Oh, the Places You’ll Go!: Madrid

So I'm going to backtrack to the beginning to get y'all caught up! I left from Raleigh on January 17th at like 2pm with my friend Matt. He's one of my good friends from school and he is studying abroad in Sevilla too and with the same program (kind of but not really planned). It's awesome to have a travel buddy. I was definitely excited to not face the confusion of the airports by myself. After a slightly tearful, but better than expected, goodbye to my family, we headed to JFK before going to Madrid.

We got to JFK fine and although it was slightly foggy when we flew in, I knew NYC was extremely close. I'm always so tempted to just take a taxi into the city. Anyways, we got off our plane and tried to figure out where our Iberia flight to Madrid was. To make a long story short, we got very confused about our gate and boarding passes and JFK was much more stressful than it needed to be. But after we found our gate, we met up with another girl named Chelsea who is studying abroad in our program and from USC too, but we didn't know her before! It was awesome to meet someone new, and another Gamecock! We managed to switch seats to sit together on the plane to Madrid.

Here's the awesome part - we got to Madrid!!! All of the students from our program, ISA, met up at one area of the airport to take a bus to our hotel. We definitely looked like a bunch of tired Americans with too much luggage, including myself (thank GOD my two were both under 50 pounds). Once we were picked up by pretty much only Spanish speaking Spaniards, we went to our hotel. The first day is a little hazy. I just remember walking around Madrid and taking a bus tour half-asleep. I mean we were up for like over 30 hours. It was a longggg day.

The next day we went to Museo del Prado and el Museo Reina Sophia. They were both pretty awesome but a lot of walking. It was so worth it though because we saw paintings by Picasso, Goya, el Greco, and Dali.

Salvador Dali

I think we really just did a lot of walking and eating for the next day. I was a little disappointed with Madrid in general. There were some parts that were absolutely beautiful, but others not so much. And the food was good, but not amazing (don't worry it gets a jillion times better in Sevilla). The only other fun thing I did in Madrid was watch the Real Madrid and Barcelona game with a bunch of Spaniards who are totally into futbol. I really wanna go to a game! Oh I need to add that to my list.