¿Entendaís?

Today was another fantastic day in the beautiful country of España. Today we started doing our Madrid Walks assignment. It's basically doing a self guided tour of different parts of Madrid. What happened was this morning we all got on the metro into Madrid and when we arrived we all got on this huge super cheesy touristy bus. We had headphones to listen to the tour, and it was super fun. Once we were on we could get on and off as much as we wanted, but we only got off once at La Plaza de Colón (I thought that's where we started - lol my bad) and the other time at La Plaza del Sol. From there we (here we becomes my small group of 6)followed our book through the beginning of the Madrid Highlights walk. It took us to some pretty cool land marks, beautiful parks, amazing cathedrals, the royal palace, and some tasty places to eat.

On the metro! (McKenzie, Drake, Me)

Weston, Jamie, Tara, Sara

 In the middle of the metro station in Madrid there's a big oasis thing- it has palm trees, a lake, and turtles!

Preston and I

 On the bus!

Jonah, Branden, Lora, Me

 Might of gotten off at the wrong place, but at least we got a picture with the giant Spanish flag!

Lora, Branden, Fletcher

Preston and I

Honestly, a lot of Madrid looks like NYC. Just a lot older and prettier ahaha.

Mom, I took these photos of the buildings with their pretty red flower baskets just for you. <3

Cool view from the bus of lower Madrid.

My group of 6! Preston (blue shirt) MaKay (sunglasses) Lora (stripes) Tara (red head) Jamie (purple)

Churros at La Chocolateria San Gines. ¡Que ricos!

La Puerta de Toledo

 Chilling in the gardens of the Basilica de San Francisco

 La Catedral de Santa María la Real de la Almudena

Garden on the way to the cathedral

El Palacio Royal

This is actually an Egyptian pyramid-castle thing. It was gifted to the Spanish by Pharaoh, and was transported brick by brick to Spain. It's still in its original position, and it's super legit. There's hieroglyphics inside and everything. 

Touching Egypt! Come to find out that touching the walls is SUPER NOT OKAY. At least we got a photo before we learned that hahaha. The guards were yelling at everyone who even bumped into the walls....lol our bad.

McKay made a friend

Having our tapas with Pepsi - even though the legal drinking age in Spain is 18, we're still Mormon.

After coming back from Madrid, I went and had dinner with my family. At like 9:30 haha. Spain is so my speed - they eat late, wake up late, go to bed late... it's the bomb. Anyways, McKenzie arrived shortly after I did and we were sitting talk with Raimundo (still not sure how to spell his name) and Gloria. Gloria told us the cutest story. She told us that today she was in church praying, and a homeless man was there. He was waiting for her to finish so that he could kneel at the bench, he was dirty and didn't want to scare her so he was waiting until she left. But she told him to come over and to pray with her. They got to talking and Gloria asked him what he was praying for. The man said that he was praying to know that God loved him, because he wasn't sure. Gloria was telling us how amazing to her this was - this homeless man wasn't praying for a home, a job, food - he was praying to feel our Heavenly Father's love. Gloria talked about how she couldn't imagine how it must be to feel so unwanted and so unloved, that the only thing he could even think to pray about is whether or not there was someone out there who loved him. It was so cool. She talked to us about pride and humility - something we're learning is that our family here loves to give us life lessons. Raimundo for example loves to give us lessons about life. He's always asking us, ¿entendáis? Understand? But he's not usually asking about our Spanish - he's asking if we understand the lesson he's teaching us. He's taught us about being careful about men, about making sure if we ever go into a bar for tapas to watch our drinks, to make sure that we take care of our children and treat them like treasures, that we need to make sure that we're always watching out for pick pockets and people with bad intentions. It's awesome. We love his life lessons. I love my family here.