WEDNESDAY

Leganes Tour

I’m one of three students in my program taking courses at the Leganés engineering campus of UC3M.

Leganés

• it’s a very new campus
• it’s quite small, just a few buildings
• the classes actually have computers in them, unlike UMass

El Prado

In the afternoon, we had a tour of the Museo del Prado, a huge art museum. We primarily talked about the works of El Greco, Goya, and Velázquez.

Pictures weren’t allowed. I’m not much of an art person so I can’t tell you much about the significance of what we saw. Apparently Goya’s really famous but the only Goya I ever heard of was the bean brand.

Here is one of the “famous” pieces we saw, apparently a masterpiece of Velázquez

Las Meninas

Most of the stuff was just regular old art to me. The one collection that caught my eye was some flower garland paintings by Daniel Segher. I like the geometry of them.

Garland of Flowers with a Sculpture of the Virgin

The museum is so big, I’m sure I only only saw a small fraction of what it contains.

THURSDAY

Hey, that’s today! I finally had free time today to get up to to date with my posts.

UC3M Orientation

Getafe campus

8am we were on our way to UC3M Getafe for an orientation event

• intro video had hilariously overdone stock footage
• the folks from the US Embassy are chill
• random Spanish guitar performance break, very impressive
• free t-shirt and food afterwards

Allow me to elaborate on that last point.

A feast of churros

When they said there was churros and chocolate (chocolate con churros) in the cafeteria for us, I was expecting a little table that everyone would crowd around and it would just be a mess like all other college food events. I was not prepared for the scale of this golden brown spectacle.

This was just one of two rooms filled with these tables

A close up of one of the plates

The chocolate that you dip them in tasted like liquid chocolate pudding. It was really good and I felt gross for eating so many.

Grocery skills

Today was a smoother day for buying groceries.

• I’ve been coming prepared with a bag since they charge for them here
• I finally found a store that sells proper tupperware
• I knew to weigh my fruit before bringing it to the register
• I paid and left no problem

There are tons of supermarkets here, I’ve seen at least six of them within just a few minutes of the residence.

I also want to point out the cool shopping cart things they have here. While they do have traditional shopping carts too, I more commonly see these trolley things used. It’s like the lovechild of a shopping cart and basket. It has four omnidirectional wheels on the bottom so it rolls really smoothly like a nice suitcase.

Matt’s quest for bread

I’m trying to adopt the Spanish staple of bread with olive oil. The bread I find at supermarkets has been kind of hard. I noticed some people walking out of the little Alimentación shops with bread under there arm. I had already checked those places out and thought they were just convenience stores with bags of chips and other packaged snacks. But sure enough, they specialize in bread too. I just had to ask for it behind the counter and I got a nice warm stick of bread, despite it being eveningtime. For 0.39€ I could definitely make a habit of this.

Tomorrow is the first day even that I don’t have an event I have to attend with my program. I look forward to sleeping in for once.