Madrid Again - The Visa Saga Hath Endth

The holy grail...a Spanish ID card

So last time I was in Madrid, back in March, before I quit and returned to civilized lands, I was finally given a temporary NIE and told that to get a proper ID card that permitted me to remain and Spain (and therefore in the whole Schengen Area because there are no border controls) I had to return in 40-45 days, hence the return journey. I ablogrrived at midnight on the Wednesday, no problems at all with border control here, and just managed to get the metro to Annabella and Jose Angel's place before it closed at 1.30am. We pretty much went straight to bed.

View from my spot in retiro

We got up the next morning and had breakfast and then lunch before I made a move, with the office reopening at 4pm after siesta. The address was a bit strange, they list no street number, just the street itself, meaning you gotta pick a direction and just walk until you get there, although I asked the security guard at the metro stop and found it pretty quick. All the foreign-looking people walking that way with papers in their hands was a good giveaway. Turns out it is actually a detention centre for illegal immigrants, a huge prison-like building with big walls and stuff. Pretty scary looking.

I walked through security into the office. Normally, when I go to Foreign Offices, there is a line at the front desk (and sometimes I line outside waiting to be let in to get to the front desk even!) waiting to check in and get a number to wait in another yet another queue to see someone at another desk, but this time there was no line at all for the front desk. Surely I wasn't at the right place then. A Foreign Office with no line?

My spot in Retiro

I went up and asked the girl if I was in the right place to get my NIE ID card, and she replied that I was and asked for my temporary one and passport. She took them, checked my name, opened a filing drawer, took out a card, and handed it to me. Just like that. I stood there a bit stunned and asked her if that really was all I needed to do, and she nodded, and I still stood there a bit stunned. Was this really the same government that had spent so long insisting my type visa didn't even exist, now giving me an ID card so easily? I later decided that the lack of line at the final Foreign Office is due to a lengthy, ridiculously difficult and expensive process - most people were either still stuck back in the lines at the first offices or had given up all together!

So now I have a Spanish ID card permitting me to stay until the end of March. The Visa Saga hath endth. Although its the ID card of an exchange student, meaning if I want to actually work in Spain there are further chapters to the drama, as I would then have to take any contracts to another office and go through a currently-undefined process to get permission to actually accept them. Mmmmm. At least having an ID card that says 'Estudiante' means I can try to get student discounts here in Belgium.

view from my spot in Retiro

That outa the way, I brought a heap of beer and food and headed back to Annabella and Jose Angel's to celebrate with them. I made curry for dinner, I thought it wasn't spicy but it nearly killed the two of them, and then we spent the rest of the day just drinking and talking. I didn't do much on Friday either, I got up late and went for a haircut after lunch, a cheap place down the road with some lady that cut it in about ten minutes and didn't try to make conversation at all, not even to ask where I'm from. Then I headed off to Retiro, back to the spot I've claimed to read and lie in the sun some more. Finally, I went back to Olga's aunt's place, to meet Olga and grab the big bag I'd left behind and say hi to her aunt, and then I had a late dinner, tried to repack everything into a bag and suitcase of 15kg each and only 10kg carry-on, and then it was off to bed.

It was my tenth trip out to Madrid airport, and my eight flight in and out of Madrid on Saturday in four months, I'm a pro at it now. I just scrapped through with my luggage, luckily they didn't weigh my carry-on, and then it was back to Belgium!

My last week in Madrid, and my decision to leave Spain

'Se Vende - For Sale' window in Malasana

After such an intense and sleepless week with Hauke and Feli, I fell quite ill over the weekend, and spent the whole time in bed. Come Monday I was feeling a lot better, but I've been left with a nagging cough that just won't go away. Also come Monday was the realisation that I was now broke, jobless and homeless in Spain, and nearly at the deadline I'd set myself for sorting out the visa thing and finding a job with no end to the visa process in sight. Even though I have a bit of paper with a NIE on it, I still can't work; I first need to wait 40 days, get the real NIE, present my job offer at Foreigners Office number four, then complete further steps to be confirmed once I make complete all the others. After a long wait while they determine said steps of course. Highly likely to include demands like qualify for the European Buracracy Championships next autumn and fill in a forest's worth of paperwork while doing a one-handed headstand. I had to get out of Miguel and Ricardo's apartment too, the saying 'Three's a crowd' definitely applies when you're talking about a one-bedroom shoe-box sized pad.

Glorieta de Bilbao, the corner by the aparment in Malasana

So, I decided to skip straight to what was originally my post-Spain plan, and try to find work as an Au Pair. I figured even though I'm not great with kids, can't drive and as I haven't babysat since highschool, have no references, as native english-speaker I would have a pretty good shot of sorting something out, meaning I could start living and working somewhere straight away without having to worry about waiting for the whole visa thing to be sorted out, as Au Pairing is under the tabe, and just keep plodding along with the visa thing so that I have permission to stay in Spain, or even anywhere in the Schengen Area, for the year.

Calle Manuela Malasana

So I signed up with three online Au Pair/Nanny websites (if anyone is interested, the sites are here, here and here. I don't really understand how two of them work at all, but apparently if you remember to at least log in everyday your profile will be one of the top ones families see when you log in. For more help, flick me an email). I find the definition beween Au Pair and Nanny really blurry, but I did find out that Nannies generally get paid more. Initially I was looking at doing this within Spain, and amongst the five or so offers I was recieving daily, there were a couple in Spain, the most promising being a family from Israel who were just moving to Barcelona, looking for someone to do a lot of housework and look after two young girls. I spoke to the woman a couple of times on the phone, but then I got an email and a phone call from a man in Antwerp, and within the next 24hours had made the decision to leave Spain and move to Belgium, with a flight booked for four days later. After spending well over a year planning on working in Spain, the snap decision to leave really made my head spin!

Metro station I used to take in Malasana

In the end though it came down to the fact that I came to perfect my Spanish, something that I wouldn't achieve with an English-speaking family in a area of Spain that speaks Catalan, not Spanish. If I wasn't going to be improving my Spanish, then I should really think more carefully about what family I wanted to live with, work for, and raise the children of, and what location would be better to live in. That decision was easy; the family in Antwerp seemed much more flexible and friendly, much more relaxed and open to working out a way that worked for us both, rather than me just fitting into their mould, and just generally, seemed to see me more as a person rather than as just someone they employ to take care of the kids. They would also give me more holidays, and from Belgium I can travel anywhere else within the country for $10NZD on the train, and easily get to the Ryanair airport, whereas from Barcelona to Madrid costs over $200NZD and while there is a Ryanair airport there, it doesn't have flights to many other countries. So to Antwerp it was then!

