To Barcelona
I’ve decided that it is far too expensive here in Madrid. Also, I don’t have a guidebook, so I’m spending most of my time wandering around aimlessly taking pictures of things that look interesting.
Everyone here speaks English… which is no challenge at all, nothing like barely surviving in Caracas. In fact, I feel like I could wander around town in the middle of the night with no worries at all here… in fact, I did.
I met a sociology teacher from William and Mary college here today… she is on her spring break…. and hasn´t graded her Mid-Terms yet… I yelled at her for procrastinating.
Madrid is like a quieter, cleaner, nicer smelling New York City. Its quite strange really… the whole place smells oddly of flowers or something. I figured it out though the second day I ws here. They have these guys who go around with sidewalk zambonies. Its like a streetcleaner for the sidewalk. When the one guy passed me, I could most definitely smell whatever it is they wash the sidewlks with. That cannot be good for the environment.
But anyway, being in a city that reminds me of a New York where they don’t honk their horns isn’t exactly what this trip was about. Especially since I met other Americans and everyone speaks English, this place just seems too “touristy”. Nope, not for me, its off to barcelona for a bit to say hello to A7 Steve, and then off to Morocco where there may be tourists, but everyone is clutching their belongings and avoiding rug merchants. Ahh, the thrill.
Anyone want a rug? Too bad, I can’t carry it.
PS on a side note, the metro here in madrid runs Windows 2000 on a Pentium III 800Mhz with 256MB of RAM… basically the same computer hosting this website (my personal one)
Mine, however, doesn’t crash lke the Madrid Metro… thats how I figured out what it runs; the entire metro system’s display blue-screened and then rebooted.
Actually, in Newark and Houston, the display screens there are also running Windows, but they didn’t crash, they just had a delightful “Illegal Operation”(Newark) and “Windows is Expanding the Page Cache”(Houston) message on the screen overtop of the Arrivals and Departures display.
This is why I run Linux.
