My summer 2009

This past summer I had the opportunity to go to Madrid, Spain. One of my mother's brother lives there. I went there with my grandparents for about 50 days. I had a great time. The point is that going there for that long helped me to understand, more or less, the Spanish culture.

The day I arrived, we went for a walk with my uncle's girlfriend. It really amazed me to see so many people walking in the streets, despite the fact Madrid is a touristic city, a lot of persons, including my uncle, walk to arrive to their destiny.

The first time I used the subway, some Romanian girls stole my grandmother's wallet. That left me a really bad impression about security in Spain, especially in places like bus stations and the subway. But it didn't matter much at the end because a few weeks later I started to use the bus and the subway by myself.

It was really weird for me to see people reading in every free moment they had to do it. For example, people in the subway read, even they only have 10 minutes to do it, but they read. In the park you could find a lot of persons from all ages reading while having a tent. I liked the idea of going to the park and read, so I did it a couple times.

At Madrid, there is this incredible park called "Jardines del Buen Retiro". It is enormous. It has grass all over the place, skating rinks, artificial lakes, many fountains, ponds, a crystal palace, ducks, among other good things. What was impressive of that park is that it was always full of people. Parents with their children, people exercising, people reading, old-people exercising clubs, skaters, and bike riders.

I like the part of the food because I ate food from a lot of styles. I tried my uncle's style, Indian food, food from different regions of Spain, Hungarian food (wasn't my favourite), and Arabian food. The ingredients were similar, but the way of cooking was totally different in every restaurant.

Going to another country in another continent helped me a lot to open my eyes to the different cultures that we have in the world. I couldn't choose among all cultures because each one of them has something special and unique and that makes it wonderful.