For the past several weeks, since my Spring Break, I have spent every weekend in Madrid with my friends. The amazing thing about Madrid is that it is so large and there are so many restaurants, bars and clubs that it never gets boring. There is always a new place to see and explore. Three weekends ago I spent with my girlfriends. On Saturday we went to Retiro Park and had a picnic all day. The weather was perfect, high 70s (or right about at 80 degrees) and we sat in our sundresses, all us girls, just eating, drinking, chatting and taking in the warmth and the heat of the sun. We were at the park for nearly 6 hours. When the sun started to go down I headed back to my friend´s apartment and we dropped off our things, freshened up and headed back out to the center. We went to one of our favorite spots, Plaza Dos de Mayo. As I have mentioned before I absolutely love how people congregate in plazas here and enjoy the outdoors. You would think that there was a concert going on or a party and yet its just a normal evening in the plaza, packed with kids playing soccer, young people drinking and socializing and dogs running about as if it were a park. After about an hour we headed to one of my friend´s roommate´s concert. It was at a small underground bar not far from the plaza. We walked into some pretty strange electronic/techno music but it was quite exciting nontheless. Finally her roommate came on. He is in a "band" with his friend and they rap together in Spanish. I caught most of the words and it appeared to be somewhat vile language but none of it was taken seriously and the crowd was dancing and repeating the chorus. We left after the show and headed to a place called Vía Láctea.
Via Láctea is a bar that only plays 50s American music. We got some beers and danced the night away with our 50s moves (moves that I learned at sockhops back when I was a kid in Girl Scouts). I have never had so much fun dancing in my entire life. Just us American girls, grooving to some oldies. The Spaniards in the bar looked intimidated by us and all these strange "twist" and "sprinkler" moves we were doing that they´d probably never seen before. Some of the Spanish girls looked embarassed for us but none of cared since we were having more fun than anyone else in that bar. We ended the night around 3:30am and all parted ways to take our night buses home.
I came home so content and so thankful for having such great girlfriends in Madrid. It´s nights like these where I feel very bittersweet about coming home to Minnesota.
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