Madrid Día Dos

We continued our sightseeing on Saturday and went to see Park Retiro, which was really pretty and autumn-y, and had some palaces and a lake to walk around. 

Next we walked to the Royal Palace, and actually went inside it this time. We got yelled at for having our cameras out, so I only got one picture inside, but there were tons of huge rooms that each had different color themes and purposes. There were huge crystal chandeliers, amazing paintings, and a table that probably sat 50 people!

After that, we went inside Cathedral Almudena, which is right nextdoor. It couldn't compare to some of the amazing Churches we've seen in Italy, but it was still really pretty.

That night, we went out for tapas (which are everywhere in Madrid), which are a mix of little foods. We finally found a restaurant that wasn't completely crowded, and it ended up being so good! We loved the Spanish ambiance, and got to try little Spanish hot dogs, a Spanish tortilla (which is kind of like quiche with potato and spinach... and came with ranch dressing!), and lots of grilled vegetables. 

We wanted to try churros before we went home, and searched everywhere for them. We ended up accidentally running into what we had heard was the best churro place in Madrid (Chocolatería San Gínes), and got amazing churros dipped in warm chocolate before we flew home!

Primer Día en Madrid

We found out that Madrid had a Starbucks, and since we hadn't even seen a Starbucks since August, we HAD to go, so we made that our first stop. On the way, we even found Dunkin, which was equally as exciting! Rome has no American chains other than McDonald's, which is nice, but it makes seeing them in other countries SO exciting. We sat in a really cute plaza with a fountain (we kept calling them piazzas like in Italy, whoops) in the sun where there was a mariachi band playing. Starbucks, sun, and mariachi? We couldn't have been happier. 

After that, we walked around and saw some sites on the way to the Royal Palace and the Almudena Cathedral. We also stopped at Plaza Mayor, which was my favorite Plaza in Madrid.

 

 We went to a market called Mercato de San Miguel, which was just like the Spanish version of Faneuil Hall! We were starving, so we finally picked a restaurant that looked good and realized after we sat down that it was actually a Belgian restaurant, and not Spanish at all, oops again. It was really good though, and we got to try different food anyway. Plus, we got Caesar salads which we LOVED because the only kind of dressing we have in Italy is olive oil, so we were very happy with our mistake.

While we waited for some of our friends from Notre Dame to arrive in Madrid, Kathryn and I decided to go crazy and get our ears pierced! I got my last two ear piercings when we were stuck in Texas on a trip, so why not get the next one in Spain? We found a classy place called the Tattoo Center, and tried to explain what we wanted to the ear piercing guy, who only spoke Spanish. Great decision, we know. We were all a little nervous once it was actually happening, but it all worked out, and now we both have our cartilages pierced!

Finally, two girls from my water polo team and two other ND girls who are studying in London and Spain arrived, and it was great to see them again! We found a restaurant and had paellas for dinner, which is a typical Spanish food that's made of rice and chicken and seafood. We had to try it since we were there but it was REALLY intense and seafoody. We felt so European when we finished our Spanish dinner at 12:30AM! 

More Italian Pizza

Thursday, after our first midterm, we decided we deserved to reward ourselves (and celebrate my always important half birthday :) ) by going out to eat. We found a place down the street that had all kinds of pizzas for only 4 euro each.. perfect! There were 4 of us, so we each ordered a different kind and tried them all. I ordered Amatriciana (my favorite... spicy tomato sauce with bacon), and we also tried apple and gorgonzola, broccoli and cheese, and capriccioso. So good! We're already talking about how much we're going to miss Italian food when we get home, and there's still so much to try.

After lunch, we had a little extra time so we wandered around Rome. We went to the Pantheon, checked out a church we hadn't seen called Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, and stopped at Giolitti's for some gelato. Then we got packed and flew to Madrid for the weekend!

Chicken Cordon Bleu!

I realize that this is turning into a blog of food, but we are in Italy... and we're so proud of ourselves every time we make actual food! Probably our greatest accomplishment so far was Monday night, when we made chicken cordon bleu and mashed potatoes, all from scratch! We've come pretty far from our penne pasta and tomato sauce of the first two weeks, haha. This is the beginning of midterms, so we haven't been able to go out exploring as much, but one of my roommates did bring me a warm homemade crepe with nutella in my bed while I was studying the other night :) Love Rome!

Pizza Night

Friday, we decided to experiment and make homemade pizzas for dinner. We got a bunch of ingredients and made up recipes for 6 different kinds of pizzas, even a cinnamon apple one for dessert. They were a success!

Real Italian Cinema?

