Yesterday, I took a day-trip with my roommate to El Escorial. We went by train, which was okay. It was really cold though. We left Alcalá by 7am, bought our tickets and got on a train that took us almost to El Escorial. It was cold and windy and the further west we went, the more snow was on the ground. The ride was pretty scenic though. Spain has really nice mountains and they are especially pretty covered in snow. We had to change trains, but other than that, the ride was pretty uneventful. Just a little tiring because it was 8am, with nothing to do, on a train rocking you to sleep. But it was cold. Very very cold. It took about 2 hours on the train to get there.
When we got to El Escorial, we hopped on a bus to take us from the train station to the bus station, which is closer to Royal Monastery. We headed straight there because it was only just 10 and the bus to the Valley of the Fallen didn't leave until 3:15. We were one of the first people inside the monastery, which opened at 10am. We paid for a guided tour (10 euro) because with a guided tour you get to see more of the place. Unfortunately, they refused to assign us a guide who spoke English because we were the only English speakers there at the time. So I had to listen to the tour in Spanish, which means I didn't get to understand very much. However, my roommate translated a lot of it for me and I had my Rick Steve's book with his own information about each room, so it wasn't too bad.
Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial. Look at how nice the sky looked at this point... One thing about this place was that it's not nearly as pretty as most cathedral and castle places we have seen so far. Just walls and windows. It was still beautiful.
I loved the sundial-ish things on the floor of the Walking Room. There was a hole (now plugged) above a window that the sun would come through and there was a strip across the floor that would tell you what time it was according to the time of year. The other thing that I really liked was the Royal Pantheon. It was a circular room with rows of coffins where the kings and queens (only the queens that gave birth to kings) were placed after their deaths. There are still three coffins that aren't filled yet, but they already have people (dead, but properly decomposing) waiting to be placed into them. I wonder where their bodies are for now... it was amazing though. Generation after generation of royalty, stacked on top of one another. Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take pictures inside, but I bought a postcard with a picture of the room on it. Another kind of creepy thing, was the room with a huge circular... um... thing in the middle of it where the remains of all of the royal children that died before their seventh birthday (their first communion) were placed. The sculptures were pretty amazing. Some of the coffins in the other areas had statues of the people within carved on top. Gorgeous, but a little creepy.
Royal Pantheon of El Escorial. Those are the coffins, stacked four high. Kings on the left, queens on the right. You can see how it's very pretty, but at the same time, kind of weird. Especially walking in there as a king or something and knowing that the next coffin will have your name on it...
The Spanish older people that were in our group were like misbehaving children. It was a little shocking. Like at one point, there is a giant curtain with one of those velvet rope looking things in front of it and one old lady walked around the velvet rope to go peek behind the curtain. A nearby guard had to tell her that she wasn't supposed to be behind the rope. Then, there was a big coffin with a statue of the guy (I forget at the moment who it was) carved on the top of the coffin. It clearly said "Do not touch" in four languages, but many of the Spaniards had to touch every square inch of this thing after the guide had left the room.
After we left the basement where all the bodies are, our guide left us, which I thought was kind of crappy. Carla and I managed to tag on to the end of another group with a guide that occasionally spoke some English. We found out later that this guide was traveling with their group and they had their own bus and everything, but she didn't tell us we couldn't follow them, so we did. We learned a few things about the paintings. I love El Greco and there were quite a few of his there. She also pointed out this fantastic painting on the ceiling above the main staircase that I would have missed entirely. It was gorgeous. She told who some of the people were and how it was so interesting because many of the figures were painted with their bottom halves larger than the top halves so that it would look like they were hanging down from the ceiling. I bought a postcard of the painting too, although it is so big and the postcard is so small that it is difficult to make out many of the figures.
The other really amazing part of this place was the library. Absolutely beautiful. A very very long room with paintings across the ceiling. Each portion of the ceiling had a different educational subject of importance, such as math, music, astrology, etc. and the walls below each section had a historical story related to each subject. I didn't get to look long enough because I didn't realize that it did this until I was already at the other end of the room. It was amazing though. The guide called in the most important library in the world, but I'm pretty sure she was just being biased for some reason. There weren't that many books and they were all backwards in order to allow the pages to breath. And almost none of them were behind glass, so I can't imagine these books are that important, though I could very easily have missed a good explanation.
