San Isidro Weekend

This weekend, my roommate went with another of our friends to San Sebastian, so I had the room to myself. Here´s what I did:

Friday - I met up with two friends to wander around a little bit and go to a store that sells american groceries. It was pretty fun, I bought some vegetable chips (which I have never actually seen in the US, but they did seem american) and a fake capri-sun - it looked like it was from germany or something...we were kind of hungry, so we went to a falafal place! It was completely vegetarian, but still good, and it made me feel super healthy. It was really big too! I couldn´t even finish it. Then I had to go home and register for classes. By that time, my senora had come home with her kids, and the daughter taught me how to make brownies! Although they are spelled "brounis" here. So that was fun, although we did not preheat the oven well enough haha so we ended up with warm brouni batter with a top layer of crunchy brouni...it was still tastey though. Then, the whole family invited me to go with them to the pet shop to buy fish for their fish tank. That was fun since I got to see how a random family outing works in spain haha. It was pretty much the same, although I was surprised that they were able to bring their dog not only into the mall, but into the store too! Anyway, we picked some fish, and then they dropped me off (after being slightly lost trying to find the place) at a metro stop where I was meeting a friend to see the fire show.

The fire show was a part of the many event´s going on to celebrate San Isidro, the patron saint of Madrid. It was pretty neat, although it was more of a display than a show....I´ll try to post pictures soon so you can see what I mean.

Saturday: Because this weekend was celebrating the saint, there were lots of performances and such going on, so I went with a friend to try and find then. This proved much more difficult than we had anticipated. We knew what we wanted to go watch and we knew the metro stop, but when we got to the area, we asked around and no one seemed to know what we were talking about. We walked around for at least half an hour asking people, until someone gave us directions to SOMEWHERE at least...we followed the directions and luckily came upon a sign for what we were looking for, but there was still no sign of the show. We got bounced around a few more times by people who didn´t know what they were talking about when we finally found a stage-looking place, but sadly it had just started to rain and everything was cancelled :( A highlight of that part of the day, though, was that we found an ice cream place with a nice italian man which we plan to go back to.

Since it was raining, we decided to try to find a different place where we could watch something inside - we asked someone before we left this time where the place was, but we still ended up on a wild goose chase in the metro for over an hour. We eventually ended up at the right metro stop (after three or four misses) and got directions to the building we were looking for. It was still raining, however, and after we had walked around for a while and found what looked like a school of the same name as our building, we decided to throw in the towel. Back home we went, after a day of almost nothing.

Sunday: Woke up early to and went to el Rastro, the flea market type place! It was a very productive morning as we both got some necessary shopping done. After that, we went to the main San Isidro event for the afternoon. Our culture teacher had described it to us as kind of like a county fair, and that´s exactly how it was! There were rides, games, food, and a few performances. After we had walked through the whole place, I played a dart throwing game, but did not win :( Then we got some lunch and ate on the grass, and then moved to a different part of the grass where there was a dance performance and some music of some kind. We watched for a while, then took a much needed nap in the sun. When we got up, we decided to try and find the shows we had looked for the day before again, so off we went again to the metro stop "lavapies" This time, we knew exactly where to go, and luckily it wasn´t raining. We had some time before anything started, so we went back to the ice cream place. At the end of the day, we saw three and a half performances, and the half performance that we saw looked like it was going to be the best, but we had to leave for dinner.

Overall, good weekend! Also, I have recently realized that my days in Spain are dwindling fast and I need to start making the most of my days after class! On my to do list are: see a play of some kind, rollerblade in the park, go to the amusement park, go to this arabic bath place, and maybe take a yoga class. Since I may not have any more weekends here, my weekdays will have to be chock full :)