Qué hace una chica como yo en un sitio como este?
~ inspiration for today's title comes from Madrid Me Mata... The bar - whose neon green sign is on the background of every form of social media I own - I haven't gone to yet but pass by all the freakin time. For my non-Spanish speakers out there, my title says "What's a girl like me doing in a place like this?" And that is what I think to myself every time I'm out at night... Madrileños are INSANE and coming back home at 5 am is still crazy to me, but I'm finally starting to embrace and adjust to the way people live here.
In other news, Jose Cuervo is now my best friend.
Tequila has always been an enemigo of mine after many nights of disaster that have resulted from it but I came to the realization last night that I kind of love it... I mean how did I expect to come to Madrid and not get over my hatred for tequila?
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This week in terms of school was chill as usual... I still don't have much work to do which I'm fine with but I can't help but feel useless. The free time I have now that should be filled with homework/studying is now filled with internship applications/cover letters/paseos around the neighborhood to find cool new places. Not too shabby.
Thursday night, we decided to go to Joy - it's the second *best* nightclub after Kapital so naturally we had to go since it's just something you have to do at least once when you're in Madrid. Before we got there though we hung out at cien for a while to prepare for the night and there were a bunch of Americans from California who were being SO LOUD I couldn't hear myself think. Usually when I hear English here, a strange sense of comfort comes over me, but these people made me embarrassed to be American. After cien, we headed back to Naturbier (the bar that makes their own beer that I wrote about last weekend) then went to Joy.
It was 90's themed and they played BSB, Spice Girls, Britney, etc. and I went ham up on the stage. Did I have fun? Hell fucking yeah. Play 90's music and have a dance floor and I will literally go all night without stopping. I also ran into Natalie and her friends which was awesome and met this dude from Brussels which was interesting... Jajajaja. He was speaking in broken Spanish to me in the beginning and was struggling so then later he was like "Do you understand English?" and I was like "Um yeah you should stick to English" and we were no longer lost in translation (his Spanish sucked... it was like listening to a completely different language haha). His name was something super French but then he said I could just call him John... You can imagine just how long it took for him to get my name correctly. It's a struggle normally but at a nightclub? It's impossible. He probably thought my name was Lauren along with all of the baristas at Starbucks/random people I meet at parties.
I think I'm still sore from dancing so much at Joy (or I may be sore from last night/donkey riding... No estoy segura?) but yeah, I'd give Thursday night a 10/10.
On Friday, I went to see Gone Girl ("Perdida" in Spanish) with Makena and I thought it was pretty good because it was super faithful to the book and everything that I pictured in my head while reading somehow made its way onto the screen... The acting was definitely great - Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike killed it - but I don't know, there was something about it that I didn't like. Can't exactly pinpoint what... I'd say it was a 6.5/10 though.
After the movie we went to Miss Sushi. It was one of the restaurants Javier had recommended on our first day of class and said it was solid sushi for a solid price... And he was right. Everything about Miss Sushi was beautiful because it was my first time having sushi in over a month - tears of joy - and the decor inside was super quirky and girly. One of the decorations on the mirrored wall was a deer head with flowers and lights adorning it. Everything was just very pink and flowery. I could totally picture Hello Kitty coming to eat there if she was person.. OH WAIT-- SHE IS. My world was rocked and forever changed when I found out in August that Hello Kitty wasn't actually a cat but a fucking British girl named Kitty White dressed up in a cat costume. I'm sorry, what? No... I'm still in denial and Sanrio has to be on crack because there's just no way... We need oxygen to survive and Hello Kitty is a cat. Facts are facts and whatever the eff Sanrio has to say is irrelevant...even if they're the creators.
Please excuse the tangent I just went off on. I'm a psychopath.
Anyway - I got the crazy tuna roll because it said it was spicy and I haven't had spicy food since I left New York and jeeesus... My mouth was on fire. I'm not sure if it was because the sauce they used was actually that spicy or because I've become less immune to spicy foods as my meals have been lacking in the spicy department (sriracha, I miss you so) but nevertheless, it was delicious. I got sesame ice cream afterwards and that was the perfect way for me to cool down the hellish fire burning inside my mouth.
On Saturday, we went to Somosierra for our burro excursion.
I RODE A DONKEY NAMED GORDITO AND IT WAS TOO GREAT. We strolled around for... I want to say like an hour? and even though I was freezing and thought I might die of hypothermia, I had so much fun. The family that owns the burros came along with us to lead the way and their dog, Chispa and two cats (little 6-month old mushes oh my god) were running alongside the donkeys too. After we rode around, they fed us a shit ton of meat and I felt nauseous all afternoon because I hadn't eaten that much meat in so long... Yeah it was delicious but it made me so thankful that Raquel's a vegetarian... I loooove some good meat but for me, it's come to the point where it's only good as a once in a while treat. I passed out on the hour long bus ride back to Madrid and when I got home, I literally sat in my room and stared at my wall in a dazey food coma.
Andrés' 21st was yesterday so we were all super stoked to celebrate with him... He didn't make it out to the burro excursion and we hadn't heard from him all day but figured he would see our facebook messages and come out to celebrate. But come 10, 11, 12 o' clock... NO WORD FROM THE GUY. We were all pretty concerned and began to think of hypothetical situations that Andrew could've been in but assumed he was just having way too much fun with his family.
We rallied on last night (unfortunately without Andrew because he was apparently deathly ill :((( ) despite the shitty weather - the most rain I've seen thus far in Madrid - to La Via Lactea, an AWEEESOME bar in Malasaña (of course) and ended up at Wurlitzer (duh). Our night ended with churros con chocolate at San Gines and it was magical because 1) drunk food is always magical and 2) it was my first time having churros con chocolate! Ugh. Bliss. I didn't even feel disgusting when I woke up this morning (lol jk, early afternoon cause I woke up at 1:30. whoops) which was fab :) In my last post I said that I would pretty much be at true Madrileña status if I crossed churros con chocolate off my list. Welp, guess I'm pretty much there now...