Plaza Dos de Mayo

I spent the week jobhunting in the mornings, then picnicing in the spot we found at Parque de Retiro the Friday before, staying there sunbathing with a book for a couple of hours, then jobhunting some more, and sometimes going for a walk to enjoy the hot weather and have some time to think. I spent a couple of evenings in Plaza Dos de Mayo again, it really is a nice place to just sit and think and drink a beer. I really can't ge over how hot it is here! Most days are between 25 and 30degrees, but I think if you're out in direct sunlight its hotter, it's just exhausting. I can't sleep with the window open and its only the beginning of spring, summer must be a nightmare here! I did get a little bit of a tan though, much needed after two consecutive winters. On Thursday I went to Annebella and Jose Angel's house for lunch and to spend the afternoon chatting away over beer, as it would be the last time I would see them for awhile, and on Friday I finally admitted that the 'summer clothing' I had brought from NZ was not even 'spring clothing' in Madrid. I went shopping for a pair of shorts and ended up with an armful of clothing that I thought would both be a lot cooler, and a lot more kid-proof than the stuff I've been wearing.

View from inside the school yard

Friday evening I packed up and moved out, as other friends were coming to stay at the apartment and I was off in a couple of days anyway. I went to Olga's (exchange student in NZ in 08-09) aunt's house, and the two of us had chinese for dinner with her aunt and cousin, and then chatted all night, it felt like a sleepover, very fun. Saturday we headed off to meet up with some of Olga's friends. First, we went to meet a girl who was just finishing some Scouts stuff at a school somewhere. Scouts here in Europe is different from Scouts in NZ in that here its actually really cool to be a Scout and therefore many more people do it. They do cool things like form bicycle aerobatic troups and go on ski trips. The schools here are also quite different, well in appearance anyway. Most of them seem like small prisions, with huge walls toped with curles of barbed wire. Olga reckons the Ministry of Education actually copied prision building plans as a cost saving measure, she's probably not far off. The city ones are in taller buildings, often with three or more stories of classrooms, and just a small concrete yard out the front.



Picture of a Tapa from Google Images

 We went with the scouts to a bar where they sell a beer with a free tapa for abot $5NZD, with a huge list od options like a small hamburger or chicken wings. You get one with every drink, so if you drink enough, you get a sweet free dinner. Probably a good time to explain the history of Tapas actually, ages ago when men would ride horses to bars out in the countryside, the publicans would worry about them being too drunk to get home, so they started placing something on top of glasses for the people to eat with their drink, like a pieec of bread with something topping it. Tapa means lid in spanish, so as these bits of food looked like a lid on the glasses, voila, Tapas. Pretty good tradition really, I like that you always get something to eat with you drinks, even if just a basket of chips. Might be why Spaniards can drink so much without rolling around in the gutter like kiwis do.

Ardanda del Rey - not that the whole town looked like this!

Afterwards, we headed to the house of another friend, in the wopps, a small town called Arganda del Rey on the outskirts of Madrid. There were five of us there, with only Olga and I being over 18, but it being a small town we managed to wheedle our way into the local club. It was kind of strange to be in a club, with girls wearing high heels, in this Rangiora-sized town, and as the drinks all cost about $20NZD, no one at all was at the bar, everyone was just standing around in groups talking. Until Olga and I let four under-age kids loose in there. Suddenly there was a whole lot of crazy dancing going on the in middle, even a congo-line of three to the toilet, and we were the centre of attention. Olga and I tried to dance in a much more restrained manner on the sidelines, and we headed back to crash at the friend's house around 5am.

shot of the Gym at the school

We headed back to Madrid the following day feeling quite tired, and arrived back at Olga's aunt's apartment for lunch. She cooked a typical Spanish rice dish for me to try, and Olga's family and german intern Ben came over. It was nice to sit and talk, and to watch some of them get beaten by the 8yr old at the dance games on Wii, but I was really shattered and took a nap in the afternoon while they went off to see a new baby somewhere. I tied up and packed up again, and spent the night chatting to Olga's aunt. I really like her, and I really appreciate the way she's let me stay and has offered for me to come and stay whenever I like, in fact she is storing some stuff for me until I head back in May for part-whatever-we're-up-to-now of the Visa Saga. So Monday I was off to Madrid airport for the eighth time, this time calling it quits on a country I never really got, and off for a new adventure!

More photos are here.

Back to Madrid again - my birthday, the sun, and a bunch of Germans

Th street sign for Miguel's apartment

I arrived back to Miguel and Ricardo's apartment on Wednesday night absolutely shattered, but glad to be somewhere that felt somewhat like home. Thursday and Friday passed like a blur filled with sleeping, unpacking, and getting settled back into the city again. I had been told that the next step in the visa saga was to book an appointment back at what I call Foreigners Office number three, so I rang on Thursday morning, only to be told that the first available appointment was in the middle of June. JUNE. As in, three months away from today and six months into my year-long working visa June. I couldn't believe it, so I rang the government contact person that the NZ Embassy here had put me onto. A couple of emails and phone calls with her office later, I was told to not worry about an appointment, just go and ask for Mr So and So. On Friday night a couple of their friends came to stay for the weekend, so after a quick dinner at the local chinese place we went to Ricardo's brother's apartment for drinks with him, his flatmate, and some other friends. Eventually the SingStar came out and I had flashbacks to the time I rediscovered joy that is spanish speakers singing along to the Spicegirls. Our Czech friend Jiri announced it was time for him to leave, and I was a tad tempted to head out the door with him, but instead I decided to stick around for a couple more hours and simply inflict my poor singing on everyone else in return.




Gran Via, the main avenue in Madrid packed for Noche de los Teatros

  Saturday was the Noche de los Teatros, or Night of the Theatre, a huge celebration where every performance group under the sun either takes to the street, or for the top-level theatre companies, puts on a performance at a discounted rate. We wandered around the streets for a bit, mostly shopping and sussing out the crowds, it seemed like everyone in Spain was in Madrid for the day, and then Miguel and I got tired and sat down for a beer at a bar terrace. After another drink with everyone else we went to check out the Goethe Institut (German Culture/Language Institute) gig, readings of poetry. We scored some sweet free posters from them, kinda cool because I have posters from the Goethe Institut in Wellington too. The building here in Madrid is amazing, they have their own logo-shaped water feature out the front.

