Growing Pains

Hey guys,
It's Matt, and it seems that it's my turn to write a blog entry. Before I get started though, we updated the picture of the Italian apple commercial on the last post to a video, so you can get a better idea of how ridiculous it looked. Check it out.

Anyways, we've been learning some lessons (the hard way) about traveling and planning the last couple days. After our night on the town Friday (and subsequently not getting to sleep until around 5 or 6), we slept through our alarm Saturday morning, and ended up getting woken up by the landlady pounding on our door at 1pm asking for another night's rent. We finally got our asses up out of bed, and headed out to grab some lunch and hit the museums. Even that turned out to be too hard for us though, as an ensuing navigation and lack-of-decisiveness debacle consumed the next hour. Finally, we ended up with a picnic lunch for 2 at the Parque de Retiro, which was pretty awesome. There was this pretty random jaggedmiddle of nowhere that we climbed all over before being yelled at by some security guard about who knows what (“¿Eh? ¿Como? ¿Habla usted ingles? ¡No comprendo!”) See if you can spot me, Where's Waldo style

We then moved on to sample the rest of the park, which had quite the assortment of lakes, huge statues, fountains, cool buildings, and oh yeah, cartoon characters. Pictures are more interesting (and I know half of you aren't reading this anyways), so here's a bunch:
My version of what was Josh Merritt's facebook pic for years.



And of course, Ben's version




Big statue of some Spanish dude, and us clinging to the base of it.

Ben: "I was drinking this Burn energy drink where ever we went, so I thought we should do a little photo shoot for a burn commercial"







I think they usually have art shows in here, but it was all locked up when we came by. Still cool though.






Most of Madrid has been spectacularly clean, but there was still the occasional grime-filled pond with shoebox literally sitting on top of all the crap in the water.








Now arch your back and look back at me, mean, like a dragon.




Our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, out for a stroll in Parque de Retiro. Also, he's about 5 feet tall.




So after a few hours in the park, we realize that it's about 6pm, and we now have left ourselves 3 hours to see two of the most famous art museums in the world: The Prado and the Reina Sofia. The Prado was pretty cool, just strolling past all these paintings of names that you read about in textbooks but never really mean anything to you (well, to us anyways). The subject matter did seem to be somewhat limited though: lots of Jesus, men on horses, and women who seem to be just a little bit too self-satisfied. We both found the Reina Sofia to be much more engaging. Particularly, Salvador Dali's stuff was pretty cool, and (usually) accessible enough for the casual observer (me) to discern some meaning from it. Of course, once you start getting into surrealism and minimalism, you start to get paintings consisting of a few black dots on a huge canvas and the like, which I still have to question. Overall though, it was really cool. Unfortunately, they don't let you take pictures in any of these museums, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

Ben: "Afterward, we were chilling outside the Reina Sofia, and we saw these bikers that were pretty tight. We had more video, but it only uploaded one clip instead of the full thing, and I'm too lazy to remake it"

This, however, is where our indiscretion began to catch up with us. We only had an hour to go through the Reina Sofia, and so we missed most of Picasso and all of the local Spanish painters. Undaunted, we wandered around back of the Reina Sofia and found a huge kinda warbly mirror, where we proceeded to take another half-hour of photos, which, after my brother's photoshopping, netted us this pretty cool picture.
Ben: "The idea here is that Matt is looking into his 5th dimension, which is the dimension in where every one of your possible paths and choices exist"

We went to the train station at about 11pm to make reservations for our night train to Barcelona for the next evening, and surprise surprise, it's closed. We spend a good half an hour struggling to communicate with the customer service lady, who spoke Spanish and French but no English. At this point, I have an interesting realization: if I had come on this trip by myself (which I was very close to doing), the last few days would have been a nightmare. I had expected there to be a lot of English speaking people here, or at least enough to pull one over whenever you needed to get something across. Such is not the case in Madrid. Apparently there are two dialects of Spanish commonly used in Spain, and so most people learn one or both of these, but don't bother with other languages. Not even the people checking your passport at the airport or working at the train station speak English. Without my brother's somewhat-broken-but-good-enough-and-a-hell-of-a-lot-better-than-mine Spanish, I don't even know how I would've been able to make even the simplest transactions, let alone ask for complex information like train schedules and reservations. So thanks, Ben, for those 3 years of “studying,” it's paying pretty huge dividends right now.

Anyways, we find out that we have to return to the train station the next day to book reservations on the night train, so we head home. On the way, we encounter numerous street performers, some of whom were actually pretty cool. Check these out:


I actually said “Hey, this guy isn't that good” to Ben right before I started taking this video. Yeah, I know, in my eye. Ben: "In his eye, indeed" He goes pretty nuts towards the end.

Rising at the crack of 11am the next day, we begin another series of missteps. First, we get on the metro heading to the wrong train station (there are two, and either works, but one is 45 minutes away). Once we arrive, we wait in line to talk to the ticket attendant, who informs us that all of the trains are full, unless we want to pay 60 euro apiece (a whole day's allowance for us) for a first class ticket. Having already shelled out $650 each for our railpasses that we now discover don't mean shit if you don't have a reservation, we are not feeling too great right now. Throw in the grumpy non-English-speaking ticket guy who starts getting mad at us for holding up the line, the fact that we're now stranded in Madrid for another night, and my ATM card which has mysteriously stopped working and left us with precious little cash, and this was a rough day. We end up reserving tickets for the next morning, and we leave disgruntled and frustrated. Even my suitcase started tearing at the handle, and I've only been using it for 3 days. What the fuck. At least we're learning from our mistakes, and hopefully these first few days of mishaps is shaping us into veteran travelers. I hope.

That night, we go to see a bullfight. Ben and I emerged with mixed feelings, trying to decide if it was artful and cool or incredibly brutal. *WARNING GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS AHEAD* For those of you not familiar with the traditional bullfight, most of it consists of rodeo clowns teasing and running the bull around to wear it out, stabbing it in the back of the neck repeatedly and in many different fashions, and when it's tired and unable to lift its head because of the wounds to its neck (and oh yeah, bleeding all over the place), the matador finally arrives to tease it a bit more and deliver the final stab through the neck with his sword. Oh wait, not the final stab, that's done by another clown who comes out afterwards and wiggles a dagger around in its neck to sever the spine. Finally they drag the corpse out of the ring with horses, and sweep the blood into the dirt to prepare for the next fight. *END GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS* We found ourselves rooting for the bulls, and the best moment came when the last bull trampled several of the clowns. Don't worry, I'm sure they're fine. The bull, not so much.

We made our train to Barcelona, and I'm currently sitting in our hostel at midnight while everyone else is out on the town, for one because we're waking up early to see the many sights in Barcelona, and for two because my brother is passed the fuck out (no alcohol, just exhaustion) and snoring like a pig (oh, except when he occasionally wakes up with comments like “Woah, was I asleep?” and “How did you get my computer?” [after I've been typing for an hour], only to resume snoring about 10 seconds later) I fear the 6 other people in our room might not take too kindly to it when they get back. Oh well, they'll be drunk as hell and probably snoring themselves.

Oh, one last thing on this already outrageously long post. My brother wouldn't let me get away with not posting this, so here you go.