A night out in Madrid

    Our last night in Madrid was definitely a good way to end my trip abroad, something about european nightlife is far more exciting than american nightlife but probably only because its so different than ours; when they come to America, they probably say the same thing about our nightlife. We took a bus on saturday morning out of the Poveda and Oviedo to Madrid which was about 5 hours, we mostly just slept because we were out dancing and living it up until 5 in the morning the previous night. When we arrived in Madrid and checked into our hostel, we got some lunch and then the boys went straight to their beds to pass out. Emily and I wanted to walk around the plazas and city a little bit since it was our only day in Madrid. We walked around and went into a few shops before heading back to the hostel to wake up the boys and figure out our evening plans. After struggling to get all of them out of bed, we made plans with another girl from our program who was also in Madrid to meet up in the plaza at 11. She was friends with the owner of a pub crawl who let us join in for free, this ended up being a great decision because we got into all the famous clubs of Madrid with free drinks and had a really great time. At one of the clubs, there was an irish woman's bachelorette party which we crashed and found to be a hilariously good time. We met so many fun people from all over the world, including some skater boys from San Francisco and some fashionista girls from London, we all exchanged numbers and recorded them on our arms so by the end of the night I had random digits written all the way up to my shoulder. Classy. We danced our wonderful trip to a close and ended my time here the best way I could have imagined.
     My last night in Europe was so great that the man at the airport the next day made fun of me in spanish for the numbers on my arm, I think its safe to say my night in Madrid was successful. The flight from Spain to Dallas was long, but my friends Sarah and Ella were across from me on the plane so that was helpful, along with the Tylenol PM that I took. We ate some nice american food and spoke some well understood but brokenly spoken english when we arrived and then we split to head to our different gates to head home. I bought some very missed trashy magazines and got on my flight headed to San Francisco; getting back to the hostel at 5 am ended up being a good idea because I slept for the majority of both my flights. I was so happy when I landed and was greeted by my mom, dad and brother. This entire trip felt like one long incredible and vivid dream, I was extremely happy to be back home and in my own bed with my english speaking family but the experience I was lucky enough to have of living in Spain was something I will never forget.

Emily and I in Madrid

A little town called Oviedo

     My last week in Spain consisted of exploring and soaking in my last moments in Oviedo and documenting my life here with excessive amounts of pictures. I wanted to have an entry just talking about my sweet town of Oviedo and the things I liked to do there, to give a taste of what my life was like there. My room, I shared a room at the end of the third floor with Sarah and we had a jolly good time in that room, the view from our room was an adorable little park that people would stroll through. There was also a little kids playground that I loved, especially the teeter totter. There were these two old women who me and Sarah named Dolores and Consuela who would come and whisper "gato" which means cat in spanish and then all of a sudden about 13 cats would come out from behind trees and bushes and the old women would feed them. It was definitely a highlight of our day.

Dolores and Consuela with the gatos

The walk to the plaza we spent all of our nights in

Plaza del sol, most of our nights were spend like this

De nada Spain

The little cafe where we had lunch

School!

The entrance to our dorms, the Poveda

Gold inside the Cathedral

Map of Oviedo

Sarah and I with the Woody Allen statue

Sarah and I in front of a fountain

On the walk to school, Sidra street

Our Cathedral

my classroom 

Christina and I in class

Our teacher, Pablo

sunday market

spanish shopping carts

Parque de San Francisco

I thought this was funny

Our poveda room

where we spent our evenings

        There were many things that I loved about Oviedo, our walk to class was about a mile long and it was beautiful. We would walk past a few little shops and the mercadona and walk past the cathedral on into sidra street full of restaurants and waiters pouring sidra from high in the air and past a fountain until we arrived at our university, we would all work to and from school together and we really got to know the town of Oviedo. When we needed some groceries or other essentials, we would walk past some cute shops on the way to the main street that started with our favorite park, parque de san francisco (cute, cause its my home town :)) and ended with the train station with the big clock tower. The main street had some of our favorite shopping and places to buy everything we needed, and it was the way we got to the train and bus stations for any traveling we needed to do. The bus station was just around the corner from the train station, and in between all of these main landmarks in Oviedo were streets filled with beautiful architecture, statues and other amazingly unique gems. On sunny days, we would take books and music and go to the parque de San Francisco and lay out under the trees and just talk and laugh and then go get some ice cream from the little stands. When we wanted to go shopping we would go to a place that we all referred to as the space ship mall because it was so weirdly designed and it was a hotel as well as a shopping mall. The design of the space ship mall was so modern that it looked strange in the middle of the old looking town of Oviedo, but we enjoyed its randomness regardless. There was also a mountain in town that people would climb to go to a statue of Jesus, called the Cristo. Many people in my program climbed up to the Jesus, but I sadly did not make it. Thats okay though.  Just walking around the town was an experience on its own, I fell in love with the town of Oviedo and it was the perfect place for my study abroad experience.