Madrid - la captial!

Finally I am here Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 na! The three flights I took to get to Madrid were dreadful, but I thankfully arrived here safely and with all my luggage. At the airport our ISA director in Santander, Carmen, met me and 4 other students at the airport to take us to our hotel, HUSA Moncloa (which by the way is the EXACT same hotel I stayed in with my Cal Poly group 3 years ago). Carmen is such a fun person. She is very expressive and likes to joke around alot. She is also really attentive making sure we are all adjusting to Spain well. I am really looking forward to working with her more in Santander.
Alright, before I arrived in Spain I was a little nervous about going back, but as soon as I arrived at the hotel I asked my roommate Naomi, who will be living with me in Santander, if she wanted to walk to la plaza españa. So the two of us walked there and it surprised me how much I remembered Madrid and how to get around the city. I easily was able to find all my favorite places to go to. La plaza españa is my favorite plaza because of the statue they have there. It is a statue dedicated to Miguel Cervantes who wrote Don Quijote. There are 6 seperate statues that are in the center of a pond and these statues are of Miguel Cervantes, Donquijote & Sancho Panza, and there are 3 other characters from Cervantes' stories. Later in the evening all the students in my group went on a bus tour to see the city and Carmen gave us historic information about the different sites of Madrid.
On the second/last day of Madrid all of us went to El Prado to see paintings by Velasquez (my favorite Spanish painter), Goya, Murillo and El Greco. It was fun for me to see all these magnificent paintings again. After that we had free time and Naomi and I took a bus to la plaza colón to see my friend Davíd (one of my friends from Valladolid who now works for the security department of Madrid's government as a computer engineer). I ended up missing him, but later in the evening around 7:30 I met up with him and two of my friends from the group came with me. We sat in the terraza to have some drinks and just talked. It was so much fun for me to be back with an old friend and to just remember the experiences I had in Valladolid.
After plaza colón, our group went to the Palacio Real. The current Royal family live in another palace, so el palacio real is more of a museum. It was a nice tour and the outside of the palace was beautiful, but the inside didn't impress me much.
Davíd y yo

It was nice to see it though. Then later I bought a few necessities at El Corte Ingles. This store always makes me laugh just becuase it is a store with everything in it, I mean EVERYTHING! It was a supermarket, clothes, electronics, a plant shop, bookstore, etc. all in one large building. Then I met with Davíd (as I mentioned earlier).
To end the wonderful day I had, Emily (a new friend) and I walked down Calle Princesa (one of the main streets) and went all the way up to Gran Vía to find some dinner. La Gran Vía is like Madrid's version of Broadway. We didn't find any place we wanted to go to, so we stopped at a gelato shop to get some ice cream and walked back to our hotel. I'll share with you later about El Escorial.

Besitos, Celeste