Dec 15th - Dec 29th

Ok, so here goes noting the TWO WEEK CHRISTMAS BLOG!!! Hopefully I can recollect all of the extraordinary events that have gone on over the past two weeks...BRACE YOURSELVES!

Where did we leave off, class I am guessing, The last week of classes was extremely slow, I only had two classes that met and for the most part we just reviewed and the teachers answered questions. The only class were we really did anything was in my Macro Economics class, as always we were behind on material, and the teacher raced through as much as he could in the last two days. Apparently, we will have another review before the test if we want to schedule one with him, so my friend Miguel from Portugal that is in the class is going to do that for the two of us. That was about all that happened at school the last week, once again not too interesting.

On Friday, which would have been about the 18th, Ryan Lathrum, a coordinator at the Business school back at ASU came to Madrid with his friend Stephen. We were put in touch by some by mutual contacts, and I offered to show the two of them around the city a little bit. We ended up having a great time together, Ryan lived in Madrid once upon a time but it was just very briefly and he was studying so he had forgotten some of the places but it was all coming back to him very quickly. We wandered around the city in the evening Friday night when they arrived, took in the night life during Christmas, enjoyed the beautiful lights all over the city, and then found are way into one of my favorite Tapa's bars for dinner. Needless to say, we had a superb meal of great Tapa's and some nice wine, and on top of the that they spoiled me and treated me to dinner.

The next day I had a slow morning, it was my second to last day in Madrid, and I was supposed to be packing to take one of my bags to Marc's house to store while I was in Portugal. I got absolutely nothing done in the morning, and left the house at about 1 in the afternoon to meet up with Ryan and Stephen again. We went to a few more places around the city, and again ended up at a different one of my favorite places for lunch, we all shared a few different sandwiches: Calamari, Chorizo, and Tortilla to be exact, and then continued on our trek. We finished the day off at the Reina Sofia Museum of Modern Art where Pablo Picasso's famous piece Guernica is kept. I had already visited the museum before, but it had been a few years, and it was cool to get a second look at some of the pieces, and enjoy the new ones also. That evening, I packed my whole life into two suitcases, and cleaned my room so I would be ready to move out, and go straight to the airport on Sunday. After packing, I lugged a huge duffel bag down to the train station and jumped on a train to get to Marc's house. I almost made it there, until we passed the station and I realized that I had caught the wrong train, ha ha ha; I felt like a complete and utter idiot, it was the first time that this had happened to me, and on top of that, I was meeting his whole family for dinner and kept them waiting for 45 minutes while I had to switch trains, wait for another one and then finally arrived! Thank goodness that they are really nice and dd not tear into me! We all went out for Chinese food a a restaurant near their house. No, not the same one that I tried the Tripe at thank goodness. After the meal I was planning on heading back to Madrid and calling it a night, but Ismael and Javier called and wanted to go out to a bar for a few drinks before I left town and it would have been rude of me to tell my best friends no so we went out on the town. It was a real lo key night, we stayed in Pozuelo which is a suburb of Madrid and went to a bar and ended up meeting up with a bunch of different friends that I had met since arriving. I ended up staying the night at Marc's and then waking up early in the morning and catching the bus back to Madrid. When I left his house at 10:30 in the morning, the thermometer read -10C, which is way too cold, damn was I glad to be leaving!

Sunday I arrived home, packed up the rest of my stuff into a backpack and was off to the Airport after saying good bye to the old guys I lived with for the last three months, Jose and Charles. I arrived at the airport just to find humongous lines of people traveling for Christmas, which I was not expecting but should have been. Luckily, I arrived with plenty of time and on top of that my flight was delayed an hour and a half. If Flight from Hell was a movie, I was on the set! A trip that is usually 4 hours from the time I leave my door to the time I arrive at my grandmas took me over 7. Once we all boarded the airplane the mayhem started. First off one of the ground crew members came one and said that there was one too many people on the plane so they started calling out names to see if they could figure it out, after about 20 minutes of flight attendants walking up and down the Isles, the figured out that it was a baby that had two boarding passes or some malarky of the such. To add insult to injury, without skipping a beat after the first messed had settled the captain made the dreaded move you never want to see, he came out of the cockpit to address all of the passengers. let me see if I can do tis justice (Insert thick British Accent HERE) "Well Ladies and Gentlemen I regret to inform you that it looks like we will be here on the tarmac waiting to take off for a little bit. Apparently the runway that we usually depart from has a whole in it; I am not quite sure what happened, but I know that they are trying to repair this whole as quickly as possible. In the mean time, we have been put in a cue with all the other flight leaving Madrid tonight and we are going to have to wait our turn, we had to get you all on to the plane in case they move us up in the order and we are able to take off sooner than expected. At this point it looks like we should be set t take off in about an hour or and hour and fifteen minutes or so. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thank you for flying with EasyJet." That was about 99% accurate, damn I am good. To cap it all off when we arrived in Lisbon it was pouring down rain and my bags came off the carousel complete drenched with water, but man did it feel good to be in Lisbon.

I will need to pick this up in a while, off to more family functions.

Phil