The zoo, daylight savings, and Ryan
October 30
This morning we planned on getting an early start because it was our last day in Madrid. SO Kate and I set our cell alarms for 9:00 (hey, that’s pretty early…) the night before and after a rousing game of LEMON, that I will be laughing about for the rest of my life, headed to sleep. Well… my phone woke me up at 8 FREAKING AM. Pete, who I honestly can’t remember the last time I talked to, decided to give me a little wake up call. It was nice talking to him I guess. A little random but nice.
Marilena, Kate, and I are all three in the get-over-being-dumped-by-your-boyfriend stage and have spent a lot of the past 3ish days talking about the shitty/good times of the past, the shitty times of the present, and the probably-shitty-but-i-don’t-really-want-to-think-about-it time in the future when we get back to SCU. All I know is that it’s good to have girls like them to talk about everything with.
After my phone call (and a long discussion) none of us were in the mood to sleep so we got to packing and showing and having the traditional morning round of karaoke. Then Marilena and I decided to run across the street to satisfy our Starbucks fix. We were a little confused cuz it wasn’t open yet…um what? I mean, I know our rolling in at 9:30 was a little bit earlier than the typical 11AM breakfasts we’d been having but it seemed like by 9:30 on a Monday it’d be open. Weird. Whatever. It was worth waiting around for 30 minutes!
After checking out of Narnia (and paying our bill which came to 57 euro each… for three nights… how sweet are hostels???), we stowed our luggage and hopped on the metro; today’s destination? THE MADRID ZOO (obviously).
After trekking off-road on a dirt path following “Zoo” signs from that metro, we finally got to the front entrance! And found out it was closed…
Well, okay, it hadn’t opened yet for the day. The sign said it opened at 11:00, cool. It was 10:30, we only had 30 minutes to wait. Well, at 11:05 the entrance was STILL deserted except for us and some leaf blower dudes that were blowing the leaves right at us…hm…why wasn’t the zoo open yet?!?
Then it hit us: SATURDAY WAS DAYLIGHT SAVINGS!
Everything from the morning started to fall into place: Pete woke us up at 7AM, not 8AM like we thought (bastard), Starbucks opened at 9:00 (we got there at 8:30 not at 9:30 like we thought), the metro was unusually PACKED this morning cuz we hit it right during work-rush-hour-traffic, AND we didn’t get to the zoo 30 minutes before it opened, we got there an HOUR AND THIRTY minutes before it opened! Fuck… we all felt a little retarded that morning to say the least.
We decided to spend the next hour walking through Casa de Campo (the gigantic park that the zoo was located in) in search of a desperately-needed-by-majority-of-our-group bathroom. Rick mentioned this park in his guide book and said that tourists should try to “skip Casa de Campo’s strange mix of rental rowboats, prostitutes, addicts, a zoo, and an amusement park.” He was not kidding. Sure the condom wrappers/used condoms here and there were disturbing but even MORE disturbing was running into some hideously disgusting prostitutes that we assume were just getting off a hard night’s work… ew.
We walked 45 minutes before finding a bathroom. No, we walked so far that we got back on the metro and rode it two stops back to where the zoo was. Hahaha, if it wasn’t for our thrilling talk about getting married and other freaking scary things like that in the future, time woulda gone by REAL slowly.
When we finally got into back to the zoo it was up and running (yay)! Some memorable things from the zoo: animals aren’t in cages, they are separated from people by a little moat; I was waiting for them to hop on over to hang out with us. The pacing/angry looking bear that ate its own carrot-colored poop. The dolphin show was awesome, and the guy trainer in it was hot UNTIL he put a fish in his mouth for a dolphin to eat it out of. The gazelle porn show. The 5 minute long rhino piss followed by his buddy drinking it up. The blonde monkey gymnast/Kate’s idol. The escaping birds from the flamingo tank…etc. THE ZOO WAS AWESOME. Rick was so wrong.
After several hours at the zoo we headed to La Corte Ingles. According to Rick, this was a HUGE mall-type-thing that was all over Spain. Our first stop was the Mercado cuz we were totally famished from our 45 minute walk/morning full of animal viewing. At La Corte Ingles, we got a little bit confused about what was going on and therefore had a very confusing time there…
-trip 1: into the Mercado to buy sandwiches which we ate on the stairs 5 steps away from the checkout…
-trip 2: immediately after finishing our sandwiches we headed BACK into the Mercado on a mission – buy dinner for tonite. We ended up peanut butter, jelly, a loaf of bread, and a bag of Oreos. Heh. On our way out we were all 4 hit on at the same time buy a guy our age that “recognized our California accent.” He invited us to his apartment to cook cuz he knew how much it sucked to travel and have to eat out all the time. A little creepy but it was a cool invitation – he seemed normal, he was prolly just super lonely. Maybe next time buddy!
