Feliz Cumpleanos, Lope de Vega, y La Noche en Blanco!

Thursday was Jordan's 21st--she's one of the Butler students on this trip. To celebrate, the whole group got together and went to a Mexican restaurant, a bar called La Paloma (owned by Kyle's host padre here in Spain) and a discoteca called CanCan. Here we are at the Plaza de Cervantes before walking to get dinner!

It was a lot of fun, but somewhere along the way I sprained something in my foot and it REALLY hurts. I need to find a place that has hielo (ice) because it's not common to have ice machines in households here.

The next morning, we (almost) all woke up bright an early for our first class 'field trip' for Professor Willem's Culture in Madrid class. We met at the estacion del tren to go into Madrid. Needless to say, everyone was exhausted and looked like this:

Our first stop was La Casa de Lope de Vega, who was famous for his plays. He was as influential as Shakespeare; however, no one really knows why he was never as widely known. We couldn't take photos inside his house, but it was really neat to see a recreation of what it looked like hundreds of years ago. It's so interesting to see tours like this because we don't have the same kind of rich history in the States! After the tour, we all went to see "Lope," a new movie that just came out about his life before he wrote plays. I think 90% of us slept through the whole thing, but we were exhausted from walking all day!
The next day (yesterday) we all went to La Noche en Blanco. A lot of major cities in Europe participate in this "white night" where the whole city opens up with free events all night long! It can be overwhelming if you don't have a plan, but we mapped out a few places we wanted to see and as a fairly large group we hopped the train and went exploring. We saw this African techno music performance at this beautiful palacio and a GIANT group of people hitting around hundreds of beach balls! There was great people watching and everything was so colorful. Here are a few pictures of what we saw:

This was part of the African techno concert we saw

This doesn't give it any justice, but here was the gigantic beach-ball crowd!

Men and women were getting painted inside a shop window

More later!
M