The Quest for Gravy: When the Yorkshire girl went to Spain.: Madrid and other shennanigans

So apologies again avid blog readers but I have been busy procrastinating and eventually writing my essay.

I've been doing my usual shenanigans of uni, sunbathing, running and swimming and have now signed up to a 10k* so have even more motivation to keep the running going. The weather (I'm British and what) has been pretty good since I've got back, well except today where it has thrown it down for the whole day but well, can't win them all.

World's smallest lift, worlds greatest faces.

Last weekend I made the not so long but long enough journey to Madrid to meet up with some fellow year-abroaders. Now at this point I'm going to briefly complain about the Spanish transport system. So I live in Oviedo which is 446km (where would we be without google maps?) from Madrid, this is roughly the same distance from Newcastle to London. However, to take the train this distance takes the same amount of time and is more expensive than taking the bus. The quickest route is to fly. This is the madness I deal with on a daily basis. So due to the lack of high speed trains to the capital I opted for the bus which took around 5 and half hours. But what a fancy bus it was, each passanger equipped with their own personal buspad** loaded with all the American films dubbed in Spanish that you could wish for and the journey was quite pretty driving through the mountains of Asturias. It was fairly uneventful except when it reached a service station and everyone got off, I however, didn't realise this was what was happening and stayed sat on the bus until the stare the driver was holding with me became uncomfortable and I decided to leave. Then the bus pulled away, with my bag on it. After a short panic that we might be changing buses and I'd end up in Madrid with not even a spare pair of pants the bus refuelled and returned and we carried on the journey.

Myself and Olivia were eventually reunited in a metro station in the centre of Madrid and made our way to the hostel. When we got to the hostel all was quiet and the cupboard labelled 'reception' was shut. I panicked, Olivia took charge and pressed the intercom and a lovely Spanish lady came, chatted to us about her English speaking sons and showed us to our room. We headed to KFC, caught up on everything that had happened to us in the last 2 months and slept. Success.

Alliterated breakfast

After churros, chocolate and coffee for an alliterated breakfast we headed to explore the rest of Madrid wandering round in the sunshine, seeing palaces and Morris dancers, eating wonderful salad, drinking wine, beer, speaking spanish and generally loving life. We also met up with one of my friends from school who is currently teaching in Madrid and shared some beverages, before meeting up with Sarah and Amy, two other year abroading language studying friends. We went to probably the greatest place in the world, I shall explain why. It's called '100 montaditos' and basically there's a list of 100 different fillings and you choose them and they put them in tiny baguettes. Sound too good to be true? Wait, it get's better. They do chocolate bread, with chocolate spread and M & Ms. So once I'd finally got over that dining experience and the fact that everyone in Spain seems to think my name is 'Paqui' we took the metro to Elle's flat. Note brief: 4 English girls speaking in a mixture of French and Spanish on the metro in Madrid causes a few select stares, but is such fun. We spent the night putting the world to rights before a scary and very early morning walk back to the hostel. By this point it was 5:30am and Olivia had to leave to the airport at 6am, sleep is for the weak.

She left, I slept, then hopped back on my bus and slept some more. All in all a fantastic weekend, brilliant company and the weather wasn't too bad either!

This also marked the third leg of mine and Olivia's tour of the capital cities of Europe that we decided should probably happen, 3 down, 47 to go.

*have you stopped laughing yet?
**actual brand name