"Wait...it's Thursday??"

For my last few days, I've decided to write a post everyday! Or at least that is my intention. I guess we'll see how that goes!

Day 30
Last Thursday in Spain. But it was a pretty great Thursday. We had perfect weather: sunny, absolutely no humidity and in the lower 80s. I guess the great weather we're having this week and through the weekend is one of Spain's little miracles, one last blessing for our very fortunate Baylor group. After class, we were given one last assignment in the culture class to go visit the third of the three major museums in Madrid, the Thyssen. Once a private collection from the Thyssens, the family that owned the steel company that supplied Hitler and the Nazis, the Thyssen museum is an impressive, eclectic collection of art ranging from 13th century Christian art to 17th-18th century portraits of nobles to the beautiful Impressionist and post-Impressionist pieces of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This museum had a little bit of everything to please everybody. My favorites were by far the Impressionists' works; I could gawk at those Monets for hours. And Van Gogh too, but there were only a few of his paintings there. While browsing the museum, one of my friends brought up how ridiculously wealthy the Thyssens must have been to have owned all of these paintings before they sold them to Spain. I guess supplying steel to Nazis was a well paying job!

After our last museum visit, our small group headed to the center of Madrid to grab some gelato. Now what I should have done after finishing my gelato was get on the metro, go home and study for my finals on Saturday. What I actually did was spend several hours shopping... priorities. I had a lot of success, knocking quite a bit off of my never ending list of souvenirs I need to get. The part I liked most, however, was being on my own in the heart of a heavily populated city, doing whatever I want to do, living life the way I want and having real options for things to do. It's a rare opportunity for me; Waco and the suburbs in Katy are a far stretch from city living. So I wandered around Madrid, got a little lost in the endless shops and street fairs, enjoyed one of my last free afternoons. My most interesting purchase of the day was definitely Dr. Pepper, a thank you gift for my señora for housing us for a month. The little diamond in the rough was found in the gourmet food section of the Spanish mega department store, Corte Inglés. We'll see what our señora thinks of a truly American soda!

After my enjoyably busy afternoon/evening, I hopped on the metro and went home to eat dinner and study a tiny bit for those finals. I definitely don't have the same end-of-semester mentality in Madrid as I do in Waco. Hmm, maybe I should get back to those books...

Carrie