Madrid Day 1

The next few blogs about Madrid were written last week.

So I'm sitting here in our hotel room in Madrid. It's about the size of my room in Caceres, but all I care is that there's a bed and a nice shower that I can stand up in (the shower at my apartment has no curtain) and that has a door. I was really nervous about the trip into Madrid at first, but it went pretty smoothly actually. Even though I mostly had just clothes, my backpack was absolutely stuffed. I just screamed tourist. I found the bus station after a lot of walking, and it was so easy to figure out. The almost four-hour ride into Madrid was uncomfortable but bearable. Americans are much taller than Europeans. Therefore, there's less leg room. Once I got to the bus station in Madrid, I went to the bathroom (no toilet paper again) and then got a taxi to the Best Western, which was really close to the airport. It took about 15 minutes to get there and cost about 23 euros, which was much better than I thought it'd be.

I was so excited to see my mom and aunt, and we all had things to tell each other about our travels. We had dinner at this little cafe close to the hotel, which was really good. Iberian spicy sausage sandwich is surprisingly good. By the way, I hated coke and olives before I came to Spain. Now however, since the Sprite here tastes like bathroom cleaner, coke is the only soda I drink, and the complimentary olives that they give you at restaurants are absolutely delicious. Tonight, we had a small plate of fresh olives and sardines. I've never had sardines, so I was a bit hesitant at first, but honestly, they were really good. Spain is changing my tastes very quickly, and I really don't seem to mind because here almost everything is "rico"! Tomorrow, we're switching hotels so that we can be closer to the city and don't have to spend so much money on traveling back and forth. I'm so excited to be in Madrid and to show my family what I've been falling in love with these past two months.