Ya estoy en Madrid!

I have reached a level of tired that I forgot existed. I got about an hour of sleep on the flight last night, broken into two half hour segments. This was a huge improvement over my last flight to Spain, when I didn't sleep at all, but today was a struggle nonetheless.
My awesome travel buddy more than made up for the sleep issues though ;) The whole plane situation was a bit of a touchy subject in the Miller household the past week or two. My sister is studying abroad in Sevilla this year through Rotary's Youth Exchange Program (see megnespana.blogspot.com if you want to know more!) and she was insistent that we were absolutely not going to fly together. But as our plans started to finalize, we realized we both needed to arrive in Spain today. And we ended up not only on the same plane, but (and this is actually really weird, since we booked our flights two months apart and through different travel agencies) sitting just one seat apart from each other (the guy in between us let me switch with him so we were actually next to each other). I guess we were just meant to be together on this trip, and it turned out to be the perfect start to this adventure, since we were both co-conspirators in each other´s crazy plans all along. It was only fitting that we got to share the excitement of seeing the Galician coast and watching the sunrise over Spain as we approached Barajas! And I even got Meg to admit that she was glad we were flying together- huge victory!

Lessons learned today include: it is zero fun hauling two suitcases and a backpack on the Madrid metro, especially when you have to change trains three times and are running on one hour of sleep. I'm so glad I limited myself to only one checked bag! I don´t know what I would have done with two 50-lb bags! This whole process was made even more fun by the fact that they don´t always have escalators in the metro stations, so several times I had to carry a 50-lb bag up or down an entire flight of stairs. I was very glad to finally ditch the bags at the hostal (and I think I got my workout for the week).

Today has been spent exploring Madrid and trying to stay awake til sunset (it was absolutely worth it! I went up to the Templo de Debod and it was gorgeous). I'll post pictures when I buy a new cable since I (shocker) left the cable for my camera in New Hampshire. Still waiting to see what else I forgot (probably something important). Tomorrow (Monday) I have my first day of orientation, and Wednesday I'll be off to Tudela finally! Gotta be up early for orientation tomorrow so hasta mañana everyone. I have a lot of sleep to catch up on!