Strike-day adventures (Madrid- día dos)

¡Hola otra vez!

[I have added in the pictures that I promised earlier]

In yesterday's post, I mentioned that a nation-wide strike took place on March 29. [My mom insists that I bring on strikes wherever I go-- in Honduras (summer 2009), I left the day that a military coup occurred; in Thailand (summer 2010), a huge political demonstration by the Red Shirts took place in Bangkok; now, this. Maybe she's right...]

In any case, the strike meant that it would be very difficult to utilize public transit, so a few of my host's friends took me on a little day trip. We first visited a nearby town, called San Lorenzo de El Escorial. It has a large monastery, with lovely gardens that we walked around for a while.

Madrid- día uno

I did a decent amount on my first day in Spain's capital city, so settle in and prepare for a lengthy (potentially verbose) retelling…

My walk to the bus stop. Not too shabby: 

Once I made it to central Madrid (35min bus ride + 5min metro), I started at... 

Let's talk food...

Originally, I wanted to do a neat little thing, similar to Kendall's photo-per-run endeavor, where I documented all of my dinners in Europe. I knew it might get tedious, but I didn't anticipate trashing the idea by day 2, haha. Needless to say, I have yet to take a picture of my meals in Spain, but oh well. I got the meals on the flight at least:

The journey

Well heyyyyy y'all! [How's that for sounding touristy?] My internet's been quite spotty, and my brain has been quite exhausted, so forgive me for the absence. I expect this is going to happen rather frequently, however, so…accept this as my apology in-advance for the next month or so. I'll post when I can, and I'm sorry if it's not as often as your curious little minds desire : )

Let's just start with the trip over. Here are the stats:

the view from up here...

I don't love flying, but I do love the view that it provides. On my flight over, I was able to witness a gorgeously starry night sky, an utterly breathtaking sunrise, and this staggering snapshot of the Alps (well, the Alps are staggering, not necessarily my photography of them).

{for you East-coasters, those little hills at the bottom of the shot are probably about the size of the Appalachians.}

Tomorrow I'm exploring downtown Madrid, so at some point you can look forward to pics of that...hopefully (my camera spontaneously deleted a picture of that sunrise I mentioned, so I hope I'm not working with faulty hardware here...).

-M