In Madrid, otra vez

I´m being un-Spanish tonight, since I plan on faceplanting in my pillows in T minus one hour, more or less, seeing how I´m completely wrecked. Maybe I figured it´d be the best way to empathize with my soon-to-be jetlagged parents? I´m in Madrid por la noche, and I´m going to get my padres around 9-ish.

Luckily, I was able to meet up with Emma, another conversation assistant, working in Madrid. She´s from the British version of my same program and I met her at the hostel where I was staying in November, along with a bunch of other UK-ers and Aussies and Americans. It´s really odd to hear so many people speaking English, since I´m so used to constant Andaluz (Spanish dialect). The hotel where I´m staying even has two English news stations on, which is cool. It also has a French and a Portuguese station, and I watched the Portuguese one for a long time because I was simply mesmorized by how similar it sounds to Spanish --I could understand virtually every sentence, and if there was a word I didn´t get, it made sense it context. So weird. I had no idea that Portuguese and Spanish were THAT mutually intelligible, even though when I´ve heard Portuguese briefly, before, it sounded like the inbred child of French and Spanish.

Emma was able to tell me how exactly to get from the center of Madrid to my hotel, so that was pretty cool. Being alone in a hotel isn´t, so much, but oh well.

The padres and I will be hitting up Madrid, Toledo and Salamanca in the next three days, then we´ll be returning to the Andalucía region so I can get to work. After work, we´ll be going to Seville, Córdoba and Granada, on different days. It´s going to be a whirlwind tour and the guide is yours truly...I´m a bit irked about the being the group communicator, but it´s all good. The worst part will be ordering food, no doubt, seeing how I´m not quite knowledgeable about all food vocabulary, especially when it´s just Spanish food. I do have one tip for any potential visitors, though: a Spanish tortilla is not a quesadilla, or anything that is normally found in the US. You have been forewarned...


After the ´rents leave, I´ll have a few weeks just to chill in Cabra...hooray. Truth be told, I´m more of a homebody than a traveler extraordinaire, even though I like both...obviously. No doubt the constant moving around from my teen years has contributed to the omnipresent bee in my bonnet to travel.

(Wow, I am clearly out of my mind tired when I type things like that...woops!)

Time to watch more Portuguese TV and then hit it. ¡Buenas noches!