This weekend another exchange student, Erik, came up to visit me. He lives in Alicante in the south of Spain along the Mediterranean. He came up on Thursday afternoon and stayed until Sunday. After arriving on Thursday we went to the Prado Museum and the Buen Retiro (the big park in Madrid). On Friday we went to Toledo. This was my second time in Toledo. I enjoyed it again and saw a few things that I hadn’t the first time. Erik found a large broad sword and bought it. We carried it back on the train to Madrid as unsuspiciously as we could. On Saturday we did the Madrid tour. This included quickly seeing the center of Madrid, Sol, the 4 huge towers of Madrid, the largest flag of Spain, Picasso’s Guernica, and almost a bull fight. It wasn’t actually a bull fight. It was a competition of bull jumpers. There were 16 young men who would go out into the bull ring and wait for a bull to charge them, when it was extremely close they would jump out of the way. Some even went as far to do some tricks. One did a back flip over the charging bull. This was a pretty cool event and they didn’t even injure or kill the bulls. Today on Sunday we met up with a third exchanger who lives in Madrid and went to El Rastro, a huge open air market with tons of booths. I saw a lot of great souvenirs ideas and have to return to buy some stuff. That was my weekend and tomorrow I have a short three day week of school before I go to Barcelona next weekend.