MADRID

Madrid... Oh God.

Well, we all met at the Madrid International Airport at like midnight on the 1st, after hellish flights (especially on my part--see last post).

Our hostel was actually surprisingly nice, we were put in an 8-bed room (all girls, phew!) with our own bathroom. We had two freaking AWESOME roommates and two not so awesome roommates (so anti-social... we thought they were from Korea and didn´t speak English.. until one night at like 2 AM they started speaking English to each other haha guess they didn´t like us). Very clean... except we were in the dirtiest, grossest square ever. Smelled permanently of pee and that is NOT normal.

Our first day we visited the Palacio Real, which was beautiful, obviously, and the Cathedral adjacent to it, which was SO much more interesting and beautiful in my opinion. Then we went and had paella and the BEST sangria (till Granada) before heading over to the Reina Sofia afterwards. The museum was........... ew. The first floor was like WTF in a museum. Finger paintings all over the walls, not to mention graphic pencil drawings of gay sex and orgies. Oh, can´t forget the male statues hanging from the ceiling by their tongues. That was SO "artsy." Thank goodness for Picasso and his Guernica, it saved the day. Gotta be honest, everything else was fucking weird. That night, we went out on a pub crawl with our cool roommates and some other people from our hostel and other hostels in the area. It was really fun, except for the 12-hour hangover the next day... didn´t even know that was possible.

So basically, the second day was spent in our beds all day. WASTE. So sad.

The last day, we woke up SUPER early to make up for lost time so we went to the Thyssen museum (which was VERY well organized by the way, much to my and Hanna´s delight!), which also featured a special exhibit by Matisse. It was BEAUTIFUL. Then we found a STARBUCKS (hallelujah!!! Until we realized the salad we ordered had literally corpses of lettuce that were wilted and soooooo gross in a plastic container yuck, bad memories) before heading to the Prado museum. Let me just say the Prado is somewhere you should NOT go if you´re thinking about killing yourself. Because it would happen. And then they would just hang you up on the wall next to all the other depressing crucification paintings. And you would be even more miserable then before spending the rest of eternity in the Prado. BUT, on the bright side, we saw the BEST. PAINTING. EVER. It was literally a priest kneeling on the ground with BREAST MILK shooting out of from the breast of a statue of Virgin Mary. No joke. We were very disappointed to find that they didn´t have that postcard in the gift shop.

So that was Madrid. GREAT MEMORIESSSSSS