-trip 3: Then it was up the elevators on a search for Halloween costumes for the next night in Barcelona. Specifically we wanted to dress up as the Italian flag… not too sure how though. After riding up eight escalators to the top floor of Corte Ingles without so much as dropping a cube of cheese on the escalator and laughing at a lady in fancy shoes when she kicked on of our bread stick crumbs across the fancy-ladies-clothes level we gave up.
-trip 4: back down all eight floors of escalators to pick up some necessary supplies that we forgot to buy earlier from the Mercado.
-trip 5: back UP all eight floors of escalators determined to find costumes (we felt like we weren’t being creative on the previous trip up).
-trip 6: back DOWN all eight floors of escalators and out of Corte Ingles feeling defeated but with hopes to be inspired by something in a store window on the walk home…
A totally bizarre, crazy, thing happened in Corte Ingles when we first arrived. After feeling a little tap on my arm I turned around to see none other than my long lost buddy RYAN SHEA! I was speechless! I seriously didn’t know how to respond to seeing him. Seriously, Ryan and I have a really random friendship. He is from Colorado and we met when I was in 7th grade (and he was in 9th grade?) at a soccer camp in Squaw Valley. At the time Britney Spears was getting really big and the boys thought it was funny to call me Britney because I guess the blonde hair/tan skin thing made me look like her? Ryan was, liek, the leader of the call-Tera-Britney craze and managed to get the entire camp to call me that… thanks. a. lot. For a few years after camp he and I remained pen pals (god, I need to go find those letters when I get home) and even though I’m the worst pen pal ever, he and I managed to stay in touch pretty well.
WELL, four years later he and I both ended up at SCU. Weird, but cool that I went to college with a boy that I met way back when I was in 7th grade. We hung out only a few times though cuz I was in my lame phase where I ONLY hung out with Pete all the time and Ryan was busy with graduating. I seriously didn’t think I’d ever see him again after he graduated last Spring AND THEN I SEE HIM RANDOMLY IN A GROCERY STORE IN SPAIN! If that’s not a sign that we’re destined to be together or something I dunno what is! Hahaha. He said that he was heading to Barcelona in a few days and that we should hang out then. I was SHAKING when I was writing down my phone number for him! I haven’t felt like that in forever… hopefully he didn’t notice. God, how freaking crazy.
We left Corte Ingles around 3:30 and weren’t too sure how to spend the rest of the six hours until our train left. A little bit of internet café here, two hours in a booth on the second floor of McDonald’s, a few failed attempts at shopping for costumes in Halloween stores later we grabbed our bags from Narnia and hopped on the metro toward the train station.
Our dinner was classic: PB&J (made with a fork) picnic in the terminal. :) Adios Madrid!
This morning we planned on getting an early start because it was our last day in Madrid. SO Kate and I set our cell alarms for 9:00 (hey, that’s pretty early…) the night before and after a rousing game of LEMON, that I will be laughing about for the rest of my life, headed to sleep. Well… my phone woke me up at 8 FREAKING AM. Pete, who I honestly can’t remember the last time I talked to, decided to give me a little wake up call. It was nice talking to him I guess. A little random but nice.
Marilena, Kate, and I are all three in the get-over-being-dumped-by-your-boyfriend stage and have spent a lot of the past 3ish days talking about the shitty/good times of the past, the shitty times of the present, and the probably-shitty-but-i-don’t-really-want-to-think-about-it time in the future when we get back to SCU. All I know is that it’s good to have girls like them to talk about everything with.
After my phone call (and a long discussion) none of us were in the mood to sleep so we got to packing and showing and having the traditional morning round of karaoke. Then Marilena and I decided to run across the street to satisfy our Starbucks fix. We were a little confused cuz it wasn’t open yet…um what? I mean, I know our rolling in at 9:30 was a little bit earlier than the typical 11AM breakfasts we’d been having but it seemed like by 9:30 on a Monday it’d be open. Weird. Whatever. It was worth waiting around for 30 minutes!
After checking out of Narnia (and paying our bill which came to 57 euro each… for three nights… how sweet are hostels???), we stowed our luggage and hopped on the metro; today’s destination? THE MADRID ZOO (obviously).
After trekking off-road on a dirt path following “Zoo” signs from that metro, we finally got to the front entrance! And found out it was closed…
Well, okay, it hadn’t opened yet for the day. The sign said it opened at 11:00, cool. It was 10:30, we only had 30 minutes to wait. Well, at 11:05 the entrance was STILL deserted except for us and some leaf blower dudes that were blowing the leaves right at us…hm…why wasn’t the zoo open yet?!?
Then it hit us: SATURDAY WAS DAYLIGHT SAVINGS!
Everything from the morning started to fall into place: Pete woke us up at 7AM, not 8AM like we thought (bastard), Starbucks opened at 9:00 (we got there at 8:30 not at 9:30 like we thought), the metro was unusually PACKED this morning cuz we hit it right during work-rush-hour-traffic, AND we didn’t get to the zoo 30 minutes before it opened, we got there an HOUR AND THIRTY minutes before it opened! Fuck… we all felt a little retarded that morning to say the least.
