane included two that I missed seeing this summer but had really wanted to see so I watched The Hobbit in Spanish and then Iron Man 3 but that one I changed to English because I feel like only Robert Downey Jr. can be Tony Stark and that some weird Spanaird's voice over just wasn't going to cut it for the movie. Watching the Hobbit in Spanish was a pretty cool experience and I understood a lot more than I thought I would based on the vocabulary used in the movie.
Good: I managed to not hyperventilate during takeoff and even used the scary on plane bathrooms--something that I usually avoid at all cost because they really freak me out.
Good and bad: My plane landed at just before 6 and I got through customs and baggage claim by about 7am with no issues but nobody was going to even meet me at the airport until 10am. Waiting 3 hours was driving me a little stir crazy. Finally after 2+ hours of waiting in the lobby outside of baggage claim I happened to look at the doors where you come out of baggage claim and I saw it said Sala 11 y Sala 12. My info packet said that someone would meet me at Sala 1 so I was obviously in the wrong spot. I started to walk around and finally worked up enough courage to ask an airport employee for directions. I asked him in completely broken Spanish because I was so nervous and he responded in rapid fire Spanish. It was so fast and jumbled together that I was really only able to catch Terminal 1, free bus, across the street outside, and his gesture that showed me I wasn't anywhere near where I needed to be. At this point it's probably about 10am and the bus has a definite leaving time of 11am and I still wasn't exactly sure what I was supposed to do to get to terminal 1 and sala 1. I started walking outside crossed a street and looked to see a bus drive by that had T1, T2, T3 on a screen as well as gratis--the Spanish word for free. There were about at least 6 or 7 buses already parked but I had feeling I wanted the one I had just seen drive past but it had gone to the very end of the terminal and I was near the middle. I started booking it and saw it parked with its doors open. I still wasn't positive that this was the bus I wanted so I asked the driver in my broken Spanish and he shook his head yes. I lugged my suitcases onto the bus and got a standing spot so that I could hold onto my luggage. That bus ride, let me tell you. At one point in what I swear was a 3 mi bus drive--this place is even more spread out than JFK if that's a reference for anyone--the driver basically makes a complete circle and I flew to the other side of the bus because my luggage is basically heavier than me. I got some bruises on my arm trying to keep my luggage all together and not letting it run into anyone.
I'm not sure how to rate this: After the scary bus ride he lets us off at the end of terminal 1 so I start back tracking and I'm starting to see signs for Sala 1...it's at the complete other end of the Terminal...so I'm booking it because it's got to be getting close to 10:30am. I finally make it and I stand next to a girl who looks like she might be a student right outside of the doors coming from baggage claim. She looks at my luggage tag--with its ISA logo on it--and says she thinks she heard ISA people over there--pointing to a group of kids near the exit doors. I'm like 'success! I've done it!' so I walk over and ask a girl are you with ISA and she says yes so I join the rest of the group on the ground. Nobody is talking to anybody. It's like complete silence until once girl says quietly, "where's that other group going?" and someone answers her, "I think someone said Granada." I'm immediately beginning to question if I where I'm supposed to be. It takes me a good 5 minutes to work up the courage to ask the girl again if this is ISA Granada. She tells me no and points to the other group. So I walk over slowly and one girl says 'hi you going to Granada?' and I know I've finally accomplished it and made it to where I'm supposed to be. I breathe a sigh of relief as the girl asks me where I'm from and starts a conversation. I'm here. I made it and I'm going to be able to at least somewhat find my way.

Overall today was a GOOD day with just a few not so greats and bads tucked in there to keep it interesting! So far so good on the being/studying/living in Spain thing....

Can I just be there already?

Two more days until I leave and it still doesn't seem real. Packing has been terrible. I mean I understand why luggage has weight limits--definitely don't want my plane to go down--but seriously 50 lbs is so hard to stay under. I've had to pack and unpack my suitcase at least once so far just to make sure I don't have to pay money to check my bag. Eventually though I know I'm just going to say the heck with it and hope it's close enough and the person checking me is having a good day.

On top of me packing for Spain my younger sister is packing for her first year at college--she leaves the day before I do. Needless to say our floor space is almost completely covered...

The reason I wanted to post this is because I saw this cool video on ISA Granada's Facebook page and thought it would show you all where I am going to be spending my time for the next four months. I'm not going to lie Granada is absolutely gorgeous. I feel so very lucky that I am able to have this opportunity. Even if I'm more than just nervous....

It's pretty cool. I can't wait to call this home for awhile. I think it'll be something that will be amazing beyond words--at least I hope so....