This time I will not be starting with ‘difficult’ Spanish sentences so that I surely do not scare potential readers, but with something else. It cannot go unnoticed that, for me, it seems that Spaniards are enjoying life much more than Dutchies do. Work is something that definitely does not come first place, but good food and drinks and having fun with family and friends is. I really enjoy this Spanish way of living and I adapt to quite well I have to say. Having dinner at 10 pm is quite normal nowadays, which would be a ridiculous thing to do in the Netherlands. But enough of this, let me start my hell of a week …
The day after my arrival, Kelly and I went out for some good shopping in the numerous small streets of Madrid. Gran Via and Plaza del Sol are the well-known touristic shopping places. Shop after shop after shop with the same crappy touristic Madrid stuff. I cannot imagine why anybody would ever buy that.
We soon noticed that prices of shops that are also in Holland, like Zara en H&M, are sometimes a lot lower. So this meant even more shopping fun and we both treated ourselves quite good. Furthermore, we arranged our new Spanish telephone numbers. We did it at Orange, which looked cheap, but we compared it afterwards and we found out that Yoigo actually is the cheapest.
And that day we ate at 9.30, so as you can see we are quite used to the late time of having dinner.
To escape from the heat, we decided to have a nice refreshing swim at one of the public pools here in Madrid on Wednesday. We searched on the internet and that the one at Case de Campo looked the best and so we took the metro to there. It was a fantastic swimming resort, having three pools and some sunning areas to relax. We definitely had a great time there, though the water was really, really cold.
Thursday was our cultural day. We looked in our Lonely Planet and found a nice city walk along some cultural highlights. We started our tour at Plaza Oriente, which is the square next to the royal palace, Palacio Real. The square and the palace were breathtakingly beautiful. The palace looks really immense when you stand near to it. It is way bigger that Paleis op de Dam in Amsterdam. We wanted to go inside to get a grasp of how royalty lives, but the price of 5 euros was too much for us. We are still students, even if we are living in a foreign country. Later we found out that on Wednesdays the palace is for free for inhabitants of the EU, so we will definitely visit it at a later time.
We walked on to Jardines de Sabatini, which are the palaces gardens. Maintained very nice, they gave us a good overview of the size of Madrid. Then we walked on to Parque de la Montaña and Plaza de España were we enjoyed some relaxing time, which we needed in this heat.
One cannot visit Madrid and then not go to Museo del Prado. Because we are students, we could enter for free, which is of course really nice. I had already been there in January, so for me it was not that exciting any more. Kelly also thought the same so we were outside in 15 minutes.
Finishing our day with a pitiful failed tortilla de patatas, we decided to get some well-deserved sleep.
Shopping time again! Yeah, me gusta! Because it is so cheap here, I could afford to buy again some new clothes.
By the end of the day I unfortunately had to realize that this shopping spree had taken all of my budget for the day so we decided to have some churros con chocolate at Chocolatería de San Ginés, one of the best chocolatiers in town. They were absolutely delicious, definitely worth the try.
That evening we felt like having some pizza, so we decided to clean the oven on beforehand because it looked quite dirty. But we didn’t read the instructions of the oven-cleaning stuff well, which said you could use the oven for two hours. We turned it one and thus it started smoking after ten minutes. We said to ourselves, now what? So we decided to meet our new neighbour for the first time and ask him if he could bake our pizzas. And guess what, he did. We immediately liked him. This was a nice finish of this busy day.
Saturday we again went to Parque de la Montaña to visit Debod Temple, which is an Eqyptian temple in the middle of Madrid. When you approach it, you immediately see that it is not in its ‘normal surroundings’. There is no entrance fee, so we went inside for a visit. We thought it was stunning, because we had never seen something like this before. The hieroglyphs inside the temple were extraordinary. There was also a model which showed other temples that were moved outside of Egypt to other cities around the globe. There is even one in Leiden!
Later on the evening, a Dutch couple visited our apartment to check out the last free room. They are from Nijmegen, but not studying at an university, so we found out that people studying HBO are also accepted at universities here in Spain. A couple of days later they turned out to be our new roomies! That is really cool, not having to speak Spanish and English all day.
Another must do is visit El Rastro, which is every sunday. That is a gigantic market in the La Latina area of the city. Small street, a lot of stalls and shops and a lot of people made this impressive to see. We strolled around for about two hours, viewing all kinds of touristic nonsense, but also some traditional and local products.
Having enough of all those people, we fled to Parque del Retiro were we could rest our feet and enjoy the fantastic weather. We bought lunch and a bottle of wine on the way so we enjoyed the rest of the afternoon there. This is definitely the Spanish way of living!
Today, we visited Toledo, the former capital of Spain. I had already been there with my study association Asset | FIRST International in January, but seeing it in August is something totally different. Much hotter than in January, we had seen it quite soon, because for every touristic attraction you have to pay entrance fees. We did not feel like paying those, so we enjoyed to view from the fortress over the valley below it, which was beautiful, as you can see from the picture below.
So, loyal followers, now you have an indication of how great life can be. I have only one thing to say:
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