March 21, 2017
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
I have been in Madrid for 2 months now and I feel right at home. This city has everything anyone could need and then more. During my first month here, I went to most touristy places including: Sol, which is the center of the city and one of the most important places in Spain. Retiro Park, the perfect place to relax and get away for a few hours. And Prado Museum, a legendary museum in Europe.
For the last month I have tried to enjoy the city as a Madrile?o. From the simplest things like riding the metro and actually knowing where to go without using google maps, to watching a soccer game at a bar with Real Madrid Fans (even though I am a die hard FC Barcelona Fan, the biggest rival of Real Madrid).
A couple of weeks ago, Poli, one of my friends from the U.S. came to visit me for his spring break. I felt like his tour guide in my hometown. We love to try new food so we went to great restaurants in Malasa?a, a neighborhood known for their great bars and food. Poli loves Real Madrid and going to one of their games was one of his biggest dreams, so even though it was really hard for me to go to a game at the Santiago Bernabeu, ?I went with him. The experience at the stadium is like no other (OK, maybe Kyle Field gets a little louder), we got to watch a soccer game in one of the most iconic sports venues in the world. Fans live the game like they are part of the team, you can hear a lot of cheering, criticism of players and definitely a lot of whistling towards thee referee, which is the way of booing. If you come to Madrid this is definitely an event you cannot miss!
As far as school goes, I had my first really stressful week studying for midterms. I had 3 midterms during the same week, including 2 on the same day. It felt like studying for accounting 327 and finance exams for the same day, definitely not the most fun part of the trip, but a great learning experience. Exams in Carlos III are very challenging for the classes I am taking, ?for multiple choice exams points can get taken off for missing a question, which is not very common at TAMU. I ended up passing all three of my midterms, two of them with good grades and the third not as well. For the upcoming weeks I will ?be working with different groups for final projects. All of my classes have a project at the end of the semester and involve all of what we have learned during the semester, I think this is a great way for us to review our material learned and actually apply our new resources.
As for my last trip outside of Madrid, I went to Mallorca and ?Barcelona last week. I met with a couple of friends, who are studying abroad in Barcelona, at the Mallorca airport. We walked around the Island for the first day and saw the most important attractions in the center of the city. The second day we decided to rent mopeds and ride them to the best beaches in the island. I had never ridden a moped before, but let’s say I am pretty good riding a bicycle, which is pretty much the same thing. During this day I saw some of the best places I have seen in Spain, beaches were beautiful and people were great. Even though many people would not think of going to this Island, I would recommend 100%.