Tuna

This Friday night I hopped on a train out of the city to Alcalá de Henares, a 35 minute ride away, to visit my friend Kate (from Dallas). She just recently moved over there and I decided to go visit since it is a cute college town and the cañas and tapas are pretty cheap.

Our walk from the train station to the first bar proved very eventful. First we run into this Romanian guy who explains the entire story of some castle in Transylvania where they used to execute people. Interesting. Then while walking from bar 1 to bar 2, we are stopped and serenaded by a tunero from Salamanca (see example picture above of the amazingly nerdy Rick Steves playing tambourine with a tuna in Salamanca). He follows us for a few blocks and then takes us to the big Tuna reunion dinner. We are escorted to this back banquet room full of tuneros and their famillies, and are given jamón ibérico, mussels on potato chips, empanadas, and copious amounts of cerveza. Every few minutes, tuneros from different places (Salamanca, Alcalá, Canary Islands, etc) break out into music and everyone starts singing. Pretty amusing.

In other news, my wallet was returned to the police station, complete with everything but my 2 debit cards and my money. They even put my keys (worth 39 euro) in my coin purse and left my El Corte Ingles gift card that had 38 euro on it. Such nice thieves here in Madrid.

Next week is my first full week of work, afternoon private classes and Arabic classes. After three months of vacation it will be very difficult to wake up at 7:20 every morning. Time to get back to work...