huevos rotos

Okay so sorry my blog posts are going to be kind of confusing from here on out. Basically, all the blog posts like this are in chronological order, but everything about going on vacation or doing some kind of excursion are not necessarily in order since I did not have time to write about them at the time. I'll put the dates by them to have it make more sense.

Anyways, back to today. It has been raining for the past couple of days, and when you're in Madrid when it's raining, you can't do anything. You may say, "Hey, why don't you go to some museums or do something indoors?" I've been in Madrid for 4 months. I've done all of the major things here. The museums usually have deals for students, but only on the weekends. Basically, all of us stayed at home, bored. "Why don't you get together and do something?" We're poor, and we want to save money. Plus, pretty much all of our host families don't really allow us to bring people over. Maru usually does, but she has been working during the day and doesn't want to be disturbed. So basically I slept, ate, watched TV, and worked on my Valencia blog.

Tonight for dinner, Maru invited us to eat with her, Elisa (her bff), and Elisa's father. We were going to eat huevos rotos, which is just what it sounds like - broken eggs. Maru said we could invite friends too and she would pay, so that was nice. (Over here, if you "invite" someone to do something, you pay. always). It's weird, lately she's been really nice, inviting our friends over for dinner and not making them pay. She even let us print out a bunch of stuff from her printer for free. It's weird though because last week when I asked if Ariel could spend the night on our couch the night before Italy because he has a lot of trouble waking up in the morning (our flight is at 7am), she said absolutely not. She was saying there's a line to her generosity, and that was it. When I first came here, she said if a friend wanted to spend the night, there wouldn't be any problem. It's driving me crazy, she keeps changing her mind. It's like you have to ask her something when she isn't being bipolar.

ANYWAYS. So Nikki wasn't hungry and just wanted to shower and sleep, so Maru, Ariel, and I picked up Elisa and drove to the bar to meet her father. Turns out, it was the same bar that Maru had taken me to my very  first day in Madrid. It was nice going back there. It's called La Parrilla, and it's fairly small where only locals go. I mean Elisa's dad knew every single person that walked into the bar. So we sat down and shared a bottle of wine, which turned out to be the 2 or 3 euro bottle that we can get in the supermarket. They gave us tapas of calamari and croquetas with ham and melted cheese inside. Really good!! Well, I'm biased, I love anything with ham and cheese in it. We got bread and our own mini sartens of huevos rotos, which was quite tasty! I guess usually they cost like 8  or 9 euros each, but every Thursday after 9pm they only cost a euro, which is a really good deal. Then I understood why Maru invited Ariel to come - she's only spending at most 3 euros extra for him. It was a lot of food too, I could only finish half of my huevos rotos...but Maru finished it for me lol. Plus, it's hard to eat a dish that's ALL eggs.

What I loved most about dinner was the company I was with. Elisa's father is a cute old man that is super sweet and likes to joke around. It's also really entertaining seeing liberal Maru and conservative him argue about certain things. What I LOVED though was the fact that when I first came to Madrid that first day, I did not understand a single stinking word that came out of his mouth. He talks really fast in a mumbling kind of way. I think it was only fitting that we went to the same bar at the end of my program with the same people. Guess what? Tonight, I understood pretty much everything he said. Even Elisa said that I had improved, and in my mind I was like YEEEESSSSSS. It was a nice night. I kind of wish Nikki had come in a way because I was the only non-bilingual person there, but it turned out okay.

After dinner, we walked down the street to Elisa's father's apartment to say hi to her mom who wasn't up to coming. She's really nice also, and when we came in she was watching Collateral Damage dubbed in Spanish. We talked for a few minutes and then drove back home. We got back to Lavapies at about 11, and Ariel took the Metro home. As you can see, I was not sleepy so I decided to watch Top Chef and write this blog :) Seriously, finals week messed up my sleeping schedule. It's 3:15am right now, and I'm barely sleepy. I guess that's what 2 straight weeks of all-nighters can do to you.

It did pay off in one sense because I already got my final grade for my Cuento class. Their grading system is out of 10 here, and my final grade was a 9.4. I got an A :)