Royal Library. You can see the paintings on the ceiling. It was gorgeous.
The basilica was closed that day because they are restoring it, which a little disappointing, but I wasn't too worried about it. It seems that everything seems to be being restored this year for some reason. Anyway, after we left the library, the guide told the group that they had 15 minutes to use the bathroom, stop at the cafeteria, and go to the gift shop. We followed them still, why not? It was freezing and the wind was hitting the monastery at just the right angle that it was whipping around corners and stopping us in our tracks. So we headed to the cafeteria and I got some hot chocolate. It was the best hot chocolate that I've had since I've been here and it warmed me up. It was definitely a highlight of the trip. When we were trying to ask one of the guys that we knew was in the group where they were meeting, we found out he didn't speak Spanish, so we tried English, which didn't work either, so my roommate tried French, because she knows how to speak French too, and they launch into this whole long conversation about who he is and why he is in Spain, which I didn't follow, of course, because I barely speak Spanish, let alone French.
We followed the group all of the way back to the bus station where they all got on a bus, presumably to head up to the Valley of the Fallen. We were going to just get on the bus and the old french man wanted us to (I think it was the first conversation he had had in a language he knew well in a long time), but the guide told us no. So we decided that it was lunch time and walked around and around and around looking for a decently priced restaurant. We tried some of Rick Steve's suggestions, but they were a bit expensive. We went to the market, which was built in 1871 and had a fountain in it where horses could drink from (back when people rode horses to the market), but there wasn't much going on there. We finally found a small, smoky (I so miss no smoking in public buildings) cafe where we could get tortilla sandwiches. They weren't bad... a little cold and when we asked the lady to heat them in the microwave, she got offended and told us that they were just made and were fresh, but she got over it and heated them up for us.
We had about an hour to kill before the bus left, but we went and sat in the bus station anyway. I was freezing, my pants were soaked around the ankles, and the bus station wasn't very warm (they don't believe in heat sometimes), but we sat on a seat in the sun and talked a bit while we waited until the ticket booth opened. After waiting nearly an hour for the ticket booth, we went to by our tickets for the bus to the Valley of the Fallen. It turns out, that half an inch of snow is more than sufficient to shut down the Valley for many days and it was closed. I was a bit peeved. It's half an inch of snow people... and my roommate was upset because this was her second time to El Escorial and she had missed the bus to the Valley of the Fallen that last time she went. I figured that it was closed because the mountain was slippery and they didn't want to send a bus up there, so I decided that we were going to make the 30 some minute hike up the mountain (I guess there is a nice trail), but a lady in the bus station told us that they close the monument and everything. Because of half an inch of snow... Anyway, she told us that we could go visit the historical prince's summer home instead. We wandered around looking for souvenir shops for awhile (all were closed because it was siesta) and ended up going back to the monastery gift shop to buy all of my postcards. I bought the two I mentioned and then one of the library and one of a drawing of the monastery with little people on horses and carriages and stuff. It reminded me of Age of Empires and I thought that Tom would really like it, so I had to buy it.
Then we made our way to the prince's summer home. The garden would probably have looked really nice in the spring and summer, but it was kind of bare and sad right now. There were really good views of the surrounding mountains though. I took some pictures. When we got up to the gate, we were told that the house isn't open to visitors until after Semana Santa (Easter week). Sigh.
View from the garden of the prince's summer home. You can kind of see the snow-covered mountains and for sure the snow-covered ground. The mountains kind of blend into the white sky though. It was a little cloudy at this point of the day.
We decided to head home after that. It was an hour until the next train to Madrid came, so we sat in a nearby cafe. I decided to get another hot chocolate because the first that day was so delicious. It was a mistake. You have to be very careful about the hot chocolate here because sometime they just hand you a cup of, pretty much Hershey's syrup, only maybe a bit thicker and creamier, and it's disgusting to try to stomach. I drank as much as I could because I had paid for it, but it made me a bit ill.
The train ride back wasn't bad because we managed to get on a train that was going to Alcalá. We only had to change trains once because the front half was going to Alcalá and the back half was going somewhere else (really weird). The people in the car told us that we were in the correct car, but after they separated the train in half a man came over the speaker saying that our car was going somewhere else, so half the car jumped up, leapt out of the train, sprinted down the platform to the front of the train and leapt back on. We made it, thankfully, but it was a bit crazy.
