La granadina It's the spring semester of my junior year, so I am celebrating with un gran viaje filled with classes (unfortunately) and crazy foreign fun.

Madrid was a good time; I really liked it. Very large, much more international, not quite so “Spain” as Granada. Day one was the Palacio Real (the royal palace), walking tours of our part of the city, and really, really good food. Wow, yum, everything. The Palacio was ridiculously huge (one of the largest in Western Europe, the guide said some 2,000 members of court lived there once upon a time) and so fancy. You walk around, look at a wall, and there are two Goyas just hanging out. No sign or anything. The current king Juan Carlos lives in a smaller palace outside Madrid, but parts of this one are still used for state occasions. Crazy. Day two was El Prado, primarily, which would be another wow situation. I always get really excited when I see paintings in real life that I know from books, and El Prado was just filled with famous art. El Greco, Valázquez, Goya (his royal stuff, the Black stuff, and more modern pieces), then other, non-Spanish artists that are too many to name. So glad we had a guide, too, because that way you get to hear more about the pieces. There were all these troops of cute, little kids (like 5 years old) walking around holding hands, looking and listening all mesmerized. Grandma Gallagher would have been in heaven. After the museum, my little group (Anna, Annie, Whitney, Ojaswi, Nick, Brint, and myself) went with Christine for an optional walking tour through the Parque del Buen Retirio (a huge, huge park), which was very nice. I don’t understand how the grass is all so green in February! By the time we finished, we were growing weak from hunger, so we lunched, had a mini siesta, and went to see some horses dancing. I wanted to go to the Museo Reina Sofia (more contemporary art, Dalí, Picasso, a big Chuck Close exhibit right now, amazing, etc), but I got overruled. By dancing horses. Will definitely need to see it at some point, but I have no clue when. That night we went to a recommended discoteca, which we luckily got into free, because it ended up being an awful lot of old men. We still had fun, though, and once again stayed up nice and late for our adventures in Segovia…