Hola from Madrid

Hola! I arrived in Madrid yesterday morning after one of the weirdest and most annoying flight experiences I've had. To make a long story short, the guy that I was sitting next to on the flight was annoying and invading my personal space and ultimately tried to get a little bit handsy. I had to tell him off - after which there were no more issues with him - but I basically got less than one hour of sleep on the flight. After what seemed like an interminable voyage, we landed. After I made it through passport control and collected my luggage, I took a bus to the train station at Atocha to meet a friend of the friends whose apartment I'm renting. My cell phone wasn't getting any signal at all, so I had to ask a nice woman on the bus to let me use her phone to make the call to let my friend's friend know that I was arriving. The woman was very friendly about it and that helped to get the bitter taste from the flight out of my mouth. Soon the friend arrived at the meet up point and gave me the key. I, then, headed to the apartment to settle in and take a bit of a nap.

I spent part of the day running a few errands - acquiring a Spanish cell phone and doing a little bit of grocery shopping - and part of the day walking around and taking some photos so as to try to keep myself awake until I could reasonably go to bed, sleep for 8-9 hours, and get my clock mostly reset. After a while I headed back and made myself a sandwich, watched a couple of episodes of Downton Abbey, read for 10 minutes, and went to bed.

This morning I got up and headed to the Biblioteca Nacional, arriving just as it was opening at 9:00. I had to get my reader's card renewed, which was something of a process because I had my passport on me but I wasn't carrying my driver's license or my faculty ID. (It doesn't seem wise to carry all my ID around with me.) So it was a bit of a process to get that sorted out. But before long I had a sermon from 1649 in my hands, and was at work in a beautiful and inspiring work space once again. So all was well.

Right now my only complaint is that I haven't figured out the trick of getting the pilot on so I don't yet have hot water in the apartment. I took a very fast and quite cold shower yesterday. I'm hoping that I can figure it out tonight because I'd really like to go for a run tomorrow, but I don't want to get too sweaty until I know that I can take a hot shower.