The Unofficial Translator

So the second day in Madrid we spent in the Palacio Real de Madrid, which is where the Kings and Queens used to live. The place was AMAZING! Here's a picture of the outside. We couldn't ake pictures inside, which I didn't know until I went up the stairs and saw the sign, but that's ok because I only took one picture of the statue of Carlos III, who was the first monarch to live in the castle. And the security guards didn't see me so I didn't get in trouble either. Hah. Before I go into detail of what I saw and how blown away I was I'll post some more of the pictures that I could take before going inside, and explain them as I go.

This is just a photo of the side of the castle that I couldn't fit into the first picture, just to show how big it is.This is one of the lamp posts that was in the large plaza in front of the castle, inside of the gated castle. It's not too interesting, but it begins to explain how much detail and how gorgeous the inside rooms were.

And this is the church right outside of the gates that surround the castle. Very breathtaking.


The following two photos are the view of Madrid from steps to the right side of the castle.















The view isn't too special and it's also not the most important part of what I saw that day, but I just wanted you all to see the pictures.

The castle has two statues, one on the left and one on the right up towards that top. And because we did an audio tour, we each got our own little audio machine which told us the history of each room and the castle, I learned that the left statue is Moctezuma and the right one is Atahualpa. Which, I thought was amazing that they would put Aztec statues of such important men on their castle. In the middle, almost at the top of the castle are four statues of the first royal family to have lived in the castle. And below are the photos.

The first is Moctezuma, then Atahualpa, then the family.As you can see from the final picture, the sky was amazing. The weather in Madrid will take a little to get used to. I expected it to be hot since I left Chicago and it was hot, and this summer Chicago being hot was a miracle. When I got into Madrid though I was cold. First, let me say that I know I get cold easily, and I wear a hoodie and sweat pants in the summer, but this really was cold. Even the other students told me that thought it was cold and not what they expected. Anyway, basically, Madrid is really chilly in the morning, and then the afternoon gets really sunny and hot, and the nights drop down and are cold again. It kind of reminded me of Guatemala where you can't walk barefoot on the tiled floors i the morning because you'll freeze and then all you want to do in the middle of the afternoon is strip your clothes off and jump in the pila or sometimes it's so hot that you'll go so far as to shower with the freezing cold water instead of heating up the water... That's only when you're desperate though, (which I can't say I have ever reached that point). Then at night you always have to put a sweater or sweatshirt on because it gets crisp. That's exactly how Madrid was. The only problem was that we started our days so early and then wouldn't get back to the hotel until late afternoon. So I soon learned that I had to either be cold in the morning but then good in the afternoon, or the other way around... let's just say that I have yet to master the weather.
Anyway, back to the palace. When we got our audio machines we all got to choose which language we wanted our tour in. One by one each student said English and I was like español. Now, this is not an exaggeration but everyone turned around to look at me and were like, "You're crazy, I could never do that, are you sure you're going to understand?" Now when people ask me how I know Spanish so well, I tell them that I'm guatemalan and that I grew up speaking it and I went to a bilingual elementary school where I learned how to read it and write it also. But for them to really understand what that means I have to say that when someone speaks to me in Spanish, it's like someone speaking to them in English, I just understand it. That's ususally when they get jealous and say, "I wish I knew Spanish like that". I guess me being here is kind of like cheating since I already know the language, but there's so much more to learn. The Spanish culture is very different than Latin American cultures, and the use of vosotros and instead of pronouncing the "s", they say "th", which is completely different also. I may not be here to learn the language but I am here to learn just as much as everyone else.
So I took the Spanish tour, which was amazing, and yes mami I did understand everything, I am not losing it like you always ask.
I walked into the palace, and as the audio tour guide explained, before walking up the steps there was a statue of Carlos III, who was the first monarch to inhabit the palace. Here's the photo of his statue that I took before knowing we couldn't take any inside... oops!
Anyway, it's a little dark, but you can begin to see how amazing the inside the palace is. If you turn around you walk up the stairs and there's two lions at the top of the steps on each side where the steps split in two one so that you can climb either side. All of the ceilings in each room and the ceiling above the steps are painted with angels, or gods and/or goddesses. The paintings are amazing, they have so much detail, the clods look real, the fabric of the clothing looks real, and they look like they were 3-D. Also, there was so much gold detail along the ceiling and the walls. The gold detail is like that on the lamp post that I have a picture of.
I mean the inside each room was breathtaking. It's so difficult to explain.

