madrid (spain p. 1)

I just got back yesterday from spending ten days in Spain with my family, my grandpa, and my cousin. It was a blast and I took a lot of pictures and did a lot of stuff, but I'm quite glad to be home. It's nice to have a computer again, not gonna lie.

I was up for more than 24 hours yesterday and spent much of it on an airplane. We flew from Barcelona to Zurich, Switzerland, which it is honestly the most beautiful place I've ever flown over. I watched Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Modern Family, The Middle, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, and Ratatouille on the flight to Chicago. Praise the Lord for those on-flight TVs. And then by the time I got to Austin I was sitting on the ground at the airport, listening to Fleetwood Mac and crying. Traveling is not for the weak, y'all. (I am the weak.)

This was the view from one of our apartment's windows. A+

Anyway, let's rewind a week or two. We went to Madrid first, where we arrived about midday. I mostly spent that day walking around and getting used to my surroundings. It wasn't that much of a culture shock, but there were definitely differences. Namely, more motorcycles and Vespas, less cars, smaller cars, smaller streets, different stop signs (I love European stop signs), more smoking, etc. Also, strangely enough, everything was in Spanish. I was like, what is this?

We walked around Plaza Mayor. There was a statue of some relatively famous dead guy on a horse. IDK who it was, but I'm sure it was pretty historically significant.

Then we explored this market and I had a macaron for the first time. Yum.

The police were buying meat at la carniceria. 

The next day (I think, I don't remember exactly what days we did what now) we went to the wonderful Reina Sofia museum. I saw Picasso's Guernica and several of Miro and Dali, who just might be my favorite. I couldn't take pictures inside, but I did get some from the hallways and outside. 

Flower vendors! There are lots of people selling things on the streets and stuff.

Then we went to the Prado which is ANOTHER art museum. It's so big that we had to go on two separate occasions and we still didn't see everything. What we saw was neat, though. I love art museums, man.

That sky is unedited. I swear, it was never cloudy anywhere on the entire trip. (And then we get into Switzerland and it's raining and we go to Chicago and have to be rerouted for a while because the airport was closed due to storms...).

I'm getting pretty tired so I think I'm going to finish this up. I'll be back with more Spain posts later.

xo