Tengo una novia

The day before yesterday we decided to plan out “el ultimo dia,” as we decided to call it. We planned to go to school, eat lunch with our senora’s, then take advantage of our pool on top of our apartment, steal some internet at my apartment, then go running in the parque de retiro. Well, all that changed after Robyn and I talked to Paquita. We asked her if our friends could come over and lay out at the swimming pool. So, as usual, she said a lot of Spanish and somewhere in there we caught that we couldn’t go to the pool because they were cleaning it. And we were just so excited about it! But it will happen soon! Of course, I will be applying lots of sunscreen because I am the child of Jim and Susan Lockhart.

Changing the plans of our ultimo dia, we decided to find this little coffee shop we saw when we went exploring the day before. This coffee shop, we noticed, had WIFI, which is always a bonus to us! I suggested we whip out our big, touristy map to find the exact location of it and take a different metro stop. So we found the right metro stop, got off and of course didn’t know where to go from there. And these creepy men were staring at us so we decided to run across the street. Again, we took out our huge map of Madrid. Thankfully, we hear this “are y’all lost?” in perfect English. It was an American! It was this cute, young woman from Virginia who was living in Madrid and teaching English at an American school. She was so great and told us exactly where to go in nice, English directions. Oh the joy we get out of meeting fellow Americans. It doesn’t matter that you would normally ignore them if you saw them in the US. When you see an American in a foreign country, you are instantly bonded!

As we were making our way to the coffee shop, we stopped at this tiny shoe store because it had these certain, tom-like shoes that we had been wanting. But, we kept holding off buying them because we thought we could find them really cheap. And sure enough, these were 5 euros! What a bargain! We all got a pair (some of us multiple)! Then we all had to wear them, because they were just too cute to pass up!

We made our way to the coffee shop, and it was even cooler than we expected. We all ended up ordering the same thing, something called like a caramelo. It had coffee, caramel sauce, and vanilla ice cream in it. D-e-l-i-c-i-o-u-s!! And after much confusion and partially stressing out the baristas of the coffee shop, we got internet connection. But, it only lasted about an hour before it mysteriously stopped working on our computers. We decided to go back and relax at our houses before dinner. We also wanted plenty of time to get ready because we wanted to do something fun that night.

This is a picture of the inside of the coffee shop

caramelo coffee drink

oh, just reading at the coffee shop.

We ended up deciding to meet around an area called Sol. And let me tell you, it is the happening place at night! We got out of the metro to wait for our friends CJ and Julie. While we were waiting, we had like 5 people come up to us handing us free entries to various disco-techs and dance places. It was hilarious! After our friends got there we decided to try this one place called Joy. (We mentioned this place to Paquita and she got so excited and said there were “muy chicos” there! She always gets so excited when we say we are going out during the night) We ended up realizing we got there waaaay to early and decided to make a little detour to this place that the American teacher told us about earlier. It is a restaurant that is open 24 hours a day and serves the best churros in Madrid with this excellent chocolate dip. We tried to order just 6, one for each of us. But he ended up bringing us this huge plateful. And since it was right there in front of us we had to eat almost the whole thing!

We ended up going several different places and just making fools of ourselves having fun on the dance floor. We even busted out some classic Sing moves. They were a big hit with the local Spaniards. We tried to teach them our skills, but it didn’t work out so well.

So around 3:00am, we decided it was time to leave because we did have to get up at 6, I repeat 6 in the morning to leave for our weekend trip. Just for clarification, this was all of our first experience with Spanish taxi’s. We told the driver to take us to our area, the Herrera Oria, not knowing that it was a huge street. We ended up driving around for about 20 minutes until we realized that we were nowhere near home. After completely confusing the taxi driver, yes it is possible to get a taxi driver lost, we remembered a street name close to our apartments and he took us there. He ended up being really nice about it and not charging nearly as much as he should of. But at one point in our conversation with him, Robyn told him that "tengo una novia," meaning that she had a girlfriend. While she meant to say "tengo una sobriena," she had a niece. It was hilarious! We finally got home at 3:30, slept for a couple of hours and woke up bright and early at 6am. 

Today we toured Cordoba and are staying in a hotel in Sevilla. As much as I would like to inform you all about my day today, I am much to tired to write anymore tonight. 

So, adios!

Maria