Some pictures from my first few days!  How cool!

For the past year or so I´ve been scheming as to how I could productively spend some time in Madrid.  I finally decided that I would make it part of my thesis, and conduct some in depth interviews with Spanish PR practitioners.  Hopefully this sort of networking will prove useful if I do decide to spend a year or two here after graduation.

More on that later.

So the details and whatnot were defined, apartment booked, and ticket bought. Yesterday afternoon I finally arrived in my favorite city.

Got to the apartment and after a little exploring was reminded why I love Madrid so much.  One could say that my street is not lacking in character.  Or prostitutes for that matter.

It´s a walking street which connects two main areas of Madrid, Plaza del Sol and the Gran Vía.  Little shoe shops, clothing stores, cafés and the occasional sex shop and lady of the night dot the street.

The former three are to be expected in a touristy area, the latter two were a surprise.

You may ask how I am so sure that they are streetwalkers.  Well, it quickly became obvious.

I was sitting at a little cafe just enjoying a bocadillo and Coke light, and this girl standing around in a leopard print catsuit caught my eye.  I thought geeez, if I didn´t know better I´d think that girl was a whore!

And then I saw three other girls in equally provocative clothing catcalling the occasional passerby.

And then I saw one of the girls-not the original- walk away discreetly with a young man.

Ah. They certainly are strumpets.

Usually this would be more cause for concern, considering I have an apartment just down the way, but I am entirely reassured knowing that next to my apartment is the police station.  Seemingly because of that, they tend to stay a little further up the street.

I´ll try to discreetly take a picture at some point as proof, although I´m not sure if they would appreciate that. 

Sunday was amazing. I spent the whole day horseback riding through ruins and the Sacred Valley.  I don’t know how it can get much better than that.

After meeting my horse, Lucero, we took off for the ruins at Moray.  Moray was an agricultural lab for the Incas, where they developed growing methods and new varieties of vegetables.  Each terrace is a separate micro-climate.

After that we had a picnic lunch with an amazing view then continued on to an overlook of artisan salt mines.

All in all, it was a wonderful day, and on a scale of amazingness and incredibleness it’s right up there with hiking Wayna Picchu.