Goethe Institut water feature

Sunday and Monday were pretty straightforward, I spent the days running errands and cleaning up the house and on Monday morning I went to Foreigners Office number three. I was a bit suspicious about this 'Just ask for Mr So and So' business, as normally they have security guards and appointment reference numbers and machines that spit out a number for you to wait for even though you had an appointment, but I walked in, asked for Mr So and So, and ten minutes later he'd gotten some forms for me, told me to fill them out and sat me down in front the lady that I made a big scene bursting into tears in front of last time to try and get some actual help. When the lady next to her leaned over and said "ah, you were here before right, you're the one that cried", I thought crap, they remember me, but the first lady was quite nice and ten minutes later I walked out of there with the golden ticket in my hand, a paper temporary ID card with an NIE! An early birthday present. Then it was off to the airport to get my other early birthday present because....

Hauke, me and Miguel

.....Hauke came to visit! Him and his friend Feli came for four nights, to be there for my birthday and have a bit of a holiday after their exams. It was the first time that my two best friends, Hauke and Miguel, had ever met, so it was a huge occasion. I had to laugh because no sooner had they arrived than we had to admit to them our original plan for dinner fell through, and as Miguel can't cook for shit and I was too busy running around in excited little circles, Hauke and Feli ended up in the kitchen cooking for Miguel and I.

Me in front of the blossoms

Five people in a shoebox-sixed one-bedroom apartment is not a good fit, so we woke up on Tuesday, my birthday, after not too much sleep at all, had breakfast, and made a picnic lunch to take with us. We took the metro towards Casa de Campo and got out just before, to walk along the River Manzanares (it really isn't that impressive) a bit and check out a bunch of cherry blossom trees before we headed into Casa de Campo itself. Everyone in Madrid was raving about how cool these trees were and I couldn't understand the fuss, I guess when you grow up in a place like Canterbury cherry blossom trees aren't too special, but they were pretty cool and Hauke got some good photos of us in front of them with his flatmate's portrait lens.

Feli and Hauke at Casa de Campo

Casa de Campo is a huge park in the middle of Madrid that used to be the private hunting reserve of the royal family. And I mean huge, it's 1700 hectares. To put it in perspective, Hagley Park in Christchurch is 165 hectares. In it is the zoo, an amusement park, a lake for watersports and heaps of resturants, and probably some other stuff that I don't know about because its just too big. We walked to the lake and had our picnic lunch and a nap in the sun there, watching a bunch of kayakers in the lake, obviously putting their work siesta time to good use, and some freaky green parrots building an epic nest up in a tree. Coming from Germany, Hauke and Feli couldn't get over how hot and sunny it was, up around 25 degrees at only the very beginning of Spring.

the Teleferico over Madrid

We took the Teleferico back into the city, something I'd wanted to do since I first got to Madrid. Its the most horizontal gondala in the world, it goes for 2.5km but never higher than 40m above the ground. The view was quite cool, you could see all across the city to the snow-capped mountains. We stopped back at the Templo de Debod on the way past, and then continued walking up through the city to get to home. Seeing their awe at Madrid really made me smile.

Me and my cake

That night a whole bunch of people came around to the house for my birthday, Annabella and Jose Angel, Jiri, Alejando, Olga (who Hauke knew in NZ) and german intern Ben, two Spanish guys who I've met several times but whose names I can never remember...the tiny apartment was packed, and although I had been really stressing that Hauke and Feli couldn't speak Spanish, everyone there was really friendly and either spoke english or german with them. I was also stressed because so many people didn't know each other, but everyone made an effort and it was so great to see friends together considering I'd only been in the city for three weeks in January. I had prepared a whole lot of different tapas and apart from a minor broken-glass-landing-in-the-food incident, everything went really well. I had set myself a mission beforehand, to make a speculoos flavoured cheesecake as my birthday cake (kinda sad making your own cake, but as Miguel pointed out, probably better than him trying to make me one) but as speculoos doesn't exist in the english-speaking world, finding a recipe online proved impossible, so I kind of mixed together a couple of recipes for different things, added the speculoos myself and hoped for the best. Miguel wanted to decorate it, so I left that up to him, and both him and Hauke lit the candles and handed it to me, and I got Happy Birthday sung to me in three and a half different languages!



Olga, Hauke, me and Feli on my birthday

 After everyone had left Hauke, Feli and I headed out to check out Madrid's Tuesday nightlife. Hauke mixed a bottle of coke and whisky together (everytime I see him drinking from the bottle like that it reminds me of the night I caught him on video taking swigs from one, insulting me and then starting the 'Sorry...mate' craze) and we walked slowly along into town. Anyone who has been to Madrid will know that the streets around the centre are full of people all night, even on weird week nights, and we met a couple kicking a ball around that got quite friendly and chatted away. They invited us to drink with them somewhere, but we figured they were actually pretty boring and gave them the slip. We actually went to meet up with another German who was in town, a girl called Steffi who we'd known as a backpacker working in Wellington. It was quite cool to see her again two years later, and to hang out with some other foreigners she knew there in an Irish bar playing club music somewhere. Just one of those nights when nothing extraordinary happens, but its an awesome night. We walked home and stopped for pizza at the 24hour pizza place on the way, that place is amazing because it turns out most of Europe does not buy into the 'fast food open late for drunken revellers' like Wellington does and you cant buy late night food in many major cities, and we wound up back home at 5.30am, not bad for a Tuesday.

I can honestly say that I had the best birthday since I finished primary school, it was just an awesome day, to have Hauke (and Feli!) here in Madrid, to spend a great day out in the sun with them, and to then have a cool celebration with friends from different walks of life, just perfect.

Hauke and I in front of AFS Spain's office

Waking up a couple of hours later on Wednesday morning was less than perfect, but the night before Hauke and german intern Ben had hitched a plan for us to go out to the AFS Madrid office to have a look around, catch up with one of their workers, another Olga, who we knew from her visit to AFS NZ a couple of years ago, and to have lunch. There is something cool about me and Hauke meeting because of AFS in NZ, becoming so close, and then meeting again in Spain to years later and going to the AFS office there. We headed out there and killed some time lying in the sun on top of the dirty metro stop building, which is a good indication of the shape we were in that day, before Ben met us and led us back to the office. Its a tad different from the current AFS NZ office, in that its a lot less professional looking, a lot smaller and cramped, and a lot less tidy and organised, but the staff were really friendly and Ben showed us around. Hauke and Olga chatted away, and then I talked to her a bit about volunteering (she was very enthusiatic about it but never got back to me, but I had been warned that AFS Madrid is a bit of a nightmare) and then we met the other Olga, Olga who went on exchange to NZ, and went for lunch at a local Japanese resturant.

