Madrid was an interesting city...not my favorite, but we did some pretty cool things there. One of my favorite days was when we had a presentation given to us at an ARUP office (ARUP is like, the leading engineering firm in the world..anytime there's a big, usually crazy, building going up, they are most likely the ones doing the engineering). So a branch of this huge firm is in Madrid and couple of really cool young engineers gave us a presentation on what their firm is up to...and then they fed us too! After that we got a tour of a Herzog and De Meuron designed museum that was nearing completion...a couple of architects from the firm gave us a tour of this building which had not yet been opened to the public...it was pretty cool! The other really cool thing we got to do in Madrid was go to a bullfight. We all split up when we got to the bullring, me and one of the other girls got lost trying to find our seats, luckily for us the security guy we stopped to get directions from thought we were cute, so he gave us these seats that were way closer then what our tickets were for, so we got to be up close and personal with the matadors and the bulls! It was pretty exciting..definitely an interesting experience, especially when the very first bull was killed right in front of us! ahh! And then a guy got pinned to the wall by a bull...I'm not sure if he actually got gored by the bull's horn or if he was just rammed into the wall, but whatever happened it looked like it hurt!

A couple things I thought were interesting about that bit of culture was that, for one thing, there were a lot of older people there..and a lot of women...and the matadors were all very young. I wasn't expecting that.....and then when a matador did really well it was interesting because they did a victory loop around the ring, and people would throw down hats and scarves and sweaters, and the matador would touch them and then throw them back...kind of like an autograph..? I'm not sure....