Toledo!

View of the whole city

On Friday, the whole BC en Madrid group (rolling 40 deep) had our first group trip to Toledo, a city about an hour outside of Madrid.  A really long time ago, (I technically could go look at my notes and get precise dates...but that would mean moving out of bed sooooo not about that...) control of the city changed hands between many different groups so there are Christian, Muslim, and Jewish influences all throughout the city.  It's a city with TONS of history, which makes sense that we would go there.  The trip was educational and counted as class time because I am taking a class in Madrid that's basically an art/history/culture class with the BC Professor who lives here in Madrid.  The class is only offered for BC students, and the majority of the group is taking it.  Therefore, since the trip was for a class, we couldn't just zone out and take a few pics  were lucky enough to take notes and pay attention to all the explanations of each site!

La Catedral de Santa María de Toledo

All in all, the trip was a great start to the class and a good way to introduce us to some of the places and things we'll be studying in the coming weeks.
Because I took notes, (hopefully) my pictures will be labeled correctly here! Although with my luck I misheard things or got things confused and nothing is right here...which in reality would not really affect anyone, considering I'm pretty sure you will not care too much about the pictures of buildings that you are about to look at.  But oh well, enjoy some of the sights of Toledo!

San Juan de los Reyes

(Found a street called Toledo de Ohio. This would be cool if Ohio wasn't so icky.)

Nuestra familia! (Isabel came with us)

The group! (missing a few here & there)

View of the Catedral from the street

La Mezquita Cristo de la Luz

El Círculo de Belles Artes

Tuesday was week 3 of my tourist/cultural day in Spain!  I decided to go to El Círculo de Belles Artes, a building in Spain that has art exhibitions and then a rooftop terrace where you can see a panoramic view of the city of Madrid.

I woke up and was eating breakfast when I told my host mom that I was going.  She mentioned how she had never been so I asked her if she wanted to come with me, and she was more excited than a kid on Christmas... she acted like I had just invited her to go meet the queen! (which she's done btw.... I guess that's like no big deal?) The whole time we were there, she just kept saying how she was so glad I invited her and how lucky she was to come with me! (She hasn't figured out that I'm the lucky one for having her as my madre española)  We got to see the whole city in the morning and it was amazing! (These pics are actually NOT from google! Trying out this thing where I take actual pics of things myself instead of looking them up on google image for the blog...)

I LOVED going out and spending time with Isabel outside of the house! It really was a fantastic day :)

Porto!!!

So this past weekend I had my first vacation to Porto, Portugal! After spending a weekend in this city, I can honestly say it is one of the most underrated European cities ever.

Day 1
Started off on Friday with an 9am flight (yay...) and had my first experience flying on a cheap crappy airplane! Just a heads up to anyone else using RyanAir, apparently at the end of every flight they play extremely loud celebratory music for arriving on time. I was severely underprepared for that...

So after wasting 45min trying to figure out how to buy a metro pass, we were on our way to the hostel. Coming out of the metro, we were met with this view on the left.  Not a bad first sight in Porto!

The street we were on had a ton of shopping and little cafes, so we grabbed some lunch (food details to come in the next post...Portuguese food deserves its own post.) while we waited to check into the hostel.

Our hostel (Garden House Hostel) was so cute and nice!! They had a communal kitchen, living area, computer room, and a garden outside with a ton of picnic tables and green space.

After we checked in, we explored the city!  We found a castle/cathedral looking thing that had a TON of students outside of it. The students were all dressed in black pants and shirts with these long black capes for some reason. (literally straight out of Harry Potter)  This cathedral also had an amazing view of the whole city so obviously being the super cool people totally dorky tourists that we are, we took a million pics.

From there, we went on a tour to go visit a wine cellar of Real Companhia Velha, one of the oldest Port wine companies.  We watched a movie, walked through the wine cellar and then got to taste some of the wine.... turns out port wine is not so amazing.  Considering it was like 77% alcohol, I'm not too surprised, but still it was hard to drink the small glass they gave us.  The white tasted like cough syrup and while the red was more bearable, it was definitely a taste you'd have to acquire.  It was still a fun experience though because Porto is famous for their Port wine.

