MADRID

Well. Almost a month with no posts. Great job, Graham.

In that month (the month of no posts), I have gotten to travel to plenty of places like Santiago de Compostela, Paris, Venice and Milan, and Toledo, so that should keep me busy on this blog through the rest of the semester. First though, I'm going to catch you (that's a presumptuous 'you'...leave a comment to let me know you're still reading!) up on life here in Madrid.

I must begin by talking about the weather. It is absolutely phenomenal. It has gotten to the point where I rarely need to check online to see if it will be sunny. Every two weeks, we have one or two cloudy days and the rare rainy day. Though it has cooled off since early September, it is still in the 60s, sunny and clear just about every day. This past week (November, mind you), I wore shorts and sandals and walked to school all week. It is a magical, magical place.

In late October, I got the opportunity to go with Elise and Robert to see a Real Madrid futbol (soccer) game. Real means royal, so the team has some history with the Spanish royal family honoring the soccer club as the "royal" team of Madrid. Real Madrid is a team comparable to the New York Yankees -- huge global fanbase, the most championships in history, purchases the best and most famous players (Cristiano Ronaldo), and usually wins. We got to see Real play against AC Milan, one of its rivals. The stadium, Estadio Santiago Bernabeu, is about a 2 minute walk from our NYU campus, so we are very familiar with it. We paid some high prices for nosebleed seats (the stadium holds about 80,000, I believe), but it was one of our best experiences in Madrid. We arrived to the stadium about 45 minutes before the game started, ran across the street with hundreds of other people to a grocery store so we could make sandwiches (bocadillos) to bring in. Finding our seats at the 2nd row from the top of the stadium, we had a great view of the field (maybe not the players' jerseys) and the crowd...the home crowd looked a great deal like the Cameron Crazies if the Crazies were all 45 year-old Spanish men. The AC Milan fans were shoved in a corner at the top of the stadium surrounded by netting to keep them from throwing things onto the field! It was a very tense match from the beginning, with plenty of scoring, drama, faking injuries (come on, soccer), singing and shouting, but Real Madrid was upset by a score of 3-2. What a great time!

I'll continue this Madrid update in my next post...