On Tuesday night, we had a field trip for my Italian class to an Italian movie called, "Benvenuti al Sud." We were all ready to just go and watch the movie, and were a little surprised (and scared) when our teacher told us we had to interview actual Italians at the movie theater before it started. Luckily, almost everyone else in my class is actually from Italy and could help me out because I realized for the first time I have a ridiculous American accent and some Italians just stared at me when I tried to ask them questions...oops. It was pretty cool to talk to actual non-English speaking Italians though! The next challenge was watching the movie, which was entirely in Italian with no subtitles. I was expecting to not understand anything, especially after my teacher told me specifically to just "try to see the pictures," but I ended up understanding it all, and actually enjoying the movie! It was a comedy about a man from Milan who moves to Naples, and his experiences adapting to "Southern Italy," which is an entirely different world from Northern Italy... I didn't completely understand all the jokes, but I got some of them! And I also learned that not only do Italian cinemas have assigned seating (weird), but they also have intermission where vendors walk through the aisles and sell food, just like at baseball games. That was pretty amusing. Overall, it was a pretty cool experience!

Tour of the First Roman Churches

For on-site theology class on Tuesday, we visited some of the first Catholic Churches ever. We saw San Giovanni in Laterano (the first Papal Basilica), the Sacred Steps where Jesus walked up and down before He was crucified (you're only allowed up and down them on your knees), the first Baptismal Font, and Santi Quattro Coronati, an ancient basilica that is now a monastery in Rome.

Leaning Tower of Pisa!

Pisa was on the way home to Rome, and since it was a 4 hour train ride away from us and we'd heard the Tower was really the only reason to go, we decided to stop on the way and check the Leaning Tower off the list. We were supposed to have two hours in Pisa, but because of some train mishaps.. and the trains being on Italian time, in general, we ended up having just less than an hour to get to the tower, see it all, and be back on the train to Rome.. but we did it! In true Braunstein family fashion, we hopped on a bus to the Tower, took our pictures, grabbed amazing pizza (we had to have pizza in Pisa), jumped on the bus back to the train station just as it was pulling away, and made it on the train to Rome just in time! Success. Obnoxious Italian teenage girls got on about halfway through the trip and started blasting music through the entire train car, but we were probably the only people on the train that loved it because we got our fill of all the American music they were listening to that we missed. As always, we couldn't have been happier when we got to Termini Station and were back in Roma.

Last Bit of Riomaggiore

We had to get a train at noon from Cinque, so we went out for American breakfast (they even had milkshakes!) by our hostel, and then explored the area by the water in Riomaggiore, which was really pretty.

Cinque Terre

Saturday, we woke up at 5 to take the train to Cinque Terre, or "Five Lands." It's a national park in Northern Italy (Liguria) composed of five coastal towns that are connected by a 9km hiking path that goes along the coast... on a cliff. We stopped in Riomaggiore to drop our stuff off, and loved our hostel. They gave us a little 3 person cottage on the cliff with an amazing ocean view, and we started calling it the pink place/gingerbread house because it literally looked like it was straight out of a fairy tale. Everything was pink - the curtains, the bedspread, the tablecloth, even the silverware holder was pink with cut-out hearts on it. There was also a really strange collection of creepy dolls in the bathroom, strange puppets, and a picture on the wall of Disney princesses. We've definitely had many "sorpresas" in all of the Italian hostels we've stayed in!

The five towns in Cinque Terre are Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore, and the hike gets harder as you go from Riomaggiore to Monterosso, so we decided to do it backwards so that we could get the hardest part over first. This was DEFINITELY a good idea, since we were ready to collapse just after the first part from Monterosso to Vernazza. That hike was pretty much an hour and a half long climb up stairs - through waterfalls, over cliffs, in mud, etc. The stairs just kept going and going, so we were so happy when we finally saw Vernazza in the distance!

Vernazza to Corniglia was also pretty hard (and a lot of stairs), but everyone that we met along the way was really nice, so we had a lot of fun.

Corniglia was probably the least exciting of all the towns along the way, so we started the hike to Manarola, and luckily got to climb DOWN the 382 straight steps on that part instead of up them.

In Manarola, we stopped for some well-deserved gelato, and got to watch the sunset on an ocean overlook in town, which was really cool. One artist that was sitting there even asked if we had a camera because she wanted to take a picture of us because it was "so beautiful."

We finally left for the last, and easiest, part of the hike which was along Riomaggiore's Via Dell'Amore (Lovers' Walk), which was covered in padlocks that people had come to hang as permanent markers of their love. We finished our 9km hike about 5 hours later, feeling sweaty and tired, but super accomplished!

We went out for dinner in Riomaggiore that night, and decided to be adventurous and try some seafood since we were right on the ocean. Bad idea. I ordered penne alla salmone, which tasted like a big bowl of tuna, and my roommate, Kathryn, ordered penne alla scampi, which was pretty much a bowl of pasta with dead scampi straight from the ocean in it. Yum.

We headed to bed pretty early after an amazing day in Cinque Terre.