After, we went down to the Rio Douro, where they had tons of little shops and restaurants lining the beautiful river in Porto!  Everything was so pretty and made walking up a ton of stairs more bearable.

That night, we went out to dinner at the famous Majestic Cafe and then went on a pub crawl organized by our hostel.

Day 2

We woke up and went to a market close by our hostel for breakfast/brunch.  The amount of pastries that I ate is debatably too embarrassing for this blog.... (hint: it was more than 4)

After breakfast, we headed to the beach for the day!  It was only like a 25min ride on the metro, so we were there in no time and spent the day enjoying the 85 degree and sunny weather.

After the beach, we went back and went out to dinner near our hostel.  It was a race against the clock because our favorite pastry shop was closing at 8pm and we had to get pastel de nata, a kind of creme brulee dessert that's very typical in Portugal. We stayed in for the night because we had to be up at 400am the next day for our flight. (good times..) That night at the hostel there was live music in the garden by some of the people staying there, so we had great music to listen to as we fell asleep.

Overall it was a fantastic first trip and I look forward to going back someday to get some nata and walk around the city some more!

Wait what?

Today at school a huge group of Spanish students were drinking 40s in the quad wrapped in plastic bags. On a Monday. At 6pm.

Classic Madrid.

Ode to Croquetas

Croquetas are basically breaded food rolls fried up with meat and cheese...aka heaven on earth.
I decided to write a haiku expressing my feelings toward this wonderful creation:


Croquetas, amor.
Where have you been all my life?
I'll eat you always.



**Roommates - when I get back to BC and make a traditional Spanish meal for you, these will be numerous.

Haha wait...I have to go to school?

Classes started this week which means back to reality... however, "reality" is taking classes at a Spanish university while being in Madrid for 4 months. (I kind of love reality.)

I'm taking four classes through my host university and one class through BC taught by the BC professor in Madrid.

At Carlos III, I'm taking two classes in Spanish: Lengua Avandazo and Español Profesional. Lengua Avanzado is a required language class and Español Profesional teaches you proper business etiquette and business vocabulary in Spanish.  I'm also taking two business classes in English: Consumer Behavior and Operations Management.

Short recap on my first week:

-I only have class three days a week. Thank you Spanish schooling system.
-However, that means I have 4 classes that are an hour and a half long on Mondays. Leave for school at 8am and don't get home til 8pm. Fun.
-Note to self: Spaniards/all other international people are unaware of the tragedy that calls itself "mom jeans."  So upon answering a question on the first day of class (trying to suck up to the teacher participate in the discussion) and using mom jeans as an example to back up your explanation, you will get blank stares and no response.
-My Consumer Behavior professor decided to torture his students on the first day of class by making them get in front of the whole class and say in English their name, where they're from, and why they're taking the class. There are three Americans (including myself) in this class.  Everyone else is an international student whose first language is not English. Thus, every single answer: "my name is mumble-mumble-mumble I'm from mumble-mumble and I chose consumer behavior because I want to learn more about consumer behavior." Needless to say things went pretty deep that first day.
-When it says 0% chance of rain in Madird, there's a chance it may rain. Learned that one the hard way.

Overall, classes haven't been too hard which is good (but it still has only been the first week...) and I'm enjoying them for the most part! Really hoping it stays that way!

Not All Who Wander Are Lost......Except For Me

Tuesdays I don't have any class and so I decided every Tuesday I'm going to go to a different place in Madrid and explore! Just an Emily day of looking around the city and either seeing the main tourist attractions or finding things off the beaten path.

Today was my first day to explore! I woke up relatively early, feeling excited and sooo cool for just going off by myself to do my own thing and wander around the city.

I decided to go to El Templo de Debod, an ancient Egyptian temple that was rebuilt in Madrid.