Feli, Miguel and I walking home after dinner in Plaza dos de Mayo

After Ben went back to work Olga came into the city with us, and we went to the Catedral de la Almudena but it was closed, so we just wandered around for ages, looking through the suburb of Latina, Plaza Mayor and back through the centre of the city to the apartment, where we crashed out for a nap. After Miguel came home we went out for dinner, sitting outside at a local bar in the Plaza de Dos de Mayo. We split a couple of typical dishes, mostly quite good but I wasn't a huge fan of the Morcilla, or blood sausage, even if Miguel didn't tell me what it was until after I ate it, it just had a weird taste and texture.

Hauke and I up Catedral de la Almudena

Thursday we were feeling much better, and we headed back to the Catedral to the Almudena, the huge cathedral next to the palace that I visited last time in Madrid. This time, I found out you actually are allowed to take photos of the view, so we got some much better shots that the ones I had surrupticiously taken on my last visit. We visited the Mercardo de San Miguel, the oldest covered market in Madrid that still has this beautiful cast iron building from a hundred years ago, now a tourist destination filled with fancy stuff. We grabbed some bits, mostly bread and cheese and sat down in Plaza Mayor again to eat in the sun, and wandered around shopping before heading back to the Plaza de Dos de Mayo.

Hauke and Feli sitting in Plaza Dos de Mayo

This plaza is a couple of blocks away from the apartment, and named after a Spanish uprising against French occupation on the 2nd of May, 1808. The plaza is now the centre of Malasana, with bars and pubs and little stalls selling second hand stuff around the outside and playgrounds for kids. The only time I've seen it empty is first thing in the morning, otherwise its filled with old men sitting around, kids playing, people letting their dogs run around, and later on in the night, hundreds of people drinking. Chinese people walk around with trolleys full of beer for sale, its like an outdoor bar that comes to you, very convinient. We sat there drinking some beer and watching the dogs, Madrid must be full of tiny little apartment-sezed dogs that all come to play together in this Plaza because theres heaps, all running after the same ball or playing the dog version of tag.

Me, Hauke and Feli in Plaza Mayor

Annabella and Jose Angel were coming again for dinner and drinks, so Hauke and Feli cooked some nachos and with Miguel and we just sat around drinking and chatting until the early hours, when everyone went to bed and Hauke and I went off clubbing again. We sat for a hour or so in the Plaza again, drinking some more beer and just talking. I had never actually gone clubbing in Madrid before, so we pulled out a handy guidebook and I let Hauke chose a club to go to. Unfortunately the Brazilian place he picked was a huge fail, so then it was my turn with the guidebook and we went to Teatro Joy Esclava, a club inside an old 1800s theatre. We had to pay 15euro (30NZD) to get in, with a free drink, and then drinks after that were 11euro (22NZD) so while it isn't cheap, its pretty much on par with the rest of Europe, and we took our revenge by stealing two glasses to replace ones that got broken that week at home. Another stop on the way home for pizza, and another 5.30am bedtime.



Me, Hauke and Feli at Retiro park

 On Friday we made another picnic lunch and took it to Parque de Buen Retiro, the park I fell in love with in January. We picked a spot, and again spent the day lying around in the sun, eating, drinking, talking and sleeping. I was a bit stressed before the two of them came about being a tour guide in a city I'd only known for three weeks, but I guess after the weather in Germany four days of lying in the sun was perfect! Then it was back to the apartment to grab our stuff before heading back to the airport.

Parque de Buen Retiro

One of the things that excited me most about Hauke coming to stay was the fact that after spending three weeks entirely relying on him to show me the way and how to do things and to speak Germany back in Austria and Germany, now it would be me knowing my way around and how to speak the language in Spain! But, after four days he had picked up quite a bit of Spanish, enough to buy his own icecream anyway, and I had to laugh when we were on the metro to the airport and I pointed out that I'd managed four days without getting us lost - two minutes later I was sitting calmly there, watching people leave at a stop when Feli asked me in alarm, but shouldn't we be getting out here, everyone else with suitcases is! Fail Claire, Fail. It's funny how empty the tiny apartment feels without the two of them here, you can actually walk around and there isn't someone sleeping n the kitchen floor when you get up, but it was great to have them here, just a really cool week.

More photos are here.

Liège, Lena and a day trip to the Netherlands

Lena's house

Lena is a former exchange student, she lived in Wellington mid 2009-mid 2010. Her city Liège is kind of near the border with Germany. I love her house, its in the centre of the city and is three stories tall but narrow, I find it really crazy compared to our bungalows in NZ. The buildings here are mostly brick or plaster, and grey or brown, I like it because its different but really I guess its a bit dreary. The people here are more of a melting pot than those in places like Mainz were, there is a lot more migration from places like Africa, I guess because its French-speaking, this neighbourhood particularly reminds me of Newtown back home in Wellington. Lena's mum speaks quite good english, her dad not so much but as a former actor he was pretty good at conveying things without words. He is always joking around but with so little english it was really hard for me to tell what was meant to be a joke and what wasn't!

Friday night we had a traditional dish from Liège, giant meatballs with fries, and just relaxed catching up and watched a movie. Saturday morning I woke up to possibly the best discovery of my trip so far; Speculoos. Speculoos are a kind of biscuit traditionally made for St Nicholas Eve in early December, but now eaten all year, they are pretty good (remember me talking about the Lotus biscuits me and Hauke had in Austria, they were Speculoos actually, Lotus is a brand) but a million times better is Speculoos spread that you put on bread. I can't even describe it, its more amazing than anything I've ever tasted, its maybe like a caramel KitKat chunky on bread. Awesome. After breakfast we walked around the city to explore, with Lena showing me all of her favourite places and bars. The bars here are all centered around a few narrow pedestrian only alleyways that Lena calls The Square, its apparently very famous (a lot of exchange students here in Belgium say they came here because they heard about the square). I had a few Belgian beers, one tasted like banana that was quite weird. We popped our heads inside the Cathedral here but its the outside that amazed me, its filthy! You can really see the effect of pollution on the buildings here, old ones have a layer of thick black except where grafitti has been removed. The whole city is quite dirty actually, the streets as well, as people just throw their rubbish on the ground. That night Lena's parents left us the house so that Lena could throw a party for her friends to meet me and to celebrate the end of their exams, except that most of her friends don't really speak english, or at least they were too shy to do so in front of so many people. Another former exchange student, Adrien came, cool to see a familiar face!

part of the market

We woke up pretty late on Sunday and then rushed around because Lena's mum reminded us that the market was on, its over a mile long stretched out along the bank of the Meuse River and is the oldest market in Europe. I am getting much better now at not spending money, so we mostly looked at all of the different types of food and weird things like heaps of birds in cages. I did get a kind of cape thing for 3euro. We visited a museum that her mum was really passionate about me seeing, but we were really too hungover for it and just strolled through getting lost and making jokes about things. They had a pretty cool exhibition of glasswork, it made me really want to start collecting glass artefacts but I've already learnt that glass and travelling don't go well together. We walked around some more, to see part of Lena's university (heaps prettier than Hauke's in Mainz!) and the statue of Tchantchesis, according to folklore a puppet that appeared from a crack in the ground in 760 and only would drink Pékèt, a kind of gin. Kind of random. Lena is a funny tour guide, she really knows nothing about this city!

