Our last stop was Madrid. I think we got the most we possibly could out of Madrid, but keep in mind, it’s the most we could after two weeks of non-stop motion. We were tired; gone were the seven hour walking days of Venice. We did another walking tour the first day, and it nearly killed me. We went back to take a quick nap and ended up sleeping for three hours—it was unfortunate, but I think unavoidable.
We took the night bus from Sevilla and to our hostel around 6 in the morning—our room wasn’t ready but we slept in the common room until breakfast time. We went on the walking tour, which, while we liked the tour guide less, was again something I enjoyed. You discover things you couldn’t on your own, like the fact that the Cathedral is much prettier from behind because the front faces the Palace and wasn’t allowed to compete; you would only see the back if you crossed a certain bridge. Or the fact that when they were constructing the Gran Via in the modern part of town, they wanted it to be very new and modern and so started basing the architecture off Paris, and then, as the ‘city of the future’ changed, changed it to the art-deco style of New York. Or the fact that the building Hemmingway lived in when in Madrid is now the local AA. I needed to be told these things.
We also got to see the art museums, which I’m always a fan of. In the Prado, we got to see works by Velazquez (including his famous Las Meninas), El Greco (who I’ve loved since Spanish class) and Goya. In la Reina Sofia, we saw works by more modern painters like Picasso and Dali. This museum was up and down for me—some things were really interesting, but like with all modern art, there’s only so much I can handle. If it’s something that looks like what I did in kindergarten, I’m not impressed. Picasso’s Guernica was there; I never realized how big it is. It’s literally gigantic, double my apartment wall, though that’s not saying much. Also, Dali is completely crazy. We just stared at some of his stuff and wondered what was going on in his mind. I think to be in one of his paintings would be to be in a nightmare. There were some paintings of his that blew me even more out of the water, because they were so “normal”. In a room labeled classicism meets surrealism were some works done by him in the same period of time that were so completely not-Dali it was hard to believe they were done by the same guy!
After our second day in Madrid we had our final night as airport hobos. Although this time, we were surrounded by other hobos too. We spent all day Thursday traveling, flying Madrid to Brussels and Brussels to Madrid with a three hour layover. Ryanair, since they’re so cheap, turns out to be really sadistic and makes you jump through about a million hoops just because they can. We got to sit in the front row Brussels to Thess though, and even though we were uncomfortably close to the stewardesses we were comfortably able to stretch our legs. We also ran into another ACT student in the Brussels airport who was on our same flight.
And that’s spring break. We got home around 6:00, earlier than expected, and I resisted the urge to go into a coma and instead unpacked and started getting settled back into life.
Whew! Finally done with the spring break posts! Sorry if they got a little tedious, I was getting tired writing them too! We had tons of adventures and laughs and inside jokes the whole trip, I can’t even begin to describe them to you so sadly these little summaries will have to make do. I know it makes it sound much more boring, but this is what I’ve been up to. It was a great trip, and although exhausting, I’m glad I took full advantage of being in Europe by traveling to see as much as I could.
My sense of language is all mixed up now. In Italy I kept speaking Greek or Spanish. In Spain I kept using Greek or the one Italian word I knew, gratzi, even though I understood everything people were saying to me! I was talking to a bus driver and he was giving me a detailed explanation that I understood perfectly and at the end asked me, “Do you understand?” and I responded, “Nei!”—yes in Greek, but sounds an awful lot like no in Spanish, so he started telling me again. Now that I’m back in Greece, I keep saying “Si!'” to people or responding in Spanish, even though I did a crap job at it while actually in Spain. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Hopefully it will wear off and I’ll be back to my native tongue in a day or two…
Final spring break photos, de Madrid: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rachelgoesgreek/sets/72157626640393816/
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