Robyn – I feel very honored, being allowed to add my thoughts about our trip to Steve’s blog. I hope I can do it justice! Steve asked me to make comments about this past weekend. However, I would like to start with just a short reflections on working in a Spanish office.
Our work day runs from approximately 9am to 7pm Monday thru Thursday, but on Friday we skip lunch and leave at 2pm! Our work areas have low walls, allowing us to communicate freely with others on our teams. We don’t eat at our desks (okay, I eat at MY desk); instead, we go to the break rooms to eat our snacks. The break rooms have vending machines, much like our own, but the prices are so much better! Water is 35 euro (approx 44 cents) and sodas (including our very own Coca Cola) are 50 euro (approx 65 cents). And, by the way, in Spain, diet Coke is called Coke Light. The snack machines have chips, cookies (including Oreos), donuts, and sandwiches of Jamon (ham) and cheese on delicious bread, not the sandwich bread you find in our snack machines in the US. Best of all, they have FREE vending machines for coffee, coffee with cream or milk, espresso, hot chocolate, hot tea, and lots of varieties of these same drinks. The only thing is that they come in miniature cups, so you have to order several to have what we consider to be a normal serving.
Okay, enough of that. So, our Friday began at 2:30 when I left work, and I came back to Sol, where we have an apartment. One of my coworkers who’d been to Spain before had told me that Spain had everything you could want except Walmart. Well, he was wrong! On Friday, we took the subway to a shopping mall we’d heard about. It was actually about TWICE the size of the Galleria and it had a huge food court, lots of smaller specialty stores, El Corte Ingles (which is a large Spanish department store) and, best of all, Elcampo, which is the Spanish version of Walmart. It was fabulous! It had every sort of thing we could want, including clothes and health and beauty items and home goods and groceries, and it was about twice as big as our average Walmart. It’s my new favorite store!
On Saturday, we planned to meet friends to see the Royal Palace, but they met earlier than we expected so we were on our own for the day. We ended up just walking and walking, enjoying the city and seeing the sites, including Plaza de Espana (where we’d been a couple of days before) and the Templo . This was a really cool site. Seems that, in 1968, the Egyptians gave the Spaniards an actual temple! Erected in the 2nd century BC, the Egyptian Temple of Debod was dedicated to the goddess, Isis. If not moved, the Debod Temple would have been flooded by the building of a dam in Egypt.
We also went to Plaza Mayor, which has been a central plaza in the city of Madrid for several centuries. We walked down the Gran Via, which houses one of Madrid’s most important shopping areas (you KNOW I hated that!).
Sunday, we had the great pleasure of seeing my friend, Maria’s, niece, whom I met on my last trip to Madrid. She has been living in Madrid for two and a half years, where she works in IS/IT. And she is a newly-wed! Her husband, Ruben, is a charming young man from Chile. Their story of meeting online and marrying in Chile is so romantic! I’ll have to share it with you sometime. It was a pleasure to catch up with Eva and meet her husband. Together with our friends, Vickie and Joey, we went to el prado on Sunday. El prado is is an art museum which is known for being the largest art gallery in the world! It houses more than 8600 paintings, including works by Goya, Velazquez, Dali, Rubens, and Picasso. We visited only one floor of the museum and were absolutely worn out! So we agreed to come together again to see the remainder of the exhibits at another time. Eva, Ruben, Steve and I then found a small plaza on which several restaurants had outdoor tables and enjoyed a lovely al fresco lunch. The waiter brought us large plates of meats, octopus (which we loved), cheese, toastas (slices of bread topped with spreads, fish, meat and cheese) and tortilla (unlike the Mexican tortilla, the Spanish tortilla is a cross between an omelette and a frittata, and typically contains slices of potato.) It was a delicious lunch and a beautiful day on which to enjoy it outside!
The area surrounding el prado was extremely crowded on Sunday. As it happens, it was the last day of the Tour de Spain, the major bicycle race in Spain. (And thanks to Steve’s cousin, Marion, for being a cyclist and telling us about this event!) And we had the opportunity to see several laps of this exciting race! I thought it was really interesting that cars and vans followed the cyclists around the track, carrying bikes and spare tires in case a cyclist had a problem on the road. And, surprise, an American cyclist won the last stage of the race that we saw in Madrid!
