I didn't see any bull fights...

If I had that many [frequent flyer] miles, I'd just show up at the airport, look up at one of those big destination boards, pick a place and go.

-Up in the Air

On Thursday, it looked like there was a pretty boring weekend ahead. I had no homework to do, and, except for a small cultural festival in my neighborhood, there was nothing to do. By Friday night, I was in Madrid.

Madrid has lots of hills.

Originally, I had not planned on going to Madrid, since everyone goes there and I don't really want to go to a place that "everyone goes" to. But Thursday I rolled out of bed with nothing to do and began poking around the websites of Ryanair and Easyjet, two low-cost airlines that operate out of London, but there were no cheap fares. I wasn't looking for anything in particular, I just wanted to go somewhere, even if I had never heard of it before. And so, I clicked on Ciudad Real. The flight was 58 pounds each way, about $92.

Ciudad Real, as it turns out, is in the middle of nowhere. The ground was completely dark all the way down to the airport, making it hard to tell when we'd land in Spain. It's a tiny city, and the Ryanair flight I booked was the only jet airplane that flew out of the airport, which was just built in 2008. The airport's lone duty free store looks like a scene from some apocalyptic movie since it's completely empty. About 100 people pass through this airport every day, and it felt dead.

No one really flies into Ciudad Real and stays there unless that's where they live. Spain's great high-speed rail service runs the 99 miles between Ciudad Real and central Madrid in under an hour, making the airport a good alternative to Madrid's main airport.

A woman named Leanne sat next to me on the crowded bus from the airport to the train station in Ciudad Real. She was in her thirties and talked with the mouth of a sailor. She was nearing the end of a journey from her home in Wales to Madrid for the weekend with two of her friends. Like the bed and breakfast owners in Blackpool, she had been to the United States once before, but not to see New York or Hollywood or the Grand Canyon, but to go to Disney World and soak up some of America's entertainment. When I asked what I should do while I was in the United Kingdom, she replied, "nothing." I still can't figure out if the British really don't like their country or if it's all just an act, an unspoken British code to pretend to hate the country in order to protect the good parts from foreigners.

Spanish band playing in Plaza del Sol.

Statue of a bear and a tree, the symbol of Madrid.

Madrid itself was beautiful. It was almost midnight when I stepped out of the train station, but Plaza Sol, the square near my 'Hostal' where I stayed, was just beginning to come to life. Plaza Sol and Plaza Mayor are home to the best street performers I've ever seen, including some who looked like they were levitating or falling or headless. (I still can't figure out their secrets.) Sunday morning at the 'Rastro,' Madrid's biggest market, I watched teenagers buying shirts bearing images of American culture, including t-shirts and belt buckles featuring The Nightmare Before Christmas and Green Day and other icons. Madrid's cafeterias are great for solo travelers. In these restaurants, diners order at the counter and sit in a bar-like setting on a stool at a counter until the staff brings out a sandwich on a baguette, still warm from being fresh from the oven.

Metropolis building on Gran Via, Madrid's Broadway.

The museums of Madrid were excellent. The famous Museo del Prado featured countless 500-year-old paintings, but the most interesting exhibits I saw were at the Reina Sofia. This modern art museum had a room full of newspapers from September 12, 2001, all of which had haunting pictures of the burning World Trade Center on the front. The newspapers were from all over the world, published in English, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and Mandarin. There was also another room, arranged by the same artist (Hans-Peter Feldmann), with 100 photographs. The first picture was of a newborn baby. The last picture had a frowning old lady in it. Each picture in between represented a year in life, from birth to ninety-nine. After I looked at each portrait, I stood in front of the 20-year-old's picture. His was one of the only faces with a smile. I looked to my left and noticed that the pictures only stretched to the corner of the room, from nineteen down to newborn, a distance short enough so I could make out each individual photograph. Then I looked to the right, and saw the long line of photos stretching all the way to 99. I felt young.

I Hate You, Bike Thief

Yesterday I went outside, helmet in hand, hoping to go for a bike ride down Regents Street. When I opened the front door, it was raining, so I went inside. When it stopped raining, I picked up my helmet again to see if the weather would hold out this time. But again, I had to turn around and go inside because my bike wasn't there. Even though it was in much-less-than-perfect condition, some thief had clipped its lock off the post and taken it away. Again, I rode the elevator upstairs and put my helmet down. I went outside to walk to the West End instead. It was slower, but I stopped to look in some stores and even found a book written by the professor who teaches my Monday night class. My walk looked like this. At least I hadn't invested much money in the bike (Or the lock, but I guess that goes without saying) and I got to take it to Manchester and Liverpool and Blackpool and I definitely got my £75 worth.

This is where I used to park my bike. Note the absence of bicycle.

It's been a pretty dull weekend. Today I wrote a long essay about immigrants in Britain over the past 150 years. Friday I went to the Docklands Museum with a class for the third time.

Thursday, however, was a lot of fun. I went to York, a really old English city. Old York is different from New York in every way. It's small and slow-paced and quaint. It's so old that it had an old wall built by the Romans that people can walk on. I felt like I was walking on a mini Great Wall of China. Then there's the castle, built in 1068. The castle just looks like a little round thing on a hill, but it does have little slits for shooting arrows out of like in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and it's incredible that it's survived a thousand years. York's town center is home to the Shambles, a street that used to be filled with butcher shop but now houses gift stores. Shambles looks like something from a movie with its 500 year old storefronts. Google named it the most picturesque street in Britain earlier this year, and it's not hard to see why. The second floor of all the crooked buildings hangs over the street for a really old-time feel. York is also home to a giant cathedral called York Minster. It feels as big as St. Paul's or any major cathedral in Europe. It completely dominates the little Tudor shops below, casting a big shadow on the rest of the city.

