Madrid!

What did you do this weekend? I hopped a short flight and checked out Madrid. This seems tough to beat. Here is a brief run-down on what went on:

Saturday: got up, went to campus, caught National Express to Heathrow (the trains like, don't go there), flew to Spain, was flabergasted by the Madrid airport, which is quite possibly the largest thing I have ever seen in all my life (including Grand Canyon and all kinds of mountains). You basically get off your plane, walk for two miles with no one around, find a guy at a desk who checks your passport, walk two more miles and hope your suitcase shows up, walk another mile to get on subway. Anyways, took subway to place we were staying, walked past place we were staying as didn't see entrance, and magically found Kari and Coco in our nearby plaza. Had an agua and checked out Plaza del Sol (which sadly was partially being constructed on), did a bit of shopping, sat around outside the Palacio Real, had some mandatorily late dinner, walked around a bit more and saw the happening night life plaza (Santa Ana) and saw a man twirling sticks of fire in another (Chueca). Learned that fire baton twirling is evidently a good ab workout.

Sunday: wandered streets looking for food. Finally got some jamon and cafe con leche, went to the modern art museum to see Picasso's Guernica ('the greatest painting of the 20th century'). Sunday was free entry day, but even other days it's rather cheap. Then we went to the Jardin by the Prado to look at some greenery and catch some rays, and earn some brownie points with the matron (we paid 2 entire euros to see plants, aren't you proud, Mom?). We then went to the Prado, again for free, to see priceless works of art. We totally scored by waiting until after lunch, as the line in the morning time was half the length of the building, and when we went it was about ten people. We didn't spend too much time at the Prado because all of the painting explanations were in Spanish, although I did spend some time trying to figure out who all the scary in-bred Spanish royals were (so first she married her cousin, then her uncle, but, as Kari stated, most importantly, what is up with her hair?). So we mainly tried to look at the Spanish stuff, which was a lot of Velazquez and Goya, and was lucky enough to include what 'may' be the greatest painting of the 17th century, which was one of the Velazquez deals. How often do you get to see the greatest paintings of two different centuries in one day? For FREE? Uhh, then we went to Plaza Mayor and tried to go to Zara but it was closed, so we sat at a sidewalk cafe for hours on end and had a Spanish sangria, found another place that had a beer tap built into the table which was ideal, but it was the end of the keg and was foamy and then ran out. Oh, had dinner at a place Hemingway apparently frequented, had some ice cream at fancy dessert place.

Monday: breakfast with Kari and Coco before they departed for the airport. Did a bit of shopping then went to the really, really big park in Madrid, then went to airport myself. Made it back into the country without incident (they even had two lines at customs for non-EU people, one of which was for visa holders, go me), even got on the earlier bus and got back to campus shortly after ten.

So what did I think of Madrid? Lots of cute buildings with cute wrought iron pseudo-balconies, lots of people wearing red, lots of stuff going on late at night, some neat museums and nice plazas and such. Although I'm not sure if I would spend much longer there than I did. But if you dig the 'doesn't open until midnight' nightlife, you may rather enjoy. Oh, and be prepared to eat a lot of jamon. By the way, the picture is 'blue steel'. We were going to go have magnum (ice cream bar), but as we all know, blue steel came first. The Prado is behind us.

General Election

As I'm sure it was front page news all around the globe, you must all know that Tony Blair is going to be stepping down at the end of next month. And to be frank, the whole electoral procedure over here is a couple realms beyond my understanding. Elections the first Tuesday in November, every November, make sense to me. Voting for Al Gore for president makes sense to me. On second thought, what they do here makes sense as well.

So Tony Blair is the leader of the Labour Party. It was said Party who decided he would be their leader. In an election, the people vote for which party they want, and in the last election Labour got the most votes. As the most popular party, their leader got to be Prime Minister. But ol' TB has been Prime Minister for ages and people are sick of him or something, so he's stepping down. It is expected that Gordon Brown will take over the reigns of the Labour Party. And to be honest, I still don't understand how a general election would fall into this, but at some point the Labour Party will vote for there to be one, and then there will be one. Interesting concept.

The Eurovision song contest is tonight. Needless to say, I am very sorry I will have to miss it. Alas, I will be eating tapas and drinking sangria on some sidewalk cafe in Madrid this evening. Times are tough. Very tough indeed.

Lots of photos and interesting Spanish tales come Tuesday!

Neal's Yard

As further proof that London is the cutest and full of hidden gems, I present exhibit A. This is a photo of Neal's Yard, which you would never notice if it wasn't in your guidebook and you had managed to accidentally stumble upon it. Conveniently located off Neal Street (just north of Covent Garden by the Seven Dials), this is basically a little courtyard with two alleys connecting it to the 'real world'. It's main appeal seems to be some sort of uber healthy eating establishment, so the courtyard may by chance be full of people eating cous cous and vegetables and looking, well, healthy.

In further uninteresting news, I have a group presentation tomorrow. My approach is to avoid thinking about it too much and hope for the best. 30% of our grade is based on questions we ask other people. That cannot go well. That means you actually have to pay attention to what the other groups are saying. For like, 3 and a half hours. And if anyone wants to trade places with me between 9:30 am and 1 pm tomorrow, just let me know....

