Sometime in the middle of the night Lijah came back from his midnight rendezvous with his lover Trina woke me to inform me that his knee was in tremendous pain and that he was considering going home. I asked that we continue the conversation in the morning as I was beyond confused and covered in slumber sauce. The next morning Elijah was a living dead zombie face and we decided that if he had any hope of continuing on the trip that he had to take this day to recover. I agreed to go chaperone the helpless girl babies and then I would return in the noche and the next day we would have buckets of fun as a complete family once more.
Because I woke up at 10:21 I had a hard time getting to the hostle / showering / looking decent in time. Sprinted across the spanish streets in a horse like fashion and yet I still arrived late. 10:07 dangit.. They left a note. Said they were sick of waiting and had gone to a foodery without me. Luckily I knew where the nearest foodery was and so I went forth and ran there without the utmost speed. I found them inspecting a tower of meat and tackled them both showering them with my love. They asked where Lijah was and I thought it best to just pretend I had no idea who he was. Then I expertly created a story about how I woke in the middle of the night to find him cradling a ball of socks and wailing for Trina his true love. This quelled their questions and soon we were on our way to Madrid. I found out Petri dish (Kathy's friend), was a professional photographer and so I was glad to learn from her as I had recently begun taking photos with my spunky Nikon D80. The difficulty with toting along with a pro photographer is that they will literally stop every 1.4 ft. to take a photo. This makes traveling a arduous process. However, one-thousand hours later we exited our Madrid bound bus and arrived at the America station once again. We immediately headed for the metro and took the grey line to the red to the green to the purple to the blue to the yellow to the station of Sol where we saw such iconic monuments as "The Madrid Oso (bear)", "The Plaza Meyor", "Gran Via Calle" and "The Prado Museo". We got some pictures of buildings and street performers and one performer scared Katie and then blew her 34 kisses so we gave him 5 cents. We also saw an invisible man and a man dressed as a tree. At one point I saw a older man with a large mustache and newspaper. He was full of character and I had to take his picture so Kathy encouraged me to go ask him. I did. He said vale. I took it. We became best buds. Later we rounded a corner to see some kind of mechanism floating above us. We learned that later tonight there would be a tree lighting performance / ceremony. We promised we would return and the spaniards cheered with glee at our acceptance of their foreign tradition. We had heard that there was an interesting plaza a few streets away and so we wandered in that direction. Eventually we found a huge open courtyard surrounded by beautiful old buildings and mosaics. Inside there were tons of small shops and stands and street perfumers. We met a few bums. We played with giant bubbles. I nearly knocked over thirty artists aisles. We were molested by a demon who called Katie a witch. We met an asian princess / man / clam. We watched in awe and wonder as a group of old spanish women in giant fur coats giggled and laughed and guffawed at what looked like a wooden deer head connected to a body of sparkly pompoms. We loved them. We met them and took their picture. We were hassled by a fat smoking spiderman and an angry charlie chaplin lookalike. But mostly we just fell in love with Spain. Later the girls had this idea. We bought some mistletoe and we found couples who were holding hands young and old and Katie would sneak up behind them like a tricky ferret while Petri filmed it and I would shout "Un BESO!" from the crowd. Then the couple would first be confused and second they would smile and kiss. It was a lot of fun although some couples never made it to the second step. We also found a man painting a painting of three naked women sitting down and facing away from him so we sat in front of him positioned just like the women in his picture and modeled for him. He was so grateful all he could to was shake his head and giggle mumbling about americans. By now it was darkish and the crowd was thronging around us. We decided to make our way back to the lighting ceremony. Petri saw something bright and shiney on the way there and was distracted so we bought some sparklers and waved them around like three year olds. I tried to give one of mine to a real three year old but he got scared and ran away. I wasn't taking no for an answer though so I went back to the man and bought six whole packets. Then we would light them and give them away to passing families. It was surprisingly hard to do at first but once you start yelling "Gratis!" and shoving them into people's hands we were able to bring bright shininess to much of Madrid. I finally got one to a three year old too. After that little philanthropic excursion we jaunted over to the main plaza to watch the Lighting ceremony. It was incredible. Any description I put here will be tepid but basically there were four massive bicycle like contraptions spinning 5o feet in the air and held aloft by a crane. Atop these contraptions were violinists and angel dancers that were constantly throwing confetti and sparkly glitter. There was also a giant red dressed woman in the center singing Ave Maria with balloons flowing out of her dress bottoms. Another girl fell out after the balloons and danced hanging upside-down. All this while fire works and streamers were shooting out of their eyes. It was glorious and about a thousand Madridians stood below with mouths agape as the whole performance took place. After our minds were blown by the day's dream like activities we explored a department store to get warm and then walked some famous streets stopping at a local bar to dance and at a local cafe to eat. We were soon ambushed by a gaggle of Bombaros (firemen) who proceeded to pour hot sticky spanish flirting all over Petri.. Katie and I were worried. The firemen wouldn't let Katie sit on a bag of trash she found in the street so she decided to tell them a story about Petri never being able to swallow apples in revenge (it was amazing she told the whole story in what limited spanish she knew). The burly firemen wanted to show Petri their fireman pole in the firehouse but after we found out that most of them were former stripers we decided that it was a bad idea to slide down their pole (no double entrendre intended) we escaped by the skin of our teeth. Soon after we saw a flamenco dancer and were chased by men pretending to be statues. We also spent some time convincing a deranged kathy not to jump off a rock wall and Petri (who is also a professional dancer) performed a perfect flamenco for us. After we had explored all the shops and all the alleys of Madrid we walked past the Prado on our way back to the Metro and headed back to Alcala for some glorious pizza. Once in Alcala we became thoroughly lost and started to loose our minds with hunger and sleepiness. Luckily a pizza shop was found and we ordered two large toppinged pizzas. We talked for hours as we ate and I complemented Petri's beautiful jaw and childlike sense of wonder. Her beauty amazes me to this day. After we stuffed or faces like drunken lebanese sailors we sauntered outside and waited for our bus for 100 hours! Right as we were considering leaving to walk home the bus came. I walked the girls to their hostel and we agreed to meet at noon the next day. I then walked home and stupidly talked to Lijah for something akin to 5 hours while uploading and editing photos… Then I passed out.
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