Monday I had to fly back to Madrid to go to my appointment with the Foreigners Office, so we just had a picnic lunch in the botanic gardens and then I jumped on a train, we were running late so Lena didn't get a chance to explain to me where the hell I was going or how to use my ten-trip ticket. The trains here are really cheap, as I'm under 26 I got ten trips within a year for 50euros, so that works out as 10 NZ dollars per trip of any distance, much cheaper than any other country I am visiting. I flew out of another middle-of-no-where airport with Ryanair. I really have a love-hate relationship with that airline, I love paying 20 dollars for an international flight, but I hate flying with a company thats so useless! We had to wait for ages on a staircase between going through the gate and getting on the plane here, and this Spanish lady in front of me was geting so worked up, pacing back and forwards and sighing loudly, she got me really annoyed and I wanted to tell her to either deal with the long waits or stop flying with Ryanair. She also skipped in front of me in the line, Spanish people are so huge on that, but I got her back by beating her onto the plane anyway - you don't have seats allocated on Ryanair and often they overbook the planes and refuse passage to some people, so its like a race to get onboard.


Anne-Marie and me


Madrid was hot! It was 18° when I landed at 10pm, and the Metro underground is even hotter. Its only the beginning of February and I found it too hot, I can't imagine what summer will be like. Anne-Marie, girl who went to Costa Rica with me was in town on holiday, and I hadn't seen her for five years so I picked her up, dropped my stuff off and we went out in search of a beer. In fairness to Madrid it was a Monday but we seemed to spend quite a lot of time walking around looking for an open bar for a city of that size and reputation! Its funny how you can go five years without seeing someone but still hang out like nothing changed, and its good talking to someone who has kinda gone through the same stuff as you, like what we experienced returning to NZ after doing an exchange. As I am staying with families in most of the countries I am visiting, it often feels like being an exchange student, trying to fit in when not knowing the culture, language or that family's particular way of doing things. Anne-Marie called it 'The State of Confusion', when you have no idea whats going on but you stop stressing about it, like you don't know where you're going or what you are going to do when you get there, but you get in the car along with everybody else anyway. I am getting really good at just smiling all the time and coping what other people do!

Lena, me and Adrien on Saturday

For all it was a Monday night, I had sworn never to drink before travelling, and I had to both deal with the Foreigners Office and catch an international flight the next day, I ended up back at home at 6am and was not impressed with myself when Miguel woke me up at 8am to go to my appointment. This started off badly, the lady at the last office made it for me but didn't give me the reference number so the security guard wouldn't let me in the door without a fight. This time I only waited for half a hour, but again the lady insisted she couldn't do anything for me and suggested I go back to the last one or try the police. Despite a fierce hangover that made me want to do nothing except curl up in a ball I kept fighting her and eventually got to go upstairs to see her boss, who said that after I had been at the other office the last time, they had decided that that same office actually would give us ID cards, she showed me an internal memo about this from last Friday. Trip to Madrid for nothing! The NZ Embassy keep emailing me to see what's happening, but I might leave it for now until I'm back in March, I don't feel like wasting any more money going to Madrid and I doubt that they have a template for the ID cards ready yet! Oh Spain...

Liège

Then it was back to the airport, a nap for a couple of hours in the air, then a couple more hours on a train back to Liège before Lena was rushing me out the door again to go out. We headed back to The Square, and ran from one bar to another ripping out coupons from flyers given to the uni students for drink specials. Bars here are gross, they floors are sticky and covered in ciggarette butts, and I can't work out where all of the toilet seats disappear too. I really have to explain here about drinking in Belgium, I think NZ's reputation for a bad drinking culture is un-deserved when you look at this country. The legal age for drinking is 16, but many young people start going to bars at about 14. At University, they have a crazy system, similar to fraternities but insead of being people who live together it is based on what faculty you study in. The students undergo around 2 or 3 months of torturous initiation activities, things like eating catfood and live goldfish and staying for a hour in the cold on your knees with your hands in the air singing songs, and excessive amounts of drinking. Every fraternity has a competition to see who can skull the most beers in five minutes, and then all the fraternities compete against each other, some guys get up in the 50s so thats about a beer every five seconds right? They just puke and then keep drinking. At parties, they skull beer as a way of saying hello to people they bump into. To me it all seems sick, so either I am getting too old for that kind of thing, or young Belgians really are crazier than young NZers.

Apart from watching all of this crazy drinking around me, the night was pretty standard, until I saw a guy wearing a hoodie with a NZ flag on it! He had spent a year on exchange in Hamilton and was as surprized to meet a kiwi in Liège as I was to see a NZ flag. He was quite cool, I spent a lot of the night talking to him and his friends. For us Wednesday only begun around lunch-time and was pretty quiet. We visited some friends of Lena, and then spent the evening hanging around the house and watching a movie.

Maastricht

On Thursday we went to the Netherlands. It took us 30 minutes by train to reach the city of Maastricht, it really is an unreal feeling to jump out of the train after such a short amount of time and suddenly everything is in another language! That was quite funny actually, after my three weeks in German speaking countries I could understand Dutch better than Lena could! After yet another amazing kebab we wandered into the city and had a look around. The first thing you notice is the bikes, everyone was biking everywhere, and no one wears a helmet which still seems strange to me. It was much cleaner than Liège as well, and there are a lot of english speakers around who attend university there.

Red, yellow and green decorations on everything

We checked out the market place, the town square and some churches. Everything was covered in red, yellow and green decorations, the first couple of times I wondered what that was for Lena reckoned it was just because they are the Rastafari colours and the Netherlands is quite into pot, but even places like optometrists had these decorations, so I reckon they were from a festival or something. I brought my obligatory wooden clogs, tried Dutch beer, and then we took a train back in time for Lena to go to work.





Maastricht


Friday I accompanied Lena to one of her psychology lectures, her university is outside of Liège surrounded by woods, quite strange, but the buildings were similar to those in NZ, more like Canterbury Uni than Wellington in that its more spread out. The only real difference between uni in NZ and here that I noticed was that people here talk throughout the entire lecture, I couldn't believe it, just chatting to their friends. In NZ the lecturer would have stopped the lecture and refused to talk over so many other voices. After eating possibly the worlds largest 'small size' sandwidges we rushed back home so I could pack before meeting Daniel, the colombian AFS student that Lena is looking after at a Latino bar. It was cool to meet him and to see Lena having the same kind of conversation with him that I used to have with her back in New Zealand. We were running really late when we flew back to the house to get my stuff and head back to the train station, and Lena's mum kept insisting there was no way I would catch my train to Brussels, but I arrived only two minutes late and the train was still at the platform. Now off to Brussels to visit Arthur!

