Day 8

Sunday, February 1, 2009

I knew I was going to be hungover today, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying a nice day. I woke up and immediately took some naprosyn with a lot of water. It worked. Sunday is the day of El Rastro, or the big (flea) market, in Madrid. Isabel and Monica told us all about El Rastro, and we were scheduled to meet at 10am at the La Iglesia metro stop for our tour (so we wouldn’t be hopelessly lost).
Natasha hadn’t been yet so she decided to come with me, but we were a little slow in the morning, so we were about 15 minutes late to meet the group. Furthermore, it was rainy and cold, not the best day for an open-air market, even though Teresa said there would still be plenty of people shopping. So when we got to La Iglesia, I called Isabel to see where they were and we headed off to meet them. Apparently, she’d sent us all a text message earlier that morning that since it was raining, the tour was optional… I wish I would’ve known because when we left I still felt drunk…

Only about 8 others decided to go (some of them hadn’t gotten the text either) and Natasha and I missed most of the tour, so it seemed like it might be a pointless trip. Plus I had mistakenly worn my suede boots since it was only drizzling when we left, but it was raining pretty hard at El Rastro. My boots definitely suffered. However, just as we went into a little café at the end of the tour, it started snowing! For me, this event was worth the trip. It wasn’t just snowing; it was snowing HUGE flakes, globs of snow, really. It was too warm to stick, so it was basically the worst kind of snow, but it was still really awesome to see – I’d never seen anything like it before. Natasha and I got waters, and ventured out into the snow to see if we could find some cheap scarves for her. Thankfully, we’d only wandered for about 5 minutes before we saw the perfect tent, 2 scarves for 5€. We picked out her white and light blue scarves and headed back home.

I took some pictures of the snow outside my window, and then opened my curtains so I could continue looking at it, as it continued to fall well into the afternoon. I spent most of this time uploading and organizing my pictures on the computer, since I still didn’t feel like doing anything intelligent. Around 1:30, I took a nap, and Teresa and Natasha woke me up at 3 for lunch.

After we ate and talked for a while, I helped Natasha study for her Spanish test. Once I had exhausted my usefulness there, I started writing… and wrote for most of the afternoon and evening in what’s now turned out to be my electronic journal. I also watched the Guardian and cleaned my room. Since I didn’t have to get up to early Monday, I stayed up until like one doing random stuff.