Visit to Retiro Park

     Today I visited Retiro Park with some other SLU friends. Retiro Park is a famous park in Spain, and it is very large. We didn't explore the entire park, but we walked through a lot of it, taking pictures and looking like tourists! But that's ok, because we all took some pretty good pictures and enjoyed the park. We can't wait until it gets warmer though, and the flowers come out because then it be even more beautiful! We first saw a building that had some sort of museum in it, the building was really pretty.

We then came across a small pond and a glass building, Palacio de Crystal. They had some kind of art exhibit inside with string wrapped around the pillars, but you could barely see it. 

Palacio de Crystal

 After, we walked to the big pond that is in the middle of the park. It has a big statue and monument dedicated to King Alfonso XII. It kind of reminded me of Forest Park in St. Louis, because they had row boats on the pond. 

Monumento de Alfonso XII

 As we were leaving the monument, there was a man playing the Chicken Dance, Duck Dance, whatever you call it, on a saxophone. I hope that song is popular everywhere and not just in the US...hopefully we don't stick out that much!
     We looked around a little bit more, and then found our way out of the park because we were really hungry. Claire and I live close to Retiro Park, and so we decided to try a restaurant that our Senora pointed out to us, Pinocchio, that serves pizza. The waiter first thought we were from France and started speaking French...I didn't think we looked French, but ok! After some confusion over what kind of pizza we wanted, we finally got our pizza. I asked for una pizza de verduras (vegetables) and I got artichokes, mushrooms, and ham...fine with me! I actually wanted ham, but they have so many different types of ham here, I didn't know which was the type of ham we are used to in the US. Everyone besides me got a little bottle of Coke, while I got a little bottle of Orange Fanta. Apparently Lemon Fanta tastes like lemonade, I should have gotten that but I'm sure we will be going back there some more!! 
     Tonight for dinner we had paella, which is a type of rice dish that is popular in Spain. There are many types of paella, including seafood, chicken, pork (they love ham here), and vegetables. Our Senora made us paella with chicken, red and green peppers, and some kind of very long sugar snap peas. It was so good!! I really want to try paella with seafood. 

Things I have learned in Spain:

• There are too many types of ham in Spain, and yet they don't have real bacon
• Spanish TV shows like to play American songs...sometimes I don't think they know what the lyrics are in English
• Spanish TV shows also like to talk about American celebrities alot 
• They are putting on the Lion King (in Spanish) somewhere in Madrid
•  It's hard not being able to text people, unless you have an iPhone and Wi-Fi...and its even harder trying to communicate with people when you have a flip phone that's extremely outdated
• St. Louis has a really bad system of public transportation....really bad

¡Adios!