Restore

The visit to Madrid made me realize a few things: I love European cities, the United States is very young and if you sit down in a café you must order something.

When we first arrived to Madrid we all went to a little café for a “little treat” which was nice for those of us who had been up since 7am and still adjusting to the time. We left the café headed for the Prado. This was probably my favorite part and I wish I could have had more time there – definitely going to make a trip back there while I am here. It was so cool to see the actual paintings of things that I had only seen in textbooks. Everything was a lot bigger than I expected. It’s amazing to think about how much time these paintings must have taken and everything that went into producing them – the canvas, paints, brushes, wow.

Then we had about an hour and a half to explore and have lunch. The streets were packed with people. I’ve never been to NYC, but I would imagine it would be similar there.

Then came the walking tour of Madrid with a very nice woman who spoke slowly and I think I understood most of what she said. It was great to learn about the history behind some buildings. The city is so old and has such a different past than the U.S. I noticed while walking around, Spain never seems to be destroying buildings to build new ones; they just restore old buildings to make them new. I love this concept. It makes sense to me and I wish we had more of that back home. I took a lot of pictures of the city so look for those soon on Facebook and hopefully some on here too.

We ended the visit at another café. Some people wanted café con leche or water or whatever and some people just wanted somewhere warm to wait for the bus. Me, being practical decided that I did not need a café con leche, but only a place to sit and be warm. Apparently that is not ok. When asked what I wanted by the owner, I simply replied ‘nada’ and took a seat with friends. The man was very annoyed with the few of us who chose not to order anything and hinted that we needed to order something or leave. This concept is very strange to me especially since there were few other people in the café and no one else came in after us so we were not taking anyone’s seat. In the end, I opted to stay and order instead of wait 45 minutes in the cold for the bus. Oh well, guess I learned something.