Did She Get it Like Andrew Warshall?

Location: Madrid, Spain

Wednesday June 9, 2010

After leaving the Prado, I met half of the Madrid the City class at the McDonald’s in Sol. People craving American fast food is a very common phenomenon in our program, even though some of the people who do don’t even eat fast food at home. I wonder why that’s so. Maybe it’s because fast food is so much fancier here. There’s in-person ordering, and there’s self-service, where you order from a machine. Imagine one of those self-checkouts at the grocery store or the self-check-ins at the airport. It’s like that, but with your fast food. I don’t think you get a smile for free from the machine though. Shame. It goes along with the Spanish culture of not having good service. Hey, people don’t tip here. So there’s no point for the waiters to be nice. The seating area upstairs was nice. McDonald’s even tries to be faux-healthy by papering the walls with tasteful giant-ass photographs of fresh fruits and putting fake plastic carrots and other vegetables in the glass separations. Isn’t that strange décor when people are eating Big Macs and McFlurries? I didn’t get a McFlurry, because I wanted to save my stomach for our dinner party.

Yes, that’s right. Lauren, Jade, and I had a little dinner party at Jade’s apartment. Lauren and I are both at homstays without kitchen privileges, so our families provide us breakfast and lunch, and then we’re suppose to fend for ourselves for dinner. Our families expect us to go out with friends for dinner each night, but we plan to eat with each other at the park more so our food budget doesn’t go through the roof. What’s nice is that lunch is the heaviest meal here (to put it lightly). In one meal, Carmen gave me a large plate of spaghetti, three pieces of steak, a handful of small potatoes, and an apple. Phew! So I try to eat a small snack and light dinner after lunch. Anyhoo, it was nice to cook our own dinner though. We’re thinking of making it a weekly thing and maybe a movie afterwards.

We decided to cook arroz con pollo or rice and chicken, so we bought fresh vegetables and chicken from Cortes Inglés, a major department/grocery/everything-you-can-think-of store in Madrid. I cannot believe how much time we spent standing in front of the ice cream section, trying to decide on the flavour. Oy vey. When we left Cortes Ingles, we came upon a bunch of people crowded around this old lady who was lying on the sidewalk. We thought she had fainted or fallen over, but then we saw that there was blood all over her face. Maybe from a nose bleed? I didn’t get close enough to see if she had an open flesh wound. We wondered what happened. I don’t think violent crimes are common at all in Madrid, despite it being a big city. I guess it’s because clueless tourists are so much easier to rob, that it’s not even worth the energy to open confront people for their wallets.

We made way more arroz con pollo than we had planned. I guess Jade forgot just how much rice expanded during the cooking process when she was adding the rice in the pot. The recipe called for the vegetables and the chicken to be cooked first in chicken broth. Then the rice to be cooked within that broth, flavoured by the bell peppers, onions, garlic, and chicken. Nomnomnomz. I still have a tupperwareful in my fridge right now.

Afterwards, we studied for our Spanish midterms together (Jade and Lauren are in the same class) while we took our ice cream: Nata and chocolate. Jade even made herself a hand-stirred milkshake. It was my first time seeing that. I guess I’m so used to the dining halls’ make-your-own-milkshake/smoothies-with-whatever-the-hell-you-want-but-leave-the-mess-for-us-to-clean-up blender stations, that I completely forgot you could also make them by hand.