Otra Adventura en Madrid

Today was another great adventure in the beautiful country of Spain. Yesterday, my phone calculated me walking 27,155 steps - 11.72 miles. Today it calculated me walking 28,977 steps! That's 12.48 miles!!! We certainly get our exercise in here. Tara, Preston, Jamie, and I all decided to go back into Madrid and do some more sight seeing today. On my way to the train station I pass through La Plaza de Cervantes, and they were having a giant fiesta! I asked one of the ladies what was going on and she told me that they have this event once a year, and all the ladies from Alcalá get together in the Plaza de Cervantes and they sew/embroider/other womanly types of working with cloth all these beautiful fans and matador capes and all sorts of other cool spanishy things. It was cool. There was a band playing too. It was so cute!

We made it to the palace just a little too late to see el cambio de la guardia, the changing of the guard. But we saw the very end of it, and after wards got to see the military band play!It was way cool. Of course, once I started filming all the quiet parts started. That's alright though - enjoy it anyways. After the changing of the guard I really wanted to do the recorrido del palacio, tour of the palace, but the palace was closed until 2 and it was about 1. So we decided to go see if we could find the teleféricos, or the cable cars that go over this giant park in Madrid. So we walked in that direction, and we found a beautiful garden kind of on accident. El Jardín del Oeste. It was full of the most gorgeous flowers, it looked like it belonged at the palace rather than hidden away in downtown Madrid. It was beautiful. We ate our bocadillos, sandwiches, that our host moms made us there.

Trying to get a casual artsy BYU backpacks shot... lol we look soooo casual.*Preston*

Going for another artsy BYU backpack shot... didn't work here either. We'll get it eventually

After chilling in the garden, we found the teleféricos. It was only 6€ for a round trip! It was pretty fun. We enjoyed it.

After we got off of the teleféricos, we went back to the palace and did the recorrido. It was really cool. We couldn't take pictures inside most of it, we asked the guard why and they said for security reasons. No one lives there, but we thought it was probably cause there's a ton of valuable stuff in there. While we were waiting to buy our ticket, there was a guy playing a violin with some background music to it. It was super good, we really enjoyed it.

After our time in the palace, we were feeling a bit hungry again so on our way back to the train station we stopped by this cute market. Apparently it's super popular and now we know why! They have tapas, smoothies, and all the cool market stuff like fresh produce and meats. I got a tapa of paella de verduras. Which was basically fried rice with vegetables in it. There was paella de carne, the rice with sausage and chicken and ham, and paella de mariscos, rice with sea food nastiness - the paella de verduras was SOOO GOOD. And didn't have egg! I asked haha. Tapas are the bomb.

Walking over to the market, the bells started to ring since - so I videoed. You're welcome, Mom hahaha (ended up walking into the middle of the road on accident too. haha oops)

Back in Alcalá, Tara and Jamie left to go find something for their host mom, and Preston and I were left to our own devices. So of course, we got ice cream.

There are huge birds here. Like storks that build giant nests on top of buildings.

Funny story: Soo we decided that we wanted a selfie stick since we didn't want all of our pictures to kinda look the same. So we got a selfie stick from this negrito (not derogatory here - just what they call them) that was selling them illegally on the side of the road. We said we were going bargain him down really hard, that the most we would pay was 5€. But the guy asked for 10€! And of course being the terrible bargainers we are we were like okay. We tried to get him down to 9€, and he went for it super easy. We should of tried harder to get him down because he totally would of. Oh well, our motto for the day was: We're learning. Ahaha. Here's the sample foto the guy took of us to prove they worked.

Also, I took note of the life lessons I've been learning from Raimundo (that's actually how you spell it - I asked) in the 45 minutes I was talking with him during the fútbol game when I got back - enjoy. They're pretty great.