Settling in and Toledo

Sorry I haven't posted in a while (Check out below for pics of the dogs!).

I've been busy with adjusting to the time, finding my way around the city and campus, and just life in general. I live on the Southeast side of Madrid. Campus is on the Northwest side. It takes me about 45 min to get to campus now, but in this program we have to find our own apartment by calling and looking up ads on the internet. So I'm looking for a place closer to campus, but still a reasonable price. Currently, I'm looking at a neighborhood around a Metro stop that is about two stops away from campus and five or so from the center of downtown. It is called Argüelles-Moncloa. The neighborhood is mostly students or young professionals. It has lots of stores and cafés and little restaurants. It also has a park, Parque del Oeste, ("Park of the West") on two sides of it.

A reasonable price for renting a room in a piso, "apartment," as we in the US know them), including utilities, is about 400-420 Euro (about $575-$600). Utilities here run about four to five times more than in the States. The place I am looking at is 380 Euro which is definitely a good deal for the area, but I have yet to see it and I would be living with a 26 year old engineer. He wants to live with a foreign exchange student, which is a plus, but I assume that means he wants to speak English, which doesn't do much for helping me with learning Spanish (kind of the reason I came...). So I think I'll keep looking... Luckily I still have 3 weeks-ish.

Yesterday we went to one of the coolest places I have ever been, TOLEDO! It's one of the oldest Spanish cities that has gone virtually untouched since about the 1500's. Narrow roads, brick and stone houses right next to each other, a huge wall for protection, Spain's second largest cathedral and a palace, El Alcázar. The city is situated on top of a hill surrounded on 3 side by cliffs cut by the río Tajo, below. This makes for some of the best defenses in battle, which is why it has constantly been inhabited. Its one of the few places left where you can see the "Clash and Mingling" of the 3 major religions that were in Spain: Catholic churches built by moors with moorish architecture, synagogs with moorish designs on the ceilings. This style of architecture is called "arquitectura mudeja." Also there are Gothic churches and monasteries and two huge bridges on either side of the city that cross the river hundreds of feet below. Im gonna put some pics on facebook. I'll post the link here too so you can get to it. SO cool!