When I got home, finally, I talked with Tom a bit online, but I was exhausted. I hadn't slept much the night before and had gotten up at 6am. So when dinner was served at about 9:15, I ate my fill and went straight to bed. It felt fantastic. I slept forever. Almost 14 hours and it felt amazing. Yesterday really wore me out more than I realized, and I had the craziest dreams. I woke up not being able to distinguish the dreams from reality (Did someone say that or did I dream that someone said it?), which is really irritating. But when I sleep late, I get to skip breakfast, which makes me happy.
Also, I guess my roommate and my host mom aren't getting along too well right now. Apparently, my roommate has been coming home pretty late for dinner, mostly because she doesn't have a computer and does all of her homework at the cafes at night, and my host mom isn't happy about it. Carla said that my host mom yelled at her about it on Thursday after I left to hang out with my friends. Carla is kind of unhappy with the situation. I guess I'll have to see how it works out.
I realize that I haven't mentioned what I did Thursday night. Well, some of the graduate students, after a semester of living with a host family, decided to get their own places (including my roommate's old roommate). So I was invited, along with another girl sitting in the hallway with me to one of the graduate student's apartment. I was all for it, but she wanted to check with other people before she would agree, which made me realize how well I'm doing with my goals. I wanted to open up a bit and learn to be more confident and not rely on people anymore. Well, here I am spending a lot of time with a bunch of different people. I don't have a select group of friends that I have to run to in order to see what they are doing first, or if they want to go too. I've made a few, not enemies, but there are a few people that don't like me, but I think that there are more people that do. I've impressed people with my tequila drinking, with coming here even though I've had very little Spanish, and because I'm going to graduate the minute I get home. My host mom even mentioned that I keep my room very organized (this is thanks to Tom of course, because his obsessive compulsive-ness rubbed off a bit).
Anyway, I show up at the grad-student's house with a few other people. He's such a great host. He had the potato chips and the other kind of potato chips, in the same bowl, separated evenly. He had drinks and cups and even brought back some wine when he left to show more people where he lived. I decided to live a little and play some beerpong... my first ever game of beerpong, and as I expected, I lost horribly and it was disgusting. I refused a second game. One of David's (the graduate student, but you have to pronounce it Dah-veed because that's what we call him) roommates is from Venezuela and I tried talking with her for a bit. Mostly I just had to follow her conversations with other people because I flipped out a bit when she talked directly to me, but I could understand her so much better because she doesn't have the Spanish accent. She was sitting in the room with us to listen to us speak in English, to practice a bit. I secretly want to have an intercambio (language interchange where you speak two different languages in order to practice each) with her because she's not very good at English, so I wouldn't feel so badly about my being terrible at Spanish. It sounded like she's really busy though, so I don't know if she'd even have time.
So, we hung out a bit and I was told these things by different people: That I was one of the grad-student's favorite undergrads and that one of the undergrads was glad I was there. So I was very happy. After that, we walked around a bit, went to a bar or two, ran into some more people. I had a good conversation with one of the other undergrads that I hadn't really talked to before about why we decided to come here and how we feel about being here. Then it started pouring rain and some how, we ended up at the Can-Can. I'm not really a big fan of this place. People smoke a lot in there and it's in the basement of this place, so the smoke gets really thick really quickly and makes me sick. I headed home with some other people rather than wade my way through the smoke.
I really miss not having to deal with smoke, but I know I'll miss having the bars stay open until 5 or 6am.
Friday, I slept in a bit, but mostly hung out at home. Next weekend, we go to Cantabria, where it's snowing and ugly. I'm so excited for the Altamira Caves though. Recall the book that I bought at the CarreFour. Well, these caves were a big inspiration for the author when she wrote the fifth book of the series and I've known this for many many years now, but I didn't realize that we were going to the town right next to where these caves are located. I'm ecstatic. And I'm probably the only one of the entire group to be so. I'm going to do a presentation tomorrow, in Spanish, over that book, so I'm going to work on that for awhile now. Quit procrastinating.
My parents come in less than 2 weeks!! Hooray!
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