Es peligroso ir solo

It is dangerous to explore a foreign city alone, so I went with friends.

The past two days I explored the city with my roommates, Ian and Julian, as well as other students from DePaul. I started off by walking to some of the plazas and doing some window shopping. There is a store here called El Corte Inglés (literally, The English Cut) which is the big store here in Spain. And it really is big, we went to their department store and it was seven stories tall, then across the street there was a Corte Inglés music/DVD shop and down the street was a Corte Inglés fútbol store.

That night, a large group of us from DePaul went out to dance. Let's just say that the club scene isn't my scene. I prefer to go social dancing or stay in rather than be packed into a lung-rottingly-smoky bar infested with creepy guys who are following the girls in our group and offering them drinks.

Today was a better day though. We went to el Parque Retiro, the huge park near to downtown, to spend the afternoon. We began by renting rowboats and rowed around the large man-made lake in the park, this was followed by a casual stroll through the gardens. One interesting thing that we noted was that rollerblading seemed to be much more popular here than back in Chicago. Not only were there people skating for recreation, but there were classes being taught to adults as well as children and they appeared to be preforming routines as a group. Because the park is so big we planned to visit it again soon in order to travel all over it's sprawling pathways.