Two more weeks in Madrid

Plaza Mayor

On Tuesday I woke up feeling terrible, and the week really just went downhill from there, I spend most of the week in bed with a bad cold, only leaving to go to more Foreign Offices. I made a bit of a scene at one office and got an "information appointment", with a woman who also told me that this type of visa didn´t exist, but then success, the woman next to her butted in to say that it did! After their boss made calls for about half an hour she told me to make an appointment at another office for a student visa, and just lie on the phone so that they made me the appointment!

Other than that week two here was pretty boring, one of the highlights was discovering the button on the TV remote that changes programmes from being dubbed into Spanish back to their original english! TV is weird here, they have less advertisement breaks than the TV shows were designed for, so the programmes keep going through the parts where they´d designed a pause until some random point, often mid-conversation, when they whack in a really long break. Strange. While most people don´t finish work until 9pm here, there is a really active life in the evenings, its still winter so I keep getting told that it will be much busier in summer time! We (well Miguel and Ricardo) entertain here a lot in the evenings, so most nights we´ve had people around for dinner and a few drinks. I don´t know how everyone operates on so little sleep, although I guess if you sleep during siesta its ok. Speaking spanish all of the time has worn me out quite a bit since I´ve been here too. This has made sightseeing harder than in Germany, as by the time I get up there is only a few hours until everything closes for siesta, and I dont really like heading out to see things after siesta when it is dark, not that I feel unsafe here, just that you cant see things as well, it would be really different if it were summer time.

Plaza Mayor

On Saturday morning Miguel headed to Prague for four days, and Ricardo went back to Ciudad Real for his brother´s birthday, so I had my first night alone in five weeks, a weird feeling! Funnily it was also the worst night´s sleep I´ve had, I am just not used to the silence anymore! On Saturday I spent a lot of time cleaning, washing and sorting out my stuff, and then went to the Museum of Dress, they have stuff there documenting changes in dress from the 1600s until now, and traditional dress from the different regions of Spain. I also found a supermarket with a asian food section (i.e. one shelf), so I will be able to cook some proper stirfrys and noodles this week. I really miss the nice mix of foods that we have in NZ, here everything is really traditional and heavily based on rice and meat, I really miss eating vegetables. If I could find somewhere here that sells curry and proper chilli powder then I would really be happy!

Line at the museum I didn't visit...

Sunday I headed off to the Museum of the Americas, a collection of things from Spain´s former colonies. I am really into Latin America and have studied different cultures from there quite a bit, so I found this quite a good museum. I was really excited to see a Quipu, the collection of knotted ropes used by the Incas to record things and communicate, these always fascinated me, and now I really want to visit Peru, but the collection was quite strange in that it skipped over the whole colonization part of their history! I had a picnic lunch in the Parque del buen Retiro, a big park in the middle of Madrid that used to be the private park of the royal family. Even if it must have been around 5degrees there was a lot of people in the park, and I got quite excited watching squirrels run around - the simple things that we dont have in New Zealand really amuse me! Because it used to be royal property it is full of statues and sculptures, every 20m or so is another, but there is a really massive monument thing in the middle overlooking a lake that you can row boats out onto, I am quite keen to take one out when it is warmer. I planned on going to the Museo del Prado afterwards, a really famous museum of art here, as its free for a couple of hours, but once I saw the line I decided I would rather come back early one morning and pay the entrance fee!

Palacio Real

Monday is museum-free day in most of europe (it keeps catching me out!) so I went to the Royal Palace and the Cathedral de Nuestra Senora de la Almudena. The Palacio Real was begun in the 1700s by a king who wanted to have a bigger and cooler palace than all of the other European kings. The current royal family lives somewhere smaller, so most days you can walk around the palace and check out things like the Royal Pharmacy and Royal Armoury. The Cathedral opposite is huge, and if you pay the museum entrace you can climb to the top. You arent supposed to take photos but I figured if I stood with my back to the security cameras and did it on the sly it would be ok - most of the photos really didnt work out! But the view was amazing. Around the corner I found a crypt under the Cathedral, and this was one of my favourite church visits, although I find it quite creepy that they bury everyone under the floor and then everyone who attends service there walks over them. Tuesday I continued with the church theme and visited the Basilica de San Francisco el Grande, this was really cool as a crazy guy who resembled a Spanish version of Mr Bean runs a constant circut tour of the place and explains everything. I stopped in at another Basilica afterwards but without a tour it wasnt as impressive.

View from the Catedral de Nuestra Senora

My plans for Wednesday all went out the window as a lot of places let EU and Latin American citizins in for free on Wednesdays, everywhere was either already full or had massive lines, so I gave up and ran errands instead. I ran the NZ embassy here, speaking to a kiwi was quite funny, but he really wasnt helpful - he admitted that they had had phone calls from other NZers in this position, but they cant do anything about it except advise me to email the Spanish embassy in NZ that issued the visa. I pointed out that the deal they signed is based on reciprocity and it isnt fair that over a hundred Spaniards have already completed a year in NZ with no problems while we cant work here, but he just gave me his email to Bcc him in. Finally Thursday rolled around, and I was off again to see a third Spanish Foreign Office for an appointment that I had been assured would resolve my visa issues. I was determined not to leave without progress being made, and was prepared to take various peoples advice that crying and/or refusing to leave would get me somewhere. I had an appointment at 12 and arrived at 11.45, only to be issued a ticket with the number 92 on it...they were up to number 58. My plan of making a scene got a little scary when I saw someone refuse to leave when they refused to give her an appointment, with security phoning the police who came and arrested her!

Basilica de San Francisco

Over a hour later (what is the point of even having appointments!!!) I saw someone, who tried the whole "your visa doesnt exist" thing again, before someone else pointed out that it did, but that while the two governments had signed the agreement (a Working Holiday Agreement has also been signed with Canada) no one had ever instructed the offices on how to process the visa. They dont know how to document things, or how to give me paperwork and an ID card that shows I can work, and until someone works that out and creates the new national ID card template etc, they are just taking peoples names and saying they will ring them when its sorted...this list has been running since September with no resolution as yet! At this point, I jumped up and stood in the middle of the office crying, shouting and generally making a scene! The woman then decided that maybe it would be easier to resolve the situation with the NZers than the Canadians, so she would talk to someone else if I sat and waited. Another hour later everyone had been seen to and left, and the staff were leaving for their lunch/siesta, and I was still sitting there! Finally she came back out with a man and said that if I went to another Office and got them to give me papers to say I could work, I could come back to her office and get an ID card. She ended up being quite nice and at my insistence, even made the appointment with them for me.

