DAY 195: La Semana Santa Viene

So another 4 months down in Madrid and it´s time for my Easter holidays and I´m really looking forward to a relaxing week at home. Spain definitely has had both its fun times and hard times and the whole experience is something I will vividly remember.

If I think about work, I came out here terrified, and speaking Spanish all day every day was so intimidating. Luckily my Spanish has improved a lot but with Mabel speaking to me in English all the time, perhaps I should be better. I think the whole thing when learning a language though is confidence and the more you speak it, even if you do make mistakes, the more you will improve. Anyway, despite her always speaking English to me, I have to thank Mabel for a lot. She´s so kind and has always been so supportive of everything and she is a really fantastic businesswoman. On top of that of course we have the fact that she is bloody gorgeous. I know I´m not a lesbian but I definitely am attracted to her ha. Her boyfriend is a lucky lucky man! The rest of the team are lovely too and Mariangeles is another girl who I ´ve really appreciated here. She sits opposite me and we chat all the time (this time in Spanish)…mainly about Ryan Gosling! It´s been really nice sitting with her for the past 8 months and despite her being a good 15 years older, she´s really been a friend. We of course have the people I don´t like though, and for people who know me well, the list of people in this world who annoy me is probably far too high! But anyway, first we have Noelia. Noelia came about a month ago and she is an intern like me but a few years older. Anyway, if I´m going to be honest here, she just absolutely loves herself and I can see her judging me every day and she always makes snide wee comments which piss me off. She´s so patronizing as well and thinks I can´t speak Spanish so just doesn´t like talking to me. Almudena is another one, or “Almu” as she gets called, which I don´t know why cracks me up. She´s nice I guess but just very…very.. dull. Finally, we have the German girl, Alex. It´s very much a love-hate relationship. For an 18 year old she is very close-minded and judgemental and comes across quite rude, but at the same time I do go for coffee breaks with her a lot and today we got on ok so I haven´t closed my opinion completely on her yet. I think she´s just complicated to understand, plus I guess we are just very different people. Anyway, enough of that bitching and back to work – sometimes boring, sometimes difficult and sometimes enjoyable – the matter of the fact is though that it has been a very good and possibly rewarding experience for me.

When I come back after Easter I will hardly have anytime left here and I know I´m going to miss the friends I´ve made out here a lot. I don´t really socialize outside of my work with my colleagues but of course I will miss them too.  If I´m honest we have probably had too many nights out of drinking far too much, doing silly things, kissing boys and munching on McDonalds but that is part of what the year abroad is about, in my opinion (that´s coming from the view of clearly a drunken mess). And of course we have had fun travelling…..Valencia….Lisbon….Toledo….Salamanca… - I literally just want to travel all the time now!

It also took me a while to embrace the Spanish culture. First of all…they eat so bloody much! I still don´t understand how most of them stay so thin – I swear they are eating at every moment of the day whether it be a “snack” (although to me a sandwich is not a snack?) or a big 3 course meal…with of course lots of bread and litres and litres and litres of olive oil. Olive oil is literally put into every single food they have here. You see people buying 5 litre bottles of it in supermarkets and that’s just to get them through the week! I for one am looking like a plump pudding. In addition to that, it took me a while to get used to them eating so late. I have lunch at 3/3.30pm every day and I´ve been out for dinner with friends at midnight, which isn´t even unusual! Spanish timetabling is something else as well…it´s so relaxed and mightily inefficient – the amount of times I have complained about at it this year has led me to write my assessed university essay on the year abroad this year about it. We also have the culture of the men, the very pervy, very sleazy, very sexist men. In clubs they want to grab you at any chance they get, so much so that two of my girl friends have ended up punching men in the face, and I´ve left the club fuming ranting my traditional “I hate men” speech. In the streets they yell at you and ask you to sleep with them and the sad thing is, that you just kind of have to get used to it!

However, as much as I do complain about things though, and I do like to complain, Madrid is a great city. The madrileños are incredibly friendly and welcoming people and the city is beautiful and always thriving. It feels like a city that never sleeps and everything is also all so cheap (apart from make-up…almost every British girl I know here really misses Boots). I can´t really complain about the weather here either – blue skies and well today, its 27 degrees. Of course I am sunburnt, and of course the Spanish are still going round in their unfashionable polo-necks!

Anyway that´s me off for just over a week. A nice big lunch with Sanderson after work today to celebrate and then Newcastle tomorrow followed by HOME. Here´s to my final stint in Madrid after Easter!! Not much longer to go!!!

DAY 41: La Lesbiana

You wouldn´t think it, but the insurance lot really are so funny. I work in Marketing so I don´t actually work with them, which is probably quite good seeing as I tend to make a tit out of myself most of the time I´m with them. Just speaking to a girl named Marta on the internal office chat, who I met on Friday night , I go "Yeah I always feel so stupid when I´m around you guys," she replies "No. We are a curious group because all of us work in the financial world in the Big 4, investment banks or doing a phd related to this....freaks. We work hard in very stressful jobs and that´s why we drink and smoke more than what is recommended, it is our way out, and after the first shisha and a few beers later, we have the IQ of a chicken." It made me laugh. She´s cute. She really is a funny character actually. On Friday she was telling me about how it doesn´t matter if you have sex with someone ugly because you can just turn the lights off and imagine someone else! She said she was joking when she said she imagines Pedro (remember BEAUTIFUL Pedro the big boss man from the first week) when having sex with her boyfriend, but I don´t actually think she was.... Anyway, on Friday night it was Tono´s farewell party and my classiness was truly thrown out the window. I didn´t think I had drunk that much when all of a sudden I started feeling sick. However, I was still "aware of what I was doing" let´s just say, and so I took this moment to go to the bathroom and tactically...you know what. I´m a grim person. However, it worked, I could continue on drinking and the next day, I DIDN´T HAVE A HANGOVER! Fabz fabz fabz. I´m sure I don´t give off a very good impression on these blogs but I don´t really care, I´m 20, Scottish and in Spain.... 

I went to Alacalá on Saturday and vegged out with Liz in front of several "fantastic" films. The first being, The Bling Ring, would recommend but is kind of weird and can´t believe it´s a true story. The second, Despicable Me 2, although sadly we didn´t get to see the end because of stupid streaming sites. The third one was, The Hunchback of Notre Damn. I don´t even remember watching it as a child but I don´t think it should be classed as children´s film....it´s so mean. Poor wee Quazimodo! What´s also embarrassing, is that I actually thought it was a true story up until that point, when I told Liz and she just looked at me like "what you on about?". That night, Liz really got lucky. We were sharing her bed and she said that 80% of the night I was trying to spoon her in my sleep and kept putting my leg over her as though she was my boyfriennd. Clearly my subconscious is telling me something....I´m sure she enjoyed it though...I mean who wouldn´t, I´m a very sexy person..... :/ There was also one point where somehow all the duvet and sheet was wrapped around me and I was trapped for about 5 minutes like a sauasage trying to unravel myself. It was quite a scary experience. I probably just shouldn´t share bed with people. Should probs just become a nun.

On Sunday, Sanderson came round and yet again Cristina cooked us all a lovely lunch, with lots of wine and sex chat of course. Cristina really does make me laugh, on the one side she is motherly and caring and on the other side she is just a hilarious and horny woman. I do love her a little bit. We then all went to smoke some shisha in a cool wee hippie café. We were all so relaxed when leaving that I just couldn´t be bothered getting back on the train.

I had to sit in on a 3 hour long conference today on the exciting topic of Taxes...life today was riveting.