Because I am interested in buildings, and because I was starting to develop a habit of coming home from classes in the early afternoon and crashing for the rest of the day, I resolved that this week I would visit a library every day. There were supposed to be some impressive ones. And maybe I could spend an hour or two on their wi-fi.
On Monday the weather was perfect, so I set out after class, riding the Metro to La Latina. I thought I remembered an impressive modern building there, and if nothing else, the public library branch there was named after the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa.
Just after I popped up out of the metro I came across a stretch of tables set out on the sidewalk. THe weather was perfect, and I realized I hadn't had lunch, so I spent over an hour having a liesurely lunch with a rice-and-egg dish followed by chicken filets so thin and tender I kept forgetting they were chicken and thought I was eating fish.
When I got up from that, it was 3:00. I set off for the library but realized after 100 yards that I had taken the wrong direction. I retraced my steps, tried to follow Google, got lost, and wound up on the Calle de Embajadores where I took the picture shown above.
That was fun, but now I was even farther from the library, and I was getting tired of lugging around my bag with its laptop, textbook, and two phones. Also, I was faced with a set of streets that steeply descended. Much of the central part of Madrid is on a gentle slope, but if I went down these steep streets I'd clearly never get back up. Taking yet another look at the map on my phone, I decided that I would go all the way down the slope to a major street and just take a taxi home. Which I did. I never got to the library, but I had the pleasure of discovering a new corner of town.
Tonight, Tuesday, I'm going with other students to a flamenco performance.
