Madrid, Spain

This is going to be a Marathon blog post.  I just got home from my fall break, and it was a whirlwind of fun.  I’m going to break it up into cities: Madrid, Rome, Reggio di Calabria, Taormina (in Sicily), and Scille (pronounced shee-la, just north of Reggio).

Madrid: 110 miles

Art, lots of art.  We started the trip on Saturday the 29th, at 8am.  Wasn’t too bad because everyone was being lame and no one wanted to go out on the Friday befote.  We first visited a Monestary a bit outside of Madrid which was OK, nothing special, and DEFINITELY nothing compared to St. Peter’s Bassilica.  At every place in Madrid, we were not allowed to take pictures, so I literally do not have any Pictures from the interior of buildings we saw.  That afternoon we went to the Prado, which was full of paintings that were clearly masterpieces, but I haven’t studied World history all that extensively yet  so some of the pieces that had huge significance I had never seen befote and thus couldn’t really apréciate as muh as I could or should have. 

Saturday night we went to see HAIR in Spanish.  That was COOL, and plus I had never seen a musical in English, so it was a double first for me.  

The end of HAIR!

It was incredible how good all of the cast members were, every one of them had some serious singing pipes.  The story line was apparently different, but it still followed that same anti war, weed smoking, hippie type theme.  From there we went out to one of the best clubs in the World – El Kapital.  On top of that, I met up with one of my good old friends from high school who I hadn’t seen in years and is studying in Madrid this semester.  It was one of my favorite nights yet – this club had 7 floors, all with a different theme and music.  

Crazy first floor dancers and dance floor!

The top floor had a canopy roof that oponed up to the open air, and the bottom floor was live DJs with all kinds of crazy dancers on this huge stage and a massive dance floor, definitely the coolest club I have ever been to.  Worth every penny of the 20€ cover with two free drinks.  Shout out to Corey Pegram, awesome night at Kaptial my friend.

Sunday we Wole up at like 9:00 and went to the Royal palace and the Reina Sofia art meseum.  The palace was pretty similar to all the other ones, I wouldn’t have minded going somewhere else – it’s getting pretty redundant.  What was not redundant was the Reina Sofia and it’s plethora of Picasso paintings!  Now those were something that I could have looked at all day long.  Everytime you looked at it from a different angle, there was something else you could see and another aspect that you didn’t see before.  Once again, you couldn’t take pictures, but I love how Picasso’s stuff at first looks like it’s done by a five year old, but then you actually look at it and realize how brilliantly bizarre it is, and in my opinion is definitely the defintion of abstract.  After that, vacation started!  We headed to our hostel, went into the shopping district of Madrid to walk around and took it easy that night, we had an early flight to catch to Italy!