Baños, caídas, y la ciudad de Granada

posted by: Lyndsey

¡Hola! Hopefully all of you know that I survived my first international plane ride! We arrived in Madrid, and I was pretty surprised by how big it was and how a lot of the names of the shops and restaurants were in English. There weren't a lot of English speakers working though, as Nick and I found out during our first lunch. We had sandwiches that reminded me of Dukes but I couldn't figure out what was in any of them so I just picked one, and it ended up being some sort of cheesey cream-type substance..it was interesting. I ate quite a few questionable meals... un bocadillo de salmon (a french bread subroll with smoked slash raw salmon), squid heads, STRONG-tasting tuna and mushroom pizza, y otras.

Madrid was cool though, except the cloud of cigarette smoke that hovered EVERYWHERE. Our hotel was in the middle of the Plaza del Sol, one of the main downtown areas of Madrid with LOTS and LOTS of people walking around...a lot like NYC! The rooms were way smaller than what you would see in a nicer hotel here, but it was definitely a nice hotel.




On our way to Granada we stopped in Toledo, an old city that used to be the capital of Spain before Madrid. We saw some really old and cool-looking buildings, and went into the king's vacation/retreat palace. We ate lunch at a tapas bar where I finally found some hope in Spanish food; I had crunchy jumbo shrimp with guacamole, and this fried cheese called croquetones (I think)..muy bueno! Oh, and I had a postre (dessert) called a pepito that changed my life.


So after a loong bus ride that had to make a special bathroom stop JUST for me (seriously. i was the only one who could get off the bus and go), we made it to Granada. Our host mom Victoria was there waiting for us. She took us to our apartamento where she fed us cream of zucchini soup with fresh bread. The food has been muy deliciosa.Victoria speaks zero English, so it's been a pretty quick transition from having to understand and speak only Spanish.

Ashton and I have yet to be on time for a meeting (go figure), and we MAY not have looked like locals as we were running through the streets with our huge map. She also had a pretty funny spill yesterday, but I'll let her describe :)
I am definitely already learning the city and where everything is though, even though it´s a lot bigger of a city than I expected.

I got a cell phone yesterday, and having to deal with a phone person that spoke no English made me never want to speak Spanish again, but I recovered. Nick´s español is coming along nicely; and I scored an invite to have dinner with his host mom sometime...sweet!

I´ll end with some cool pictures from my experiences so far. Thank yall so much for the prayers...they are felt, and I miss everyone a lot!

Hasta luego!

-lyndsey

my room!

Estamos en MADRID!!!

Amazingly Lyndsey, Nick, and I all made it to Spain with all of our luggage! No throwing up of passing out either (this was a problem once before)! I guess I had lower expectations about the arriving condition of me and all my stuff so I was pleasantly surprised. Everyone's prayers have been felt and I have been overwhelmed with God's love for me. He is always looking out for His children! It was hard to sleep on the plane because I didn't get a window seat but that wasn't a big deal because they kept giving us food and water and you know I don't want to miss a meal. In fact I got my own "special" vegetarian meal! We're staying in Madrid for a few days before we go to Granada and we've been doing some cool stuff. Everyone on the program went out to eat together for dinner. They served us "raciones" which are small appetizer like foods that you share with about 4 other people. so there were like 85 of us on the top floor of a restaurant. We had over 10 different raciones with things like bread, salad, fried calamari, mushrooms, potato omelettes, potatoes with sauce, cheese, fried eggplant, cake and then only two things of meat that I was unable to participate it. Lyndsey was not impressed with either one though! So basically it was delicious and I got plenty of food (and API paid for it!). So that was a lot of fun and we met some new people. We went to El Prado today which is the best art museum in the world apparently. They have over 9000 paintings and it was pretty cool. We had lunch at an italian place which was okay and then we went to the Royal Palace which was really cool. It was kind of like the Biltmore in the way that you walk through different rooms. They were so elaborately decorated it was unbelievable. In fact some of them were too busy even for me if you can believe that. We went out for dinner tonight and found a pretty good meal. Lyndsey and I got a smoked salmon sandwhich which was pretty good. The salmon was kind of raw and cold which I didn't mind but apparently a lot of things are served cold here. That is going to take some getting used to for Lyndsey! We ended up going to a chocolateria where they serve chocolate and churros (basically fried donuts) which is an extremely popular dessert here. It was PACKED with locals and it was soo good. The chocolate was so thick and when I had eaten all my churros this kid told me he would give me 2 euros if I drank the rest of the chocolate. Obviously he didn't know me very well because I downed it like it was nothing! Haha! He was shocked but nobody that knows me would be. I mean somebody paying me to eat chocolate? So I wasn't planning on doing a blog but this seems like a great way to let everyone know what's going on. Thanks everyone for caring, I've really felt so loved this past week. Love and HUGS!!!

Ashton