We decided to spend the next hour walking through Casa de Campo (the gigantic park that the zoo was located in) in search of a desperately-needed-by-majority-of-our-group bathroom. Rick mentioned this park in his guide book and said that tourists should try to “skip Casa de Campo’s strange mix of rental rowboats, prostitutes, addicts, a zoo, and an amusement park.” He was not kidding. Sure the condom wrappers/used condoms here and there were disturbing but even MORE disturbing was running into some hideously disgusting prostitutes that we assume were just getting off a hard night’s work… ew.
We walked 45 minutes before finding a bathroom. No, we walked so far that we got back on the metro and rode it two stops back to where the zoo was. Hahaha, if it wasn’t for our thrilling talk about getting married and other freaking scary things like that in the future, time woulda gone by REAL slowly.
When we finally got into back to the zoo it was up and running (yay)! Some memorable things from the zoo: animals aren’t in cages, they are separated from people by a little moat; I was waiting for them to hop on over to hang out with us. The pacing/angry looking bear that ate its own carrot-colored poop. The dolphin show was awesome, and the guy trainer in it was hot UNTIL he put a fish in his mouth for a dolphin to eat it out of. The gazelle porn show. The 5 minute long rhino piss followed by his buddy drinking it up. The blonde monkey gymnast/Kate’s idol. The escaping birds from the flamingo tank…etc. THE ZOO WAS AWESOME. Rick was so wrong.
After several hours at the zoo we headed to La Corte Ingles. According to Rick, this was a HUGE mall-type-thing that was all over Spain. Our first stop was the Mercado cuz we were totally famished from our 45 minute walk/morning full of animal viewing. At La Corte Ingles, we got a little bit confused about what was going on and therefore had a very confusing time there…
-trip 1: into the Mercado to buy sandwiches which we ate on the stairs 5 steps away from the checkout…
-trip 2: immediately after finishing our sandwiches we headed BACK into the Mercado on a mission – buy dinner for tonite. We ended up peanut butter, jelly, a loaf of bread, and a bag of Oreos. Heh. On our way out we were all 4 hit on at the same time buy a guy our age that “recognized our California accent.” He invited us to his apartment to cook cuz he knew how much it sucked to travel and have to eat out all the time. A little creepy but it was a cool invitation – he seemed normal, he was prolly just super lonely. Maybe next time buddy!
-trip 3: Then it was up the elevators on a search for Halloween costumes for the next night in Barcelona. Specifically we wanted to dress up as the Italian flag… not too sure how though. After riding up eight escalators to the top floor of Corte Ingles without so much as dropping a cube of cheese on the escalator and laughing at a lady in fancy shoes when she kicked on of our bread stick crumbs across the fancy-ladies-clothes level we gave up.
-trip 4: back down all eight floors of escalators to pick up some necessary supplies that we forgot to buy earlier from the Mercado.
-trip 5: back UP all eight floors of escalators determined to find costumes (we felt like we weren’t being creative on the previous trip up).
-trip 6: back DOWN all eight floors of escalators and out of Corte Ingles feeling defeated but with hopes to be inspired by something in a store window on the walk home…
A totally bizarre, crazy, thing happened in Corte Ingles when we first arrived. After feeling a little tap on my arm I turned around to see none other than my long lost buddy RYAN SHEA! I was speechless! I seriously didn’t know how to respond to seeing him. Seriously, Ryan and I have a really random friendship. He is from Colorado and we met when I was in 7th grade (and he was in 9th grade?) at a soccer camp in Squaw Valley. At the time Britney Spears was getting really big and the boys thought it was funny to call me Britney because I guess the blonde hair/tan skin thing made me look like her? Ryan was, liek, the leader of the call-Tera-Britney craze and managed to get the entire camp to call me that… thanks. a. lot. For a few years after camp he and I remained pen pals (god, I need to go find those letters when I get home) and even though I’m the worst pen pal ever, he and I managed to stay in touch pretty well.
WELL, four years later he and I both ended up at SCU. Weird, but cool that I went to college with a boy that I met way back when I was in 7th grade. We hung out only a few times though cuz I was in my lame phase where I ONLY hung out with Pete all the time and Ryan was busy with graduating. I seriously didn’t think I’d ever see him again after he graduated last Spring AND THEN I SEE HIM RANDOMLY IN A GROCERY STORE IN SPAIN! If that’s not a sign that we’re destined to be together or something I dunno what is! Hahaha. He said that he was heading to Barcelona in a few days and that we should hang out then. I was SHAKING when I was writing down my phone number for him! I haven’t felt like that in forever… hopefully he didn’t notice. God, how freaking crazy.
We left Corte Ingles around 3:30 and weren’t too sure how to spend the rest of the six hours until our train left. A little bit of internet café here, two hours in a booth on the second floor of McDonald’s, a few failed attempts at shopping for costumes in Halloween stores later we grabbed our bags from Narnia and hopped on the metro toward the train station.
Our dinner was classic: PB&J (made with a fork) picnic in the terminal. :) Adios Madrid!
posted by tera a firenze at 1:01 AM
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