hard to believe that i have been in spain for nine days as it has absolutely flown by. i am staying with patricia and eduardo at their beautiful apartment in the chueca district (kind of like the castro but a little bit less gay) of madrid.
edu celebrated his 28th bday last week and had a big fiesta on the terrace that ended in a full on jam session at about 5am with his buddy (in the pic) belting out spanish favorites and me doing my best to cover the western tunes. they call u2 ´´oo dos´´. i have a few thoughts about how good it is to travel w a guitar, but i´ll save them for now.
after about 5 days in madrid wade and i rented a ´´smart car´´ (tiny funny looking 2 seater) and drove 600km to barcelona to meet up with my friend tiphaine who is from france but lives in warsaw and her friend angela who lives in barcelona. managed to see a lot of the city and had hilarious and fun times for 3 days with very little sleep. despite angela and tiphaine´s doubts we were able to fit 4 of us and all of our luggage in the smart car for 30km and avoid 2 police run-ins. we explained to them clearly that we are professionals. hahahaha. barcelona is an incredible city.
madrid is truly amongst the favorite cities i have ever visited. amazing people, architecture, food and general joie de vivre (sp?). i spent this afternoon at the reina sofia museum of contemporary art. muy interesante y sophisticado. my spanish is improving exponentially and tomorrow we are putting up bilingual post-its all over the apartment to improve it (and their english) further. obviously makes a huge difference to be staying w such lovely madrillenos and i look forward to hosting them in sf sometime soon.
the tentative plan is to fly to morocco in a couple of days then take a boat from tangiers back to spain, hit the southern coast and end up back in madrid.
i once again feel blessed to have this opportunity to travel and to have been able to meet so many great people along the way. there are not many wanabe national geographic shots of buildings, landmarks or landscapes here. mostly just fun shots of folks that i have had the pleasure of hanging with. (to give credit where credit is due some of them were taken by tiphaine as well)
besos,
g
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