mardid

madrid was amazing

Katie, Heather, and I took the bus from valencia at 9am. we got into madrid and walked to the hostel. then we took our bocadillos to el parque de buen retiro and had lunch. the park was amazing and i think was similar to central park. we had lunch under a tree and it was really nice and relaxing. after lunch we went to el jardin botanico. the botanical gardens were beautiful- gran you really would have enjoyed them. the colors of the flowers were amazing and the sunflowers were in bloom! most of them were taller than me. after that we went to the train station, atocha, where they had the bombings a few years ago. after that we went to the reina sofia. it is a museum that has a lot of dali, picasso, miro, diego rivera. la guernica was there. that was amazing. i never realized how large it was before. then we went to dinner - i had a gyro which was amazing. we got ice cream and went back to the hostel to sleep.

the next morning we left the hostel at 9am and got breakfast (orange juice and a croissant). we walked to temple debode which is an egyptian temple in a park in madrid. that was pretty interesting. from there we went to the prado. we didn´t get to do everything but we saw a lot of the goya, velasquez, el greco. my favorite painting was las meninas by velasquez- we looked at it in lamparelli´s class in 11th grade...it was just surreal to stand in front of these paintings that i had only seen in books and read about before, it´s hard to explain. then we grabbed lunch and ran back to the bus station. took the 5 o´clock bus back to valencia- they played fever pitch in spanish- it was different.

the weekend was amazing. it was in the high 90-100 degrees the whole weekend. we walked 8 hours a day. we were sweaty and gross, but i would do it again in a second. and i´ll try to post pictures soon...

this weekend: barcelona!

ciao

kk