Unfortunately, google maps turned out to be not so helpful, and I never made it to Debod. I walked around and found this arch thing...

It seemed big and temple-like, so I thought okay well I guess this is it! I sat for a while and looked at it, was a tad disappointed (which I was not willing to admit.. I didn't want a crappy first day of exploration!) and then peaced out because there was a ton of shopping in the area. (I know, I know... I chose shopping over a supposed temple...but the really cute coat I bought at Zara def made up for my lack of interest, right?)

Anyways, I got back home and googled Templo de Debod. Turns out to the left is what I was supposed to have seen. Google maps, why you gotta fail me like that?!? I have absolutely no idea what I ended up seeing but it definitely was NOT Debod.

So instead of my exploration day, I ended up seeing an arch in the middle of a road and going shopping.  Definitely not a day wasted, but not what I had in mind either.

Learned my lesson and next Tuesday will be try #2 for el Templo de Debod! Fingers crossed I can actually find it and not get distracted by clothing stores. :)

Muchas besitas! 

El principio

Estoy aquí en Madrid!

FINALLY! One week ago, I started my European adventure in Madrid, Spain!
This past week has been one of the busiest of my life! Not even sure where to begin here, but a brief look back at my orientation...

First day we went and saw el Palacio Real! Kind of forgot to take a picture (literally no idea what I was thinking...maybe still thought it was uncool to act like a tourist..?) But oh well, google images has it covered.

After, we walked around Madrid and explored a little! The whole group went out for tapas and sangria (aka the best drink ever invented. period.) to celebrate our first night! 

I got settled in to my homestay and started to get to know my host mom Isabel better! She's this chatty retired nurse who's 71 and still walks and swims every day and loves having two 20 year olds around to keep her young. :) So basically she's the bomb.

The next few days we had a lot of orientation-type things to do at my university, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. (one of these things involved registering for classes... A mix of taking the wrong train and having the system crash before I could pick classes led to a very stressed out crazy calm, cool, and collected Emily who absolutely panicked knew it would all work out.)

Besides that, we've been shopping, sight seeing, dancing at discotecas, and getting to know the city!

I could go on for ages about all we did, but here I'll just start with the basic most stereotypical spanish things I've done thus far!

First, PAELLA!!!!!! MI AMORRRR

Nothing beats paella, especially when you eat it with tinto de verano (red wine, orange pop, and fruit. couldn't have made a drink more perfect for me.) Isabel made us paella for our welcome dinner and I still just want to eat the leftovers every single day. Obsessed.

Next, las discotecas. It's crazy how quick it took to get used to it, but Spanish night life doesn't start until around 2am (and that's the early side of things.) There's a spanish verb called empalmer and it's what they use when they stay out all night and then go straight to class afterwards.  I would be lying if I said it wasn't on my bucket list. Anyways, me encantan las discotecas! We tried out a few, and the best definitely are the ones that play more authentic spanish music.  Nothing beats going out and dancing away the crapload of paella that you ate for dinner.

We also got to go to el Chocolatería San Ginés. Basically, they bring out a bunch of churros and you dip them in melted chocolate. Heaven. I haven't stopped craving them since we left the restaurant.
Still craving them right now as I write this. I will DEFINITELY be back there for more!


...like I'll probably go back tomororw.






Finally, we ended our welcome week by going to La Plaza de los Toros, aka a real live Spanish bullfight.  The plaza itself was incredibly beautiful.  I had some idea what to expect because over the summer I read The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, but watching bulls get slaughtered was something I could not have prepared myself for. However, it was more interesting than shocking.  Yes, there was a lot of blood and watching the animal finally die was horrible, but I wish I had known more about why the bull fighters were doing what they were doing and the history behind everything going on.  Overall, I'm glad I went because of the cultural experience, but leaving early was definitely fine with me.

All right, I'm sure I've done enough rambling so I'll stop here! Classes start this week so the vacation is over and back to reality.. :( (although a trip to Porto, Portugal is in the works so I have something to look forward to during school...!)

Hasta luego!