Madrid y Toledo

Hola! I'm in Spain now! For the past three days I've been in Madrid and Toledo. Madrid was really cool. It's a huge city and we ended up walking around most of it...kind of exhausting. We went to see the Prado which is a museum of Spanish painters like El Greco and Goya. The art was amazing. After that we saw the Palacia Royal, which is where Spanish royalty used to live. It was amazing. There were different rooms for the Kings to eat breakfast, put on shoes, get dressed, smoke, etc. Each room was decorated with gold and gorgeous decorations. Me and a few people in our group also visited LaPlaza Mayor, which is the main plaza in Madrid. There are so many stores and alleys off of it with brick streets and old style buildings. All of the buildings are so ornate! Even the stores are in really old elaborate buildings and some of the discotecas are in old churches! There are so many parques with beautiful statues. It's such a modern city but there are so many old world touches that add charm.
After that, we went to Toledo. It's a lot of Cesky Krumlov from the Prague J term trip. It's this big circular city with brick streets and all old buildings. There's also a huge gothic cathedral and other insane buildings. There were all of these narrow roads in the town that could only fit one car at a time and an old Roman aquaduct. There's also a winding road around that city that gave us some amazing views! Toledo's famous for its swords and I guess they even designed the swords for Lord of the Rings. There were lots of cute little shops but there were so many tourists.
The people in my group are really cool. Our group leaders only talk to us in spanish, which can be difficult to understand sometime. This is especially because of the spanish accent with the soft s and t that sounds like "th". They also use vosotros a lot, which I've learned the conjugation for but never really used since most of my spanish teachers have been from South America. The other students and I have started doing this strange thing where we talk in english to each other and then one of us will switch to spanish and the rest of us will just start talking in spanish and then someone will just switch back and we all will. It's very strange but kind of cool since we're all at a similar level. Being here has helped me realize how bad my spanish actually is. I feel like I have no idea how to say something the way I want to. The way I figure out to say it is formal and definitely not the way the locals talk. However, my listening comprehension has improved a lot.
Today we arrived in Valencia and I got to meet my host mother. She's really nice and speaks slowly and simply so that we're able to understand her. We watched some dramatic spanish movie that was on tv and she noted that one of the actresses in it was on one of her favorite tv shows, "mujeres desperadas." So I bonded with her over Desperate Housewives! The apartment we're living in is pretty small, but it's not bad. It's really close to the insanely awesome modern science museum and aquarium. She has a little dog that's really cute and an old cat. So far this has been very exciting but pretty difficult. Getting internet has been very difficult but hopefully soon I'll have everything figured out!