Recap: Wednesday Arrival in Madrid

I'm back!  Sorry about the big gap between posts.  Wi-Fi was very spotty in Madrid so it was difficult to update the blog.  Now I am at my homestay in Cádiz and they have Wi-Fi, so I will have it all the time now! What a relief.  A lot has happened since my last post, so I will start with our arrival in Madrid.

After arriving in Madrid, we put our bags in our hotel rooms and went out to explore the city.  The first things that we did were to visit the bank/ATM to obtain Euros and to visit Vodafone, the cell phone store.  Afterwards, we grabbed lunch (tortillas españoles!) and began exploring.  The first thing we saw was a beautiful old Basilica next to our hotel:

Next, we headed to Parque de Retiro, which is a huge park in Madrid that is full of little gardens, paths, and people publicly displaying their affection for each other.  The park was gorgeous and the best part was that there were two palaces in the middle!  It was quite a journey trying to find the palaces, so we felt pretty accomplished once we did stumble across them.  Here are what the park and the palaces looked like:

This longest day of my life (literally, since it lasted from Tuesday morning at 6 A.M. EST until Wednesday morning at 2 A.M. Madrid time) kept getting better!  Madrid was playing Portugal for the Euro Cup semis at Madrid.  They had set up a huge projection screen right outside the stadium, so we went there and watched the game.  It was quite an experience and quite a game!