Being in a different country, especially one that does not speak English, has helped me learn the value of knowing multiple languages. I consider myself fluent in English, conversational in both Spanish and Hindi, and I know very little French, but enough to maybe pick up some things occasionally. After being here for two months, I can honestly say that learning languages is something that I think would be an interesting and extremely useful thing to do (although whether I do it or not is a completely different story). And, ironically (primarily the Hindi part), all four of those languages were useful for this trip. More on that later.
Madrid
We left Metz at like 9ish on Thursday, March 17, headed towards Madrid, Spain. It consisted of 3 changes, the last of which was in Barcelona. The first day of the trip, we had a 12 minute layover, and our train arriving at Barcelona was late by 14 minutes. Well, since it was their fault it was late (crossing into Spain took literally like 30 minutes - the French police came on, checked everyone's passports, we went 2 mph over the border for like 10 minutes, and the Spanish police came on and checked everyone's passports again), we figured they would exchange our tickets or whatever for free. Apparently, in Spain at least, with connections, you have to give them at least an hour of time to be late between connections; otherwise, it's your fault you took the risk and missed your train. That means you have to pay for the next ticket yourself with no refund. Good thing we knew that (not)... We ended up having to wait in the Barcelona train station for like three hours, but we got a new ticket (instead of being 'stranded' in Barcelona) and that's what's important.
Our original plan in Madrid was to stay with one of the people in our group's friend. Unfortunately, the person happened to be out of town that weekend, so we had to find a random sketchy hostel that actually ended up having a nice lady as the manager (if you could call her that). Anyway, we settled down around like 9:00 PM and walked around and ate dinner for the next couple hours and most of us just went to sleep after an exhausting day of traveling, while the others went to a 7 story club which apparently was really cool.
The next day, we woke up to rain like we were in Metz or something. We walked around some more, and found a fresh fruit market. I got 1/4 kg of strawberries for like 95 eurocents, and they were DELICIOUS. We walked around some more, went to two different museums and a cool sandwich place, but overall I'd have to say Madrid wasn't that great. I think it was more because of the fact that we didn't really have a plan, didn't do anything in particular, and it was rainy, but Madrid was definitely my least favorite city of the four on the trip. Also, it didn't help that, for some reason, European cities like to have two main train stations. For instance, we came into Madrid Puerta de Atocha, but we left out of Madrid Chamartin, which we didn't realize until we were at the wrong train station. Good thing we got there early and they were both connected to the subway line within 10 minutes of each other! Unfortunately, this wasn't the last time this would happen on the trip...
Random creepy baby thing outside the train station.
Rain + lots of book shops on the right (not sure why they were there).
Stuff from the museums, the first pic was about Hinduism.
Other random pictures I took.
Outside of Chamartin, off to Lisboa.
Next up: Lisboa
LOL @ that sicko baby thing! You don't sound as enthusiastic about Madrid as the other cities... and OMG I really want to taste those strawberries!!
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