Last week of January!

Its been another one of those I don’t feel like I’ve done anything but I haven’t had any time do to anything weeks! Haha! Monday was pretty intense with classes during the day, and Paige and I were feeling all healthy and such so we decided to walk to just about every place that we could, so that took up a lot of your day, which included a 40-50 minute walk to the church that night for institute. The professor of the group also loves to read, apparently, so we have had a ton of reading in our history books to be doing! The studying in different places thing is working out alright! I made it over to a park one day that is just across the street to read and such for a bit, and then me and some other girls went to yet another park the yesterday to work on Spanish homework. Its still a little chilly to be doing a lot of studying outside, the wind is kinda cold, but its still nice to get out of the house and doing something!

Tuesday and Wednesday were pretty much dedicated to doing school stuff, catching up on reading, doing worksheets, you know, the really exciting stuff, haha. But then Thursday Paige, myself, and some other chickas headed out to a store on the outskirts of Alcala called El Corte Ingles that is just like a big mall type thing, except its all one store with 5 different levels of shopping pleasure! Theres even this little grocery store thing that was almost a mini Wal-Mart in and of itself, INSIDE of the mall! It was intense! So I ended up buying some really cute shoes for pretty cheap, fell in love with some other shoes, but they were not in the rebaja (sale) section so I couldn’t bring myself to spend that much money on them, and also bought a really cute travel bag for the longer trips, like the one that we have coming up on Tuesday!
Then last night, being kinda like the weekend for us because we don’t have classes Fridays we went over to someone's apartment and watched a movie on the lap top and afterwards some of the other girls tried to convince us to go dancing with them again, but seeing as we wore our pajamas to the little movie shindig, there was no way I was going to get my nice warm BYU sweat pants smelling all smoky, so we went home and went to bed.
Today was quite the eventful day tho! It started out with me getting out of what I had thought was a quick shower, but the mom of the family quickly told me that I take too long of showers because there is a shortage of water in Spain and the plants need the water more than people do, so I need to make my showers shorter. Dang it!!! Haha! And I thought I was doing so good! So I spent all day thinking of ways that I could make what I thought were already quick showers to be even quicker! No good ideas yet, but we’ll see what happens tomorrow when its down to the wire and I have to get in the shower! Haha! (These are plants that need water more than me. haha!)

Then on top of all that, we headed into Madrid to go and see a museum called the Museo de America which has artifacts and maps and stuff all about Spain finding America and what they found when they got there and kinda how things changed and such, and it was pretty cool! We only made it through the first floor by the time we had to leave and decided to power walk it through a bit of the second floor so we could feel like we saw more of what we were supposed to see (we have to write a report about it) and then started walking to meet the rest of the group at the Palace in Madrid. Sounded like a good plan when we were all together and talking about it and looking at a map, but the funny thing was, that the group that I broke off with in the museum, nobody had a map, and the only thing we knew was that we needed to make it to some Plaza in the middle of Madrid and then the palace would be right down the street. So with that news, we set off walking around Madrid, following signs that were telling us that there was the plaza that we needed to go to, but about 30 or so minutes into our walk, the signs stopped and we had no idea where we were. Haha. So we walked, and walked a bit more, and still not seeing any signs we stopped a friendly looking gentleman on the side of the road and asked him where the Plaza de España was, and he laughed at us. Which was quite encouraging, as you can imagine, then he asked us if we were walking, and when we said yes he giggled again then told us to walk down the street a ways, then turn right, then walk a long ways and then we should be there. So… with those GREAT directions, we found a metro station and decided to be smart and take that instead of wandering aimlessly around the city like we had been doing for the last little while. We finally made it to the palace an hour late, ate some lunch, and then took a tour of this building that took us over an hour to find. It was amazing!!! Its just like the palaces that you see in the movies! There was a different room for just about everything, like this one room was where the king “performed the ceremony of getting dressed”. I would like a room to perform the ceremony of getting dressed too!! That would be nice! There was also this room that is now the dining room that used to be PART of the living quarters of the queen. And when we were walking down the stairs, we were all picturing ourselves wearing the big Cinderella dresses and going to a ball or something. Haha. It was fun. Tomorrow we’re gonna take it easy all day, sleep in, get ready, do more homework then go to Madrid for the Carnival. I guess theres a big celebration for… something, I don’t really know what, haha, but theres a party basically all weekend going on in Madrid and its supposed to be HUGE and super fun! So those are the plans for tomorrow!