Due to the winter season, many of the last few days have been complete foggy skies, and some days when I look out the 11th story window of our apartment, I can barely see the city at all. Those days are always a little bit gloomy to not see the sun for several days. This probably lasted from Tuesday until Friday.
Like Nesquik in the United States a popular breakfast drink here is Colacao, which is just chocolate milk. It seems to me that their breakfasts are similar to the deserts we may eat after dinner (cookies, pastries, and cakes) and then a lot of bread. Side note: they buy their bread everyday and it is AMAZING!
Chocolate milk
In general, they really do not sell recognizable brands in the supermarkets of American foods. I saw a few boxes of cereal that were Kelloggs brand, but the cereal names were all new to me. I will admit, I had imagined that Madrid would be a LOT more Americanized than it actually is. I had imagined seeing more American stores like CVS or Belk, or stores of those natures, but the only American stores are fast-food chains (Burger King, McDonalds, Subway, and Dunkin' Donuts are the only ones I've seen) and then of course, StarBucks. But even these restaurants only seem to appear in the "touristy" parts of the city and not as often in the regular neighborhoods. It always makes me smile to see "Nuggets de pollo" - literally chicken nuggets, but in Spanish.
We DID cave in for an American evening one night and went to get milkshakes a legitimate looking 1950's dinner in downtown Madrid. Double chocolate brownie milkshake, so good.
At times even their courtesy is different. In the metro, our line is one of the deeper metros and so we must go down three rather long stretches of escalators, and EVERYONE stands on the right side of the escalator. This leaves the left side like a passing lane so that if you are in a rush, you just fly up or down the escalators. Its actually a really convenient system. All around the metro is an incredibly convenient system. It is very easy to use to get to any part of the city that you want, very fast. Supposedly Madrid's metro is one of the best in the world. They are constantly cleaning it (I've seen men washing the walls) and I actually feel much MUCH safer than I do in American subways. You just don't have the "freaks" that you see in America. None of those gothic teenagers, not nearly as many saggy pants, very few people with hair any color but brown, EVERYONE is just dressed insanely well. Don't get me wrong, pickpocketers will dress like this as well, but no one appears to be out of the norm and so you don't worry about particular people as much as you may in the United States. All in all, the metro is amazing. The most empty a car has been is having half the seats open and the most full it has been is packed. But this is great because I've never been in a car alone with someone messing with me.
As I was saying in another post, all the men just dress really well. Also the younger guys around my age always cut the sides and back of their hair really short and then leave the top decently long and fluff it up as you'll see below. I actually think it looks really good, though I'm not sure what I'd think of Kevin trying it ;) My best guess is that a lot of the Real Madrid and Barce futbol (soccer) players set the trends for 20 year old guys as well as teenagers as they are the idols of this country.
Standard hairstyle
For those of you who speak Spanish this next observation will be interesting, however, to the rest of you not as much. In order to abbreviate numbers like we do with 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc, they use a super scripted "o" or "a". So primero = 1o this is seen in my address:
C/ Antonio Cumella 11,
Apt. 11°C
28030 Madrid
The C/ stands for calle which every street is a calle here, larger ones are avenidas, and high ways are carreteras, I believe. Similar to New York City, streets are not just arbitarily given the name "lane" or "circle" or "street" etc. Other common words can be abbreviated like the numbers as well. Because Spain is historically catholic, until the end of the reign of Franco, all women born in Spain had Maria added to their name by a priest. As I am not catholic, I cannot explain this tradition further, but Maria = Ma
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