Graves in the crypt

Unfortunately this appointment is when I am supposed to be in Belgium (I am actually not allowed to leave Spain until I have my Spanish ID card, but as I am staying in the Shengen area and my passport will never get stamped anywhere I am leaving anyway). I am really dubious that this appointment will work, given they couldnt work it out in the last five months for other people and only worked it out during a hour for me, and I have been temped to throw in the towel at this point, just finish my trip around and come back to NZ or look for something else, Ive been offered a few weeks of manual labour in Belgium or I could get a working holiday visa in Germany and try my luck getting a job without speaking any German. But, as Ryanair had 60euro return flights from Brussels to Madrid I decided to give it one last go. I am doubtful that it will work, and even if they do give me the papers to say I can work, I guess I then will have to go to Madrid from Paris or something to try and get the ID card, or risk leaving it until I return in late March only to have them question why I took so long! This will be the fourth Spanish Foreign Office Ive visited, and there are only six here in Madrid! The Spanish Embassy in NZ emailed be back, just to say that the Foreign Office is now aware of the problem and they are sure it will be resolved shortly - seems to me that they were aware back in September as well, and the Spanish definition of shortly is very different to the NZ definition! I forwarded this onto the NZ embassy here but didnt get a response - I figure if I am still unable to get my visa processed by late March when I am back in Madrid, by which point I will be here illegally, I will see if I can get a newspaper in NZ to write about the situation and see if that prompts the Spanish embassy into doing something!

Palacio de Comunicaciones

This meeting put me in rather a bad mood, so I just went back to the appartment and consoled myself with cheap spanish beer all afternoon, until a whole bunch of other people came around and we watched the elimination on Spanish Big Brother - possibly the worst reality show Ive ever seen! And then Friday morning it was off to the airport to head back to Germany...

Week One in Madrid - where bureacracy is a national sport



"Welcome Claire"

 Back on Monday I faced a scary task - taking a tram and bus alone from Hauke´s house in Mainz to catch a plane to Madrid from Frankfurt Hann. It´s funny because when I was 15 and alone in Costa Rica with no Spanish I had to just cope and get on with things from day 1, but in Germay I had Hauke looking after me all the time, and my first dismal attempts to do things like order drinks in German meant I just got him to do everything for the next three weeks. So taking the tram and then bus by myself was actually pretty scary! I had no time up my sleeve incase things went wrong so I was freaking out when the tram was late, I didn´t know whether to keep waiting or go back to Hauke´s house and try call a taxi, and I had no cellphone to ask him what to do, but luckily it came and I followed his brilliant map at the train station to find the bus to the airport. Frankfurt Hann is a converted army airfield in the middle of nowhere, a hour from Frankfurt, used by budget airlines - flying with Ryanair was an experience, you`ve got to pay for things like the scales to check the weight of your bags and they overbook flights so you've got to try and be one of the first on, and I couldnt understand a word that the air hostess said in english.



Miguel and Ricardo, first dinner

 Arriving in Madrid to see Miguel waiting was great, we became great friends on the Ship for World Youth in early 2009 and haven´t seen each other since. He is originally from Venezuela, but now has Spanish residency and is working and studying here. He lives with his friend Ricardo, a pharmacist from Spain, in an apartment in Malasaña, one of the neighbourhoods in the centre of Madrid. One thing I really like about Madrid is that it has distinct neighbourhoods, each with their own feel. Malasaña was the birthplace of ´la movida madrileña´, a socio-cultural movement of the 80s (after the death of Franco). The mayor at the time, an elderly former university professor told a public gathering to "get stoned and do what´s cool", leading to a hedonistic decade of partying, with nothing being taboo and rock and alternative music flourishing, a nightlife that still continues in Malasaña with a huge number and variety of clubs and bars, and parties that continue out on the street until long after the sun has come up - luckly the apartment is at the back of the building overlooking the courtyard, not out onto the street, otherwise sleeping is really difficult!






Me cooking


I should mention here that sleep is already quite difficult in Spain, as I am not used to this whole Siesta business. Here most shops, offices, tourist locations etc are open from 9am to 1.30/2pm, and then again from 5pm until about 9pm, with a break in the middle for lunch and a nap. To me it seems a little inefficient, as everyone then has to pay for twice the amount of trips to work and endure twice the amount of traffic jams, open and close the buildings and computers twice, and so on, and then because you leave work at 9 its dark and you don´t have so much time to do things, although in saying that people go to bed much later, around 1 or 2am. I haven´t really tried to get used to napping in the afternoon, as I am leaving Spain again soon, so I am tired all of the time at the moment and it means I spend three hours sitting around in the afternoon with nothing to do while everything is closed.

The rest of Monday was pretty relaxed, I met Annabella, one of Miguel´s best friends and possibly New Zealand´s biggest fan, and we had tapas for dinner (I think I´ve eaten more tapas that actual meals since I got here!). On Tuesday Annabella took me shopping, it is the season of Rebajas, or sales here, and I was very happy to spend a lot of time in Zara, a chain I was addicted to in Costa Rica and missed in NZ, but I have been very prudent and keep reminding myself of how stupid I looked when I feel over in the train station because my backpack was already to heavy! We then had dinner with more friends of Miguel´s at a local chinese resturant. On Wednesday I ventured out alone for the first time, just walking around and window shopping some more. Madrid has an amazing underground Metro system, built back in 1910, and you pay 1euro to take as many connecting Metros as you need. I am glad I spent time in Berlin watching Hauke work out that metro system, otherwise I think I would´ve been pretty lost, but so far I´ve worked it all out fine. I brought a Spanish cellphone, but that


Don Quixote's windmills

 turned into my first debacle here. Spain-spanish is quite different from latino-spanish, and while I can understand Miguel and his venezuelan friends perfectly well, I am still struggling to get used to the Spanish accent, and my first couple of days here were terrible, I needed people to speak quite slowly. However, I have found people in Madrid to be a little less than helpful and friendly, and the vodafone man was my first example of this! I explained that I wanted a prepaid phone, but he just pointed me in the direction of some models and left, I had to keep calling him over to answer questions and he kept leaving after each answer before I could ask the next one! It took forever to get him to sell me a phone, and I still don´t really understand how things work here, it is prepaid but there are some kinds of prepaid plans, its a little bit messy. We finished off Wednesday night with a bit of a house party, all venezuelan friends except for Miguel´s Czech workmate, it was quite good to talk to him and get his opinion on living in Madrid as a foriegner and how to go about things. We went down to the street at about 1am, and I was amazed by the number of people out partying on a winter´s Wednesday night. Madrid has little plazas and squares everywhere, and these full up with people drinking beer sold by Chinese men who park their scooters on the street corners everywhere.