In several of the rooms, there were long crystal chandeliers. Gorgeous and still looking like new, which, made me wonder how they keep up the appearance of the place. I mean the walls were covered in tapestries and they were all still so deep and rich in their color, it was amazing. I also found out that in the winter they would cover the walls with tapestries and then in the summer they would take it down and hang up large paintings. It was an interesting idea I thought. But the tapestries to make the rooms look darker kind of an old, eerie feel. But I guess the lack of light (in order to preserve the color of the inside) except for small ones on the ceilings add to the darkness. The border of the doorways were made of marble as were most of the floors. It also makes me wonder how they keep everything clean. Everything has that antique, but very well preserved look, but I wonder how they clean it. The ceilings are so high, I would hate to have the job of dusting it and getting the cobwebs out of the corners. Walking through the rooms and hearing the story of each one and the history of the pieces in them, it made me think of the new buildings and condos going up all over Chicago. When I compare the models and photos of the new condos they are the polar opposite to the decoration and design of anything in this palace. Everything is so modern and all about the newest high tech appliances, it's crazy to think how much has changed and how the high tech modern things hundreds of years ago used to be china from Asia, or hand-painted clocks. There were about 16 different rooms and it was amazing to walk to each room and see how different they would be from the one before it. Carlos III had a room where the wallpaper was a seagreen color and it had his initials and his wife, Doña Sofia. It had a monogram with JCS which stood for Don Juan Carlos III and Doña Sofia. I thought of Lindsley when I saw it and how if she were to see the wallpaper she would probably get it made for the Beaver 6 room or get it made for her children's rooms when she has kids. Haha Love you Linds!
There was also a Room covered in china. It was small, but it was covered in 134 plaques of porcelain. and there was hand painted detail. It was gorgeous. There was also a Comedor de Gala, which is the Gala Dining Hall where they would hold big dinners and dance. The floor was wooden, and you could see the worn marks from people's shoes in the closed off section, who knows how old they were. The room was huge, and apparently during the time of Carlos III, part of it was the queen's room. But then during the period of Alfonso XIII the bedrooms were joined to form the gala dining room.
Something that was very common to find in the rooms were statues and only statue heads, or designs on the walls of angel heads. I don't know what scares me more, the statues with eyes or the ones without... I think I might have just come upon a new phobia of mine, statues. Mannequins would be included too, they just freak me out, like they're going to come to life all of a sudden. Haha.

Anyway, I was one of the people who got behind on the tour, and I didn't get to finish it, but there are a few more pictures I took like of the hallway and the patio in the middle of the palace. Here they are below.

After leaving the palace, we met up with our tour guide Mercedes. She was great we went all over Madrid and I'll explain the history that she told us while I post up the pictures. The funny think is that I'm horrible at history. Not only do I not enjoy it (I always tell my dad history doesn't matter because it's in the past), I have the worst memory for it. However, I became Mercedes' English translator. Every time we stopped and she explained something to us then moved on, everyone turned to me to explain what she had just said and translate it into English. Let me tell you, repetition definitely works. Ha...
Anyway, let us begin the tour.
This is a picture of the Plaza Mayor. After Madrid became the capital of Spain, which used to be Toledo, this is where all of the activities took place. The festivals and celebrations, and even the criminal sentencing because the jail is very close by. Therefore, they would sentence the person in the plaza then take him/her to the jail if that was the sentence.






The second photo is the right side of the plaza, the part that is cut off in the first photo. The place where the flags are is the balcony where the king and queen would stand and watch whatever was going on from above. Also, there was a law in Madrid that said that the owners of the apartments in these buildings had to give up their balcony's to the government so that the government could rent them out to the nobles and they could watch the event from a balcony. Isn't that just ridiculous?! Not only were the apartment owners kicked out of their balcony's, they didn't even get the rent money that the nobles had to pay to be able to be on the balcony's. So the people living in the apartments had to watch the events down in the plaza with everyone else! Now let us move on to clearly more entertaining and interesting things. I know everyone sees the Yoda in the right hand corner of the photo. (Don't worry I got a close up). I especially wanted to get him in the photo to contrast the old historic site with what happens in the plaza today. Hey, you gotta make money somehow!

So here's the close-up. And as you can see he is fully equipped with a light saber. If you put money in his box he waved the light saber around as if in a mock fight. But, Yoda wasn't the only entertainer. There was a spider also. This man stood up on a box (I guess that's the cool thing since Yoda was on one too?), and he was dressed all in black, and had his arms down by his sides, and when someone put money in his box he lifted up his arms he pulled up the other legs and a web all sewn together. It was kind of a waste of money if you ask me...







Anyway, the next photo is the old jail house, where I said they took the criminals. It's not a jail anymore, it's actually the town/city hall building now.