Madrid is on Saturday!! It's slightly worrying how utterly unprepared I am for this journey. Tomorrow I shall work on that and perhaps get some euros and a map of Madrid, so I do not spend all of Saturday evening wandering around going 'Donde esta, um,' [and me pointing to the impronouncable hotel name on piece of paper]. And I am sorry if I have spelled the Spanish wrong. I took French, after all. I find it odd that I this will be my first venture to a Spanish-speaking nation. How have I never been to Mexico? I don't know. Well, I do. I kind of fear Tijuana.

Football game!

Today I went to quite an exciting football game. Some (aka, the announcer) declared it to be the most important game of our lives. That means ALL of us. To sum it, Southampton beat Southend 4-1 to secure a 6th place finish in the Championship League, meaning they will now enter the play-offs with the 3rd through 5th place teams to compete for a spot in the Premiere League, which contains the big boys such as Manchester United. The 1st and 2nd place teams in the Championship League get automatic upgrades, and the bottom three teams in each league get demoted. Somewhat luckily for Southampton, Southend is one of those teams for the Championship League, implying they are not good. So now Southampton plays Derby, who finished third, next Saturday, and the winner of that game will go to the championship game at Wembley Stadium the night before my tranportation management final.

Back to the game... it was a sell-out, with 32,008 in attendence. There was a touching tribute before the game for the recently deceased Alan Ball, including people on one of the main stands spelling out his name in silver placards. While there was a lot more falling down in this game than in many of the games I've watched on tv over the years, any short-comings in the quality of play were more than made up for by the entertaining and overly enthusiastic fans sitting around us. While I could not understand what they were chanting a good proportion of the time, I was able to decipher the general chants involved things such as 'when the saints go marching in', 'f*$£ off' (directed towards Southend fans), some random bad things about Pompey ('Portsmouth'), and other various happy things. While I have never seen so many police per square foot in my entire life, there was no hooligan-ism (sad, I know). And interesting tid bit...you can't take beer into the seating area. You can quietly consume your beer until 10 minutes before kick-off and from half-time up to 10 minutes into the second half. Perhaps this is to avoid spillage. Beer is sticky, you know.

Cinco de Mayo!

Today is a very special day to all taco loving Americans, the one day a year where it is practically indecent to avoid salsa for a full 24 hours. However, I don't think anyone here is big on Mexican independence day. Perhaps I will quietly eat some refried beans later. Although I imagine there may be festive-ness down at Chiquitos. Now if only they would put tacos on their menu...

Oh, plus today is a fun day because Americans and Brits write the date the same. 5/5. No confusion there! Although this happens once a month, so it's not too exciting.

Tomorrow is the big football game. Its a sell-out, which has not occurred at St Mary's Stadium in apparently quite some time. As I fear getting the exact details incorrect, I will not say too much about the situation, but I do know that Southampton needs to score more goals than some other team (NOT the team they are playing against, but I suppose them, too) who is playing at the same time in order to get into the play-offs. I think. And if all goes correctly, then the play-off tickets will go on sale AT the stadium at the end of the game. The potential for craziness is quite considerable, I think, so I'm quite pumped. If I don't update blog after this it is because I have been trampled in some sort of stampede.

7 days until Spain!

Vista

Good news! The free computer room in building 25, which has been closed since the beginning of Easter break, is not only back open, but it's stone-age slow-as-molasses computers have been replaced with brand-new uber-speedy computers installed with Windows Vista. So today not only did I get to print out a bunch of old exams for free, but I got to play with Vista, which, mind you, is really funky. Although Office was really complex and it took a long time to figure out how to print.

I realized this evening that with my weekend in Spain I am definitly on course to break my record of countries visited in a calendar year. The record, which currently stands at 3 (including the US), shall be met by this trip (UK, Netherlands, Spain) which guarantees that I will be able to hit four at least when I return to the US. Although hopefully I'll be able to go to Paris at some point so the US would then be number 5. Plus I will get to fill in another bubble on my world map, which I always enjoy in a sort of sad way.

I have also taken heed of the fact that many of the night venues in Southampton have random one word names. Like, we have mono, junk, tusk, ikon, um, other places I haven't been, and so on. Perhaps they are overcompensating for the often longer silly pub names like The Moldy Faucet (which I have just made up to illustrate a point).

There is a new album up on picasa from my road trips to Alton Towers and to Croydon. I didn't take my camera into Alton Towers because I didn't want to risk breaking it, but I totally took it into the tram headquarters building. Mainly there are just a lot of pictures of random people most of you don't know making weird faces and/or sleeping. It's a good time, really.

It's sunny and I am inside again

So the unnaturally sunny summer weather has returned (although it never really left). It is sunny and uber warm outside and while I could be getting a bit of sun....I am in the computer lab and will be until near the end of time.

In things to look forward to news (aside from all the coursework!), I'm going to a 'football' game on Sunday! It's right at the end of the 10-month of whatever season and there are things riding on this game that I don't quite understand, but we are hoping that Southampton wins and they do well and maybe someone else loses so we can get into the play-offs, and if they like, win the play-offs or something they could maybe get back into the premiere league. Or maybe Paul Allen can just go through with purchasing the team then buy them a bunch of new players and they can be really good next year. My fingers are crossed that there is visible hooligan-ism but that I am able to maintain a safe distance from it. I am also not going to wear blue because that's not how they role around here.

There is a crunchie wrapper sitting on the table across from me that a girl has eaten. Let's consider this a shout-out to Kari. They also have Cadbury bars with bits of crunchie in it. As I am not a fan of the styrofoam flavoring, I have not sampled this kind.

Week and a half until Madrid mini-break! Woo-hoo!