Mi padre fue la primera rueda!!!

El domingo por la noche fui a ver Transformers (en español!) con mi nuevo amigo Javi. Shia in spanish sounded more manly than usual. And the robots en español were hilarious. I must say, movies in Spanish are a completely different experience. It was a fun movie, and I had a great time. Also, movie theaters in Spain are really small compared to the ones in the states. In the States, the movie theaters are stadium seating like, but here they are just…flat. All the seats are at the same level, which makes the movie watching experience sometimes a bit painful (you gotta tilt your head, a lot. Especially when there are robots fighting!).

Monday comes around and so do classes. Our schedule hasn’t changed in three weeks, even after passing our exam. We still have the same teachers at the same time, just with new books and new material. There are a lot less students this week, the fewest I’ve seen since I’ve been here. There are only a few new ones like Robert from Zurich and Weston from Arizona and some other guy who’s from Holland but when he speaks in English he sounds a bit Irish (I can’t remember his name right now, but someone told me his name was Reiner, and that he had studied in Seattle for a semester….so I just looked at them and said “Reiner? Like Mount Reiner?” then I got smacked in the head. :/ ). So, when time came for the copa (like every Monday night) the bar was pretty empty, minus the very few new people and lots of old people who have been there for three weeks or more. But it was nice to see some new faces. In order to get to know some of the new boys and to enjoy our last week in Madrid, we went out to a bar called Trocha, and had ourselves some drinks. It was a pretty relaxing Monday evening.

Tuesday comes around and we all decide to have lunch in the park. So we’ve established a nice spot on the grass in the Retiro and we’ve had lunch there ever since (after skyping with my mommy of course). Professor Tardio, my Hispanic Studies Advisor and professor head of this program at CMU, arrived on Sunday to Madrid and came by Sampere to say hello to us all. She also invited us to some tapas and sangria later that evening. The CMU crew (consisting of Steph, Michelle, Tema, Cristian, Guillermo, and myself) plus Tardio went to this place called Las Cuevas. It’s a basement like place that looks like a tavern/cavern with quotes written all over the walls (Laura, you’d like it. I took pictures of it). There are also renditions of famous paintings that can be found in El Prado. There was also this old guy playing the piano (he was awesome, until he started playing Moonlight Sonata. Not cool. Not cool.) The place was pretty sweet, but we all thought it was a tapas place. It turned out to only be a bar. So no food. So we had to jarras de sangria sin comida. So we were all very hungry. After Tardio left us, we decided to get some food. We headed off into Sol and found a reasonable place. Our new friends Javi y Alejandro met up with us and we all shared some tapas. It was delicious. My favorite tapas are patatas bravas and chorizo en cidra con pan. Yum. After satisfying my hungry we headed home.

Wednesday came and went with only some exciting things. After a full day of classes and a lovely lunch in the park, we headed home for our daily siesta (its just too hot to do anything during the day. Every time we try we just get overheated, head home, and wait until it gets cooler). We decided to meet up with our Sampere friends at El Tigre for one last time. Wednesday though was particularly crowded because we happened to go to El Tigre during Orguello Week 09 (the Gay Pride week, and this place is smack in the middle of the gay area) so there were rainbow flags everywhere, bars on all the sidewalks, stages in all of the plazas, and tons of people walking around. So, plus our giant sangrias y mojitos (and free tapas) we got to see some action on stage. Even though I had no idea who was performing, it was still pretty sweet. It was nice to see how everyone just gathers together and celebrates something with so much gusto. Anyway, afterwards we headed to this place called “School Disco” which is a club only on Wednesday nights that’s for international students and other Madrileños. Girls get in for free and get free sangria. Woooooh. So we stayed there for a while dancing and having a good time. Cristian and I couldn’t resist showing off our dance skills which apparently gave off the wrong idea to the many foreigners in our group (let’s just say I was asked several times whether or not I was hooking up with him. I love Cristian, but the answer a definite NO).