The next photo is just one of the streets in Madrid, one of the smaller ones. You can see the top of the churches in Madrid.

One of the things I noticed in Madrid was how much grafitti there was on buildings and all of the little street carts had graffiti all over them. Some of it was in English and pretty inappropriate. But here's a colorful one I thought was interesting.
The next photo is just of one of the churches we saw on the tour.
And then there was a building that was painted just very vibrant, bright colors that I thought was gorgeous.


This next photo is a picture of the bridge in Madrid. Apparently Madrid is mainly on two big hills and it used to take a long time to go from one to the other, that is until they built this bridge. However, the bridge also became the place where people went to commit suicide. I'm not sure whether you can see from the photo, but there is a fence, as well as glass to block people from being able to jump.

This is the last photo of the tour and it's one of a convent where the nuns are not able to have any contact whatsoever with anyone outside of the convent and no one can see the nuns. That's why the windows are so high up and there are so few so that they can't look out. Mercedes told us that these types of convents used to be very common, and that there was a law in Madrid that stated that no one could build a house higher than the convent walls, and if they did they couldn't have any windows above where the walls ended so that there would be no contact between the nuns and the people outside.
Also, the nuns used to hold fundraisers by selling baked goods, but since they couldn't see anyone and vice versa, they were put inside this wooden cylinder thing with no openings except something in the middle that would swivel. Someone would put their money in the little swivel drawer and then the nuns would swivel it around to get the money then but the candy on the drawer and swivel it back around to give to the buyer. How odd is that? I mean it's so difficult to imagine living a life that way. Mercedes told us though that most of the women who were nuns were the ones dropped off on the doorstep of the church by their mothers of parents who could not care for them, they were just abandoned. I guess if you grow up in that way, you never know what you're missing, so it's easier in that sense. But it's still so hard to fathom never having contact with anyone.

Once our tour was over, we had a couple of hours of free time back at the hotel which I spend laying down and trying to update my blog, which yes I know I am waaay behind on. I will catch up, promise.
The plan for the rest of the night was to meet at the lobby at 8pm to go to a flamenco dance. And our program director told us to eat something before it or we would probably starve in the middle of it. Right before we had to meet, Maggie, Amanda and I went to find something to eat but we didn't have enough time to sit down so we went to the grocery store and found pre-made salads for 1.99 Euros. They also had a cart with samples of chocolate soy milk, which tasted just like the chocolate soymilk we always have at home, and I missed home again... Anyway, Maggie and I bought one of the salads and as we checked out, I soon found out that there was no tax!!! Coming from Chicago, where they just raised the taxes I thought I had hit gold. The flamenco dance was great. There was more singing than dancing, but the talent and the deep strong voices of the singers is incredible. If you ever have a chance to see a flamenco dance, I highly recommend it. Especially in Madrid, where we got to order a drink, and which we all took full advantage of and ordered wine or sangria. :) Don't worry though dad, your sangria is still the best. ;)
After the dance, the group went to find a place to eat tapas and the girls went to one place, while the boys went to find a place where they could watch the Spain soccer team play and eat. While we were eating, I saw my first pick pocket. The four of us were sitting outside and suddenly we saw a man running towards us and he past us, and then a man was running right behind him trying to catch him. And behind both of them was a police officer, waayy behind. It was interesting haha. And it definitely made me clutch onto my purse even tighter.
After dinner we went back to the hotel which was about 12:30 pm, we slowly are trying to get used to the late nights. And at around 1 the boys came knocking at our door determined to pull a noche española where we stayed out as late as the spanish did. However, I was the only one up for it, so the 3 guy and I walked around for a bit, and we came across a hookah place, Jamie and I got really excited and convinced Brian and Mark to try it because they never had before. So we got two hookahs, strawberry flavored and sat outside and smoked it and got the attention of a lot of people wondering what it was that we were doing. We even had a conversation with two English men who had been drinking since 5pm and it was about 1:30am. One of them was wearing a red dress. Mark asked them if they were Manchester United or Leads fans and the man said Leads. As they walked away one of the guys yelled out Manchester United and the guy in the dress got so offended and started walking back towards our table and kept repeating, "Oh you're fuckin rilin' me now, you're fuckin' rilin' me." It was hilarious. I don't know what was funnier, the man being in a dress, which was inside out by the way, or the way he said the f-word.
Anyway, after stopping in O'Connells again, and realizing how uncomfortably packed and crowded and sweaty it was we left and went back to the hotel and called it a low key, yet successful night.
Until my next post,
xoxo
D