For Instance

Good grief! I was just writing a post about how this keyboard was messing me up, then I accidentally published the post, and couldn´t edit it without pulling up some strange screen. See? Point made.


I also can´t figure out how to ue the 'at' symbol. Which makes it hard to, you know, check e mail.


Anyway! To the point! I AM IN SPAIN! And relatively unscathed at that. Though I did manage to baptize the streets of Madrid with my freshly falling tears this evening. Yes, I was wandering around in the midst of hundreds and hundreds of people trying really, really hard to not burst into sobs. All out of exhaustion and frustration - a deadly combination on my tear ducts. Most frustratingly part of that little incident was that there was literally no place I could go to collect myself away from the maddening crowd. So I just gritted my teeth (grut my teeth?) and put my head down and breathed really hard.

How did I end up at that point? Well. Take a tired me, give her two hours of sleep, a frustrating shuttle ride to the airport (wherein the shuttle driver gets lost), add three flights, with an international one that has shaky foundations (i.e. I was worried all day that I´d miss it), throw in a elbow to the side for an 8 hour flight, very little sleep and then put her in a brand new city with weirdly winding roads, and a very large language barrier. Then try to have her figure out how to call her sister. Bad bad bad.

There were some GREAT parts of the day, though. Amazingly great. Note that most of my tear-inducing stress was pre-arrival.

I got in, took my luggage (I didn´t check any! hallelujah!), breezed through customs, got a 10 ride pass for Metro, figured out where I was going, easily made a few transfers, and found the Puerta del Sol - kind of the center of Madrid (the touristy part anyway). Feeling confident, I had breakfast, walked around for a while, then went to the Big museum in town - The Prado. Tons of great art - mostly religious - I have seen more pictures of angels holding dead Jesus than I would have ever thought existed today (at least three). I spent hours and hours there. Then I was exhausted. And hungry. And I wanted to check into my hostel, which I decided to do first. Got a bit lost, but not too bad.

Had lunch around 4, at an Argentinian tapas bar (didn´t mean to do Argentinian, it just looked nice). Struck up conversation with a street artist expatriate while there (hee! I totally just threw down the word expatriate). Left without being hassled to even look at his art (thank goodness, I would have had to buy something), to find a street opera of sorts going on in the Plaza Mayor. Very fun.

Then I wandered more. And saw some amazing things. I saw they were setting something up somewhere, and people were starting to wait, so I had to know what was going on. I discovered that "it" was going to start around 7, so I came back at 7, and waited. And waited. And waited. And more and more people came. And I wanted to leave because my feet hurt and my back hurt and I was exhausted and bored, and tired of trying to translate my eavesdropping. But I was packed in by a wall of people.

Then, after 8, "it" started. Along came a long procession of people wearing purple cloaks and REALLY REALLY tall pointy purple head mask things. Like ku klux klan, but purple, and ridiculously tall. And they were carrying gigantic candles, and some of them had chains on their feet. Weird. Weird, weird, weird. Somewhere in the cockles of my brain (can the brain have cockles), I recall this being someting Catholic. Or at least related to organized religion in some way.

Well. They kept coming and coming and they were moving SOOOOOOO slowly. Like a mile an hour. Or less. And they kept stopping. And I so wanted to go then. But after about an hour (I was seriously trapped) of the purple hoods, people started applauding, and this giant candle-lit, human carried float/chandelier/Jesus statue came bobbing down the street. There were like 50+ BIG men (in purple, sans hats) carrying it. IT WAS AWESOME.

Not quite worth the three hour wait, but anyway....

After that, I hurt every where, and jut wanted to sleep, but I knew that I should call Lindsay. And I couldn´t make the phones work. My fault, I knew I needed a card, and hadn´t purchased one at the airport - thinking, naively apparently - that phone cards would be a universal item. No such luck.

Anyway. Tears, tears, people everywhere.

Finally got a quick dinner, despite my desire to simply go roll myself in bed. And now I´m at the hostel, with free internet (though a 20 minute limit which I´ve gleefully exceeded despite the people obviously waiting), sangria in hand. I like this hostel.

More adventures tomorrow, but no more tears, I promise. Because I´m going to sleep!