Old Roman wall.

Shambles

Now that I know how cool York is, I'm ashamed to admit that I wouldn't have gone there at all if it weren't for the National Rail Museum. For someone who likes trains, this museum is amazing. For those of you who don't like trains, well, I guess it's good you stayed home. This museum was really cool, it had the actual Hogwarts Express used in the movies, a Japanese bullet train, and railcars used to bring royalty around the country. I want my wedding here. Part of the museum was converted from an old cargo dock/shed on the railroad, and it's really pretty. It has the glass ceiling like most British rail stations have. The museum's set up elegant tables underneath, and visitors can eat dinner in an antique railway station. Since renting out Grand Central Terminal isn't really an option, the rail museum is a great place for a wedding.

Really long name of some place in Wales.

This is where I'm getting married!.

My train to York left from Kings Cross Station. It was then that I realized that Platform 9 was barricaded with automatic gates, and only ticketed passengers are allowed in. I guess I'll never find out I'm not a muggle.

My life here is starting to look like Homer's when he was in New York.

The trees turn yellow in the fall here, too.

I've fallen into a sort of routine here in London. Not that I'm bored of it yet, but I've been here long enough so it feels like going to class, getting homework done, volunteering at the SHINE school, biking to a new market for lunch each Sunday afternoon, and walking down to the Thames on a clear night are things I've done for years.

Chapel at King's College in Cambridge

I've been staying around London recently, largely because throughout the first half of October I have class on Fridays. I don't have the luxury of four-day weekends to travel into Europe right now, but I'm taking advantage of this by taking day trips. Saturday was spent on the school-organized Cambridge trip. Cambridge is a college town that feels very small. With one of the world's most famous universities with some of the world's greatest thinkers as alumni, Cambridge would be a fun and beautiful place to go to school. After I finished the guided tour of the town, some friends and I shopped around in the stores that lined the street and got some lunch.

Punting on the river in Cambridge. The boats move by a pole that's pushed off the bottom of the shallow river by the guy standing up, a process called punting.

Cambridge University is famous for, among others, Watson and Crick, Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, and Francis Bacon

Street in Cambridge with shops and hardly any cars.

I've still been getting around London, too. We've had great weather so I've been taking walks around the neighborhood, and today for one of my architecture classes I went over to the old docks in East London. The warehouses are not used for industry any more, but they make a unique neighborhood of apartments built on a quiet canal. I also saw the Shard, a giant skyscraper that will be the tallest building in London when it's finished.

London on a clear afternoon

January is still far away, but I'm in the process of picking classes for next semester. Seeing every class I've already taken laid out on the planner made me realize how I'm not that far away from the end of college. I'd probably feel better about all this if I hadn't read this depressing article about unemployment amongst people in their 20s yesterday.

Haven't written one of these about London in a while.

I'm not a big fan of the 'study' in study abroad. This weekend I stayed in London because I knew I wouldn't read 100 pages and write the two essays I had to get done if I went off to explore the European continent. Even with the work, I took time to see more of London. I went to the National Gallery, where there's lots of pictures of people I've never heard of (And a few that I have-Charles Darwin, Paul McCartney, and Winston Churchill among them), as well as some nice Renaissance and Impressionist exhibits. One exhibit was photos taken just this spring of British immigrants to New York City. It was interesting to read about the things they missed about the UK and what brought them to New York. Many were quoted missing British humor but loving the concept of the "American Dream"-the ability to start with nothing but aspirations of fame and fortune and realistically hope to achieve these dreams. Some mentioned that Americans heard their accents and immediately made the British feel welcome. I would like to see an exhibit like this of Hispanic or black immigrants and read about their experiences in New York. I think it would be different.

Sunday morning I went to Spitalfields Market. It is very expensive for a market, but it did have some nice things. Friday I took a 20 mile bike ride out to the Northwest area of London, a place called Edgeware. Located at the end of the Northern Line on the Underground, Edgeware is a middle-class residential area. Think of it as London's equivalent of the outer areas of Queens in New York-a generic neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.

Last Wednesday I started volunteering at an Islington elementary school. I love it! The students are great. While some of the boys in the class are disruptive (The teacher has an aid or two in class at all times helping out), the students I was working with are really sweet, although I had forgotten how hard scissors are for seven-year-olds! They all have wonderful accents, although in their eyes I'm the one with the accent. One boy asked if I was from South Africa. I guess the ties from Britain's empire days still exist, since both the students and my own professors seem to mention the former colonies often and they seem to be the countries the British know most about. Today I went to the school again to volunteer.

Last night I went to see Blood Brothers, a musical running in London's West End, a slightly-less-glitzy version of New York's Broadway. The story of two twins separated at birth was, I thought, quite good with funny dialouge and top-quality singing. Everyone I went to the show with hated it, though. They said the humor was of poor taste and the plot was boring. Maybe I'm the one with weird taste.

It was sunny and warm today. It's been raining in the northeastern United States for days. London gets less than half the annual rainfall of New York. Your mind is blown.