I woke up at 9:00 and couldn’t get back to sleep. I spent the next couple hours doing nothing but messaging my Australian love until Nate woke up so we could get food. Where has my Australian love been you ask? Australia! We went a while not messaging with the occasional message here and there but I realized after my convo this morning that I was still in love and got sad that I didn’t know when I was gonna see her again. Anyways, Nate woke up and we both showered and needed something greasy immediately.

We walked around and stumbled across museo de jamon, but not the the museo de jamon we were used to. The side of the restaurant we’d been going to only sold sandwiches out of a window. The other side was a restaurant and bar with hundreds of hams hanging from the walls and ceilings waiting to be cut. They sold more than just ham, but Nate and I both got breakfast for under 6 euro and it was delicious. Almost everywhere in Madrid serves breakfast all day so I ordered steak and eggs with French fries and a salad, seemed American like but it wasn’t really at all. Delicious though! This obviously became our favorite go to spot in Madrid.

After that we were stuffed and we passed a little corner store and bought some waters and my stomach was a little upset so I bought a Sprite. I don’t drink soda at all, too sweet for my taste. Occasionally I’ll have a vodka Sprite or rum and Coke but not often. I cracked the Sprite and it was the best thing I ever tasted. I was like what is going on here? I look at the label, 7 grams of sugar in a 12 oz. can. I thought that had to be wrong and told Nate and we were both confused. Then when we got back to the hostel to nap I looked up soda nutritional information and apparently in different countries soda has different amounts of sugar. I wasn’t surprised to find out that the US had the most sugar in their sodas than every other country in the world, and we wonder why obesity is a problem in the US. A can of Sprite in Spain has 7 grams of sugar and a can of Sprite in the US has 29 grams, more than four times as much! I was appalled, not by the fact that American companies put sugar in everything, but at show good Sprite is with less sugar.

We napped a good while and then went out to explore the city again. Our Venezuelan friend checked out today. Nate and I grabbed some cheap food later on and a couple buckets of beer and then decided we wanted to do the pub crawl again. It was so much fun the night before we said why not? This night was completely different. 12 euro again but we only went to one bar and then the club from midnight until 4:00. The club had bottomless white wine, sangria, and beer until 1:30 for everyone in the whole club. There’s a 20 euro cover to get in but we only paid 12 for the whole pub crawl which included the cover so it was worth our money. This club was crawling with Americans! 20/21 year old exchange students from all over the US, we met a ton of people that I will never see again. The first night was better, but the second night was still so much fun. Both nights cheaper than they would have been if we woulda gone out on our own.

*Pop up note: Nate almost got kicked out of this club twice! The first time one of the girls in our pub crawl group was getting too drunk so Nate took a bottle of water off the counter and gave it to her and two bouncers came out of nowhere and picked Nate up by each armpit and were getting ready to throw him out for stealing. But the girl who asked Nate to get water spoke Spanish and pleaded her case to the bouncers and they let Nate go. The second time Nate went outside to cool off because it was really hot inside, but they have a somewhat strict dress code there and guys aren’t allowed to wear earrings in the club. The leader of our pub crawl told Nate to take them out at the door and put them back in once he got in so that’s what Nate did but he forgot he put them back on and they almost didn’t let him back in because of his earrings. And he ended up losing a back to one of the earrings in the process so he wasn’t too happy about it.