Our work day runs from approximately 9am to 7pm Monday thru Thursday, but on Friday we skip lunch and leave at 2pm! Our work areas have low walls, allowing us to communicate freely with others on our teams. We don’t eat at our desks (okay, I eat at MY desk); instead, we go to the break rooms to eat our snacks. The break rooms have vending machines, much like our own, but the prices are so much better! Water is 35 euro (approx 44 cents) and sodas (including our very own Coca Cola) are 50 euro (approx 65 cents). And, by the way, in Spain, diet Coke is called Coke Light. The snack machines have chips, cookies (including Oreos), donuts, and sandwiches of Jamon (ham) and cheese on delicious bread, not the sandwich bread you find in our snack machines in the US. Best of all, they have FREE vending machines for coffee, coffee with cream or milk, espresso, hot chocolate, hot tea, and lots of varieties of these same drinks. The only thing is that they come in miniature cups, so you have to order several to have what we consider to be a normal serving.
Okay, enough of that. So, our Friday began at 2:30 when I left work, and I came back to Sol, where we have an apartment. One of my coworkers who’d been to Spain before had told me that Spain had everything you could want except Walmart. Well, he was wrong! On Friday, we took the subway to a shopping mall we’d heard about. It was actually about TWICE the size of the Galleria and it had a huge food court, lots of smaller specialty stores, El Corte Ingles (which is a large Spanish department store) and, best of all, Elcampo, which is the Spanish version of Walmart. It was fabulous! It had every sort of thing we could want, including clothes and health and beauty items and home goods and groceries, and it was about twice as big as our average Walmart. It’s my new favorite store!
On Saturday, we planned to meet friends to see the Royal Palace, but they met earlier than we expected so we were on our own for the day. We ended up just walking and walking, enjoying the city and seeing the sites, including Plaza de Espana (where we’d been a couple of days before) and the Templo . This was a really cool site. Seems that, in 1968, the Egyptians gave the Spaniards an actual temple! Erected in the 2nd century BC, the Egyptian Temple of Debod was dedicated to the goddess, Isis. If not moved, the Debod Temple would have been flooded by the building of a dam in Egypt.
We also went to Plaza Mayor, which has been a central plaza in the city of Madrid for several centuries. We walked down the Gran Via, which houses one of Madrid’s most important shopping areas (you KNOW I hated that!).
Sunday, we had the great pleasure of seeing my friend, Maria’s, niece, whom I met on my last trip to Madrid. She has been living in Madrid for two and a half years, where she works in IS/IT. And she is a newly-wed! Her husband, Ruben, is a charming young man from Chile. Their story of meeting online and marrying in Chile is so romantic! I’ll have to share it with you sometime. It was a pleasure to catch up with Eva and meet her husband. Together with our friends, Vickie and Joey, we went to el prado on Sunday. El prado is is an art museum which is known for being the largest art gallery in the world! It houses more than 8600 paintings, including works by Goya, Velazquez, Dali, Rubens, and Picasso. We visited only one floor of the museum and were absolutely worn out! So we agreed to come together again to see the remainder of the exhibits at another time. Eva, Ruben, Steve and I then found a small plaza on which several restaurants had outdoor tables and enjoyed a lovely al fresco lunch. The waiter brought us large plates of meats, octopus (which we loved), cheese, toastas (slices of bread topped with spreads, fish, meat and cheese) and tortilla (unlike the Mexican tortilla, the Spanish tortilla is a cross between an omelette and a frittata, and typically contains slices of potato.) It was a delicious lunch and a beautiful day on which to enjoy it outside!
The area surrounding el prado was extremely crowded on Sunday. As it happens, it was the last day of the Tour de Spain, the major bicycle race in Spain. (And thanks to Steve’s cousin, Marion, for being a cyclist and telling us about this event!) And we had the opportunity to see several laps of this exciting race! I thought it was really interesting that cars and vans followed the cyclists around the track, carrying bikes and spare tires in case a cyclist had a problem on the road. And, surprise, an American cyclist won the last stage of the race that we saw in Madrid!
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