The Spanish working holiday visa requires me to go to a Foreigners Office here and sort out something, no one really seems to know what, but it will see me recieve a national ID permitting me to work, within one month of arriving. I took a bit of a risk and am only here for three weeks before I go back to Germany to keep travelling, and I am beginning to think the risk won´t pay off. Bureacracy seems to be a bit of a well-practised national sport around here, and no one seems to know what the hell I am supposed to do, or which Foreigners Office I need to go to. I got no where on the phone, so on Thursday I took myself off to the closest one and explained the situation to the secretary, asking if this was the right office. She only answered that I should sit and wait. For the next hour about ten of us sat and waited, while we watched through the glass doors as the office staff gathered around someone´s baby and seemed to party. Finally, I got to see another woman, who tried to tell me that working holiday visas for Spain don´t exist, made some calls, and then told me to go to another office. Thank you for requiring me to wait for a hour and a half, rather than just telling me it wasn´t the right office in the first place! To go to this office, I need an appointment, but when I rang again the receptionist insisted that there was no working holiday programme. On Friday I got up early and went with Miguel to work, so that he could ring on my behalf, but we still ended up going around and around in circles with there being no process in place to handle working holiday visas. The different types of visas are assigned to the different Foreign Offices around Madrid, but there is no office that deals with this kind of thing. Finally, we were told to use the online appointment booking system, but to do that you need a National ID number, which I won´t get until my visa is resolved...I really don´t understand how a website designed for non-Spanish citizins can require a Spanish ID number! There is a really good montage in the movie ´The Spanish Apartment´ of a guy running around a million different offices at his university in France to organise his exchange to Spain, I feel like I am in the middle of that montage right now. Finally, as we searched for information tonight I found the ´Spain´ section of the Wikipedia ´Working Holiday Visas´ page:

Spain has signed an agreement with Canada. As of December 2010, the spanish authorities have failed to apply this agreement within Spain and most canadian citizens in Spain under this agreement have not been able to confirm their legal status nor been able to work. Canadian citizens wishing to apply for this visa should be aware of this current situation and should not plan their year upon receiving the visa because they might have to return to Canada after 90 days.


Spain also has an agreement with New Zealand.

Oh great. Now I get why I keep getting told that working holiday visas don´t exist and no one knows what to do. There simply don´t seem to be any procedures in place for dealing with this at all. Looking on the bright side of things, Google also tells me that getting a working holiday visa for Germany from either Spain or inside Germany itself will be straightforward, I was thinking of heading there after Spain but I could always bring that forward if the Spain thing really falls through. But positive thinking! I shall go to a Foreigners Office tomorrow and refuse to leave until I have some answers.




Templo de Debod


My training for the next Spanish National Bureaucracy Championships has left me with little time to do anything else. I visited El Templo de Debod, an Egyptian temple from the early second century BC, dedicated to the Gods Amun and Isis. After Egypt built the Great Dam of Aswan in the 1960s, a group of temples and other sites were threatened, and in return for Spain´s help in rescuing them Egypt gifted them this temple, and it was rebuilt in the middle of a park in Madrid. Its pretty bizarre to be wandering around an Egyptian temple with the Madrid skyline in the background! Today I went to see the memorial for the victims of the 2004 terror bombing in the Metro, it is inside the train station but still took me about half an hour to find as it isn´t signposted and no one I asked knew where it was, including a security guard! The memorial lists the names of the deceased, and inside a room there is a glass tower above with inscriptions of the messages of condolence left by people from around the world, it is a very pensive memorial but also displays a lot of hope and unity in these messages. I also popped into the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, or Queen Sofia´s Centre of Art, where Picasso´s most famous work, Guernica is displayed. This huge mural shows the tragedies and suffering of war, and was painted after German and Italian forces bombed the city of Guernica at the Spanish Nationalist´s request, and along with his other paintings and sculptures, is really impressive. It was also quite cool to see the posters painted by both sides as propaganda during the Spanish Civil War, as I´ve studied these for a couple of clases and been fascinted by them.



Olga and I

 On Friday afternoon I meet Fabricio for a few drinks, who I´d met a couple of times in Costa Rica. He has been living here for four years, and the catch-up in a familiar accent was good. After dinner I headed out to meet up with Olga, who had lived in Wellington as an AFS exchange student a few years ago, and we had a few drinks with her sister and her friends. They have the current German AFS community service intern living with them, it was kind of funny actually to meet him having spent so much time with the guys doing that programme in NZ. Olga is the first AFS student I´ve caught up with, and its been so long but at the same time, it doesn´t feel like much time has passed. We ended up doing the partying-on-the-street thing back in Malasaña until about 4am, and it is incredible the amount of people that were out, the noise was unbelievable, and the streets are really narrow so any cars that wanted to get through were crawling along trying to get through the crowds. And again, this is winter!




Don Quixote's windmills


On Saturday Miguel, Ricardo, Annabella and her boyfriend Jose and I headed to Ricardo´s hometown Cuidad Real, in the region of La Mancha, famous for nothing much except Don Quixote, on Saturday, in possibly the world´s smallest car. It definitely isn´t designed for five adults, and I don´t think I have ever had a more uncomfortable car journey, but it was worth it. While driving through the landscapes still amaze me, I can now see why European´s love coming to NZ, as here it is so flat and unchanging, with these boring, straight highways that have big walls on either side, so that you can´t actually see very much. It took us an hour and a half just to get out of Madrid, the highways are so huge and messy and badly signposted, we just couldn´t find our way, so the sun was setting as we stopped for lunch at the windmills of Don Quixote and it was really beautiful. We spend the night in Ricardo´s currently empty childhood home, drinking rum and (in my case) listening to drunk Latinos poor attempts at singing Marilyn Manson and Madonna in english until 8am. We got up pretty late and had an epic brunch of the dinner we failed to cook the night before, a whole lot of different chorizo and sausages, with grilled vegetables, cheese and egg, much better than baked beans on toast, before we headed back to Madrid.


Breakfast in Ciudad Real




So I end my first week in Madrid absolutely shattered, frustrated with the visa debacle, and a bit unsure about Madrid´s citizins - not the perfect start, but I am keeping positive and hopefully things will work out better this week!