Amsterdam, Madrid, Seville... who needs more

Hello everyone I hope you're all doing well. Sorry I haven't updated the blog since I got here. The internet has been hard to find lately. Anyway I suppose I should tell you a little about my first week in Spain and how everything is going. I hit the ground running in Madrid... literally, I landed in Madrid around 12:30 p.m. and needed to get my luggage and find the group if I wanted to leave on time and receive a ride to the hotel I was staying in. Well as I'm sure you can imagine airports are not the easiest fascilities to figure out in limited time, a new country, and little sleep. I ran around trying to find my group for 30 minutes, I finally was talking to a cab driver who had politely told me terminal four (the I should be meeting my group at) is a completely different airport. He then tried to con me into taking his taxi for 50 euros. I said no thanks, hopped on a bus to terminal 4 went down the elevator and met my group in time to take the bus to the hotel... WELCOME TO SPAIN. When I got to Madrid I met my roomate and some of my group members here in the program before we went out for dinner and a night on the town. My first impressions of Madrid were that it was extremely clean compared to what I had initially thought and second that, "wow", "I am in Madrid". We spent three days in Madrid and left for Toledo/Seville on the fourth day. During our time in Madrid we went on excursions throughout the city, toured the royal palace, visited the Prado art museum, and took another excursion to another amazing near by town. Its difficult to describe the emotional part of having seen some of these places with my own eyes after having read and studied them for many years. I stood in a tomb full of dead Kings and Queens and the very families that had conquered Spain throughout history and the families that were so important to its history that I have studied them many times even in the United States. In the museum I saw paintings from El Greco, Bosch, Goya and Valasquez... some of the most remembered and influential artists ever to be known. Some of these works were hundreds of years old. Bosch's "Garden of Delights" painting that I studied about in college in Minnesota was three feet before me after being completed by Bosch over 500 years ago! I've seen a lot so far, a lot more than I'm able to tell you about right now but I wanted to share with you at least some of it for now and to let you all know I'm safe in Sevilla, Spain. Hope you're all doing very well, everyone is great here and I really enjoy both the culture and the setting. Hasta luego.