You can travel the world but nothing comes close to the golden coast

I am writing from the second day off in two consecutive weeks. (Last week -- no school Monday, this week no school Tuesday). This is extra excellent because we always have Fridays off. Two three day weeks in a row! Tomorrow we go to Segovia and that will be almost vacation-like except for the lecture we will attend.

On Sunday night, I went to the European Music Video Awards outdoor-concert-ma-bob along with, oh I don't know, ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND other people. (This may be rounding up, but it is not exaggeration) It was very crowded and very difficult to see anything.

Still, I got pictures of a screen of Jared Leto (be still my heart):

and Katy Perry:

And I got to sing along to California Girls in Madrid, which I found utterly delightful and the Madrileños around me found annoying.

and Linkin Park. When "Linkin Park" is chanted by a lot of Spanish people it sounds more like "Leaky Park". Which I like a lot.

1st surprise of the night: although I don't like Linkin Park very much, I enjoyed their performance.

2nd surprise: KANYE! He was only onstage for about 1 minute with 30 Seconds to Mars but it was delightful nonetheless.
For some reason I thought that this face would be the best one to make for a picture, and in retrospect I'm not sure I was wrong.

Acetie

I think a lot of people think of Spanish food as paella or maybe ham. They should think of it as olive oil. Olive oil is the absolute center of cooking in Spain and they even bring it to you at the table in restaurants:


Salt and olive oil. This is a pretty classy olive oil container, I hope you believe me that there's oil inside.

Kitten update!

Yesterday, I happened to return to the same spot as the man with the kitten. The kitten was still there, and still adorable, but no longer on the man's knee.
I did not take a picture.

Oops

I thought we (the Stanford program) were going to Segovia today.

We're going next week.

What it's all about

Check this out(pun intended):


That's right. I'm an international library member. I've never been so proud.


In case you were confused about why it was so necessary to buy the two croissants for one euro, let me tell you that this weekend I spent 1.90€ on ONE croissant. It was smaller than either of the croissants you get for 50cents. Ludacris.

Things I love about Spain, number 102

GIANT sugar packets. Always.


My bad... you can't really tell the scale in this picture because the cups are smaller here. Rest assured, the sugar packets are giant.

So you want to be a metro-musician

Imma let you in on a tip: have an adorable baby on the train, and have that baby be really into your music. Seriously, these guys cleaned up. I'm not sure the baby wasn't a plant.

Another way to profit off adorableness:
Yes, that is a tiny kitten perched on this man's knee.