El Escorial, Nights Out, and Other Adventures

Today, we visited this place called El Escorial which was a monastery built by Felipe II. It's a really interesting building because there is both a palace and a monastery but the palace is built like a monastery and the monastery is built like a palace in terms of simplicity/complexity and money spent on construction. The place itself was really beautiful, the outside looks like this (according to google images...):

The inside has a really cool layout. The rooms for the king and queen are both really simple but are also side by side next to the altar so that they could technically hear the mass being said from their beds. There was also this really cool room where if you stood in opposite corners you could talk into the wall and hear each other as if it were a telephone. There was something about the way the room was built that the sound traveled up with the curve of the ceiling and down to the other corner. 

The church itself was really, really beautiful. Here is a picture (again, from google. you couldn't take pics inside):

It was absolutely enormous and also built in a way that you could give 4 masses at the same time. There was also a really cool library with books even from the 6th century, one of the oldest copies of the Qur'an, and musical compositions. Also, very cool. Here is yet another google image:

On Thursday night, we went out to this club in the center of the city. We originally wanted to go to this salsa club so we were meeting people up in Sol, one of the neighborhoods. We ended up seeing a club promoter and instead went to this club called Moonshine. It was a lot of fun and there was a lot of dancing. Here is an example of dancing:

The club was actually really fun and surprisingly played a lot of American music including Spice Girls, Beyoncé, and this throwback 

We made a lot of friends with some of the people in Taj and Antonio's program through Middleburry College and it was fun! The next day Zulayne and I had to get up super early to go see some museums aka El Prado y La Reina Sofia. They were both really cool museums but I think I liked La Reina Sofia better because it was more contemporary and it was easier for me to interpret the paintings. The social and political and emotional messages conveyed through more contemporary paintings can be so much more powerful. The tour guide was explaining how artists these days often feel like they have more liberty and freedom of expression and artistry in order to change things up and get the audience to think about something in a different way (especially since we have movies and film to capture life in a more direct way). 

I've been having some issues with my host mom and I am going to change houses. I don't think that it will be in the center of the city any longer but ultimately the change will be for the best because I think I'll be much happier. Tomorrow I have to meetings with families so hopefully everything goes well!