October 4^th – Today we took the bus downtown after another trip to our market for more substantial supplies. Drat the organic floor is still roped off, but no matter we bought nice makings for salad, a loaf of bread, and made another stop at our cheese vendor. This lovely young lady has become our cheese vendor and she is very knowledgeable on Spanish cheeses. Our first view of her was not encouraging as she appeared to be scowling, but maybe it was just boredom because when we finally approached her the first time it was as if a switch has been activated and she turned out to be very personable. So we will be buying from her a lot I think, as she pretty much sells only cheese and we want to have her as a source while we’re here. Our apartment is very close to the Bull fight ring in Madrid and architecturally speaking is very beautiful. I’m afraid I can’t subscribe to the ‘art’ of bull fighting as I’m not much on the spectacle of torturing a bull to goad it into fighting, very provincial of me but there it is and I have a choice. Anyway we got to the main area and decided to walk about some; we needed to get SIM cards for our phones so that we would have a local numbers. However we are rethinking it as the cards are only good for one country and the Padilla’s (Julia and Jose) live in France so calling them is perhaps not a great option, at least from a cell phone. We will investigate further.   The architecture of Madrid is pretty spectacular on the whole, very much like Paris but much more florid. Also it ranges from mid 1800’s to what appears to be the 1940’s in the ‘old’ central area. Franco’s stamp is on a lot of the ministry buildings but they are still impressive. We came across our first demonstration against the government today but it was small and peaceful, but pretty loud. We’ve seen television where they have been much larger and very confrontational with heads getting cracked, luckily we have missed those. We’re falling in to Madrid time pretty quickly with late lunches and dinners, tonight we finished a great homemade dinner , by Deb of course, around 10:30 pm. Then to bed around mid-night which for us is late enough. Things are very ‘cozy’ in this apartment it’s about 650 square feet, not crowded at all but definitely a two person setup. We have a galley kitchen, a toilet, a shower, a bedroom, a small living room and a small dining area. If you decide to come to visit us be sure to let us know ahead so that we can figure out logistics. We can shift things around on the floor and make some space but as I said it’s cozy, at least by our US standards.