This weekend (March 5-9) was John Carroll Weekend, an annual event that is held in a different city every year, from Tokyo to NYC to Berlin. This year it happened to be taking place about 2 hours away from us in Madrid, so Thursday I traveled to Madrid via train after the end of my CIEE class, getting to the hostel around 7 pm. That left me with about 5 seconds to get ready to go to that night’s reception at the grand Casino de Madrid, which isn’t a casino at all but rather a really amazing private club built in 1910 which today houses works of art that are considered national treasures. If we hadn’t been part of an event there, we’d never have been allowed in. But when the prince of Asturias, Felipe II, is an alum of your school, you get to have receptions at the Casino de Madrid. And so we did. Here’s a photo of Tim, Amanda, Paul, Emilia, me, Beth S., Beth K. and Maren inside the beautiful casino. You can't see the background all that well, but trust me, it wasn't too shabby. And yes, this number of people all stayed in ONE room at the hostel.
There were tons of free drinks and endless hors d’ouvres, and then president DeGioia and Prince Felipe spoke. It was hard to actually meet the prince, but we all took really lame pictures of ourselves with him in the background, or in the case of Beth and Paul and myself, he’s in the foreground and we’re jammed into the photo around his tie. This photo came from someone else, so unfortunately it's really small. I think you can see it bigger if you click on it. Observe:
And see the expressions of sheer awe on our faces just after Beth, Paul and I took that photo:
Later we went to a club called JOY, where all of the following things happened:
1) Drinks cost like 10 Euros (over $15) apiece
2) I lost my loaned cell phone on the floor packed with like 1,000 people and somehow found it later that night
3) around 3 am, the curtain on steps where we were all dancing opened up to reveal a clearly transvestite singer with dancers dressed all in white, approximately 6 inches from our faces, which had previously been completely concealed. Fantastic. Observe Sarah and me in total shock as the show begins literally right in front of us (note the dancers dressed in white, behind us on the left):
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