Welcomed by Living on a Prayer and Palaces

Los Amigos Backpacker´s Hostel has clean rooms, clean bathrooms, clean showers, free breakfast, fast internet, and outrageously kind people staying in its room. We love it.
I had my first chorizo (Spanish type of sausage) last night. Not that exotic, but pretty good. Like salami.
Our sleeping arrangements were great, except a strangely good American pop band was playing just outside our doors. I went to bed with the sounds of ¨Living life on a prayer¨ringing inside my head.
¨Oh-oh, we´ll make it I swear. Oh-oh, living life on a prayer.¨ It was a real Welcome to Madrid moment.
Sam and I woke up early and decided to jog. I persuaded him that he could jog in his boxers, and he persuaded me that I could jog in my boxers and give him my shorts. We stumbled upon the Royal Palace and its two huge gardens, where horse-drawn buggies were setting up. It was another Welcome to Madrid moment.
After the jog, I found out why my breakfast is free. It´s bread and cereal, but there´s only whole milk, and not enough of it, so I had frosted flakes in water by my second bowl. Actually, it was pretty good. And we met two awesome English girls, their first night in Spain as well. We may meet them to go clubbing.
We can go anywhere in the city for one Euro using the Metro. Today, we saw the Prado, one of the most beautiful and overwhelmingly well-stocked museums I´ve ever seen, a gallery of Man Ray, a fabulous surrealist/bizarre-ist photographer/painter/sculpter, and a Naval Museum where Sam fell in love with antique guns.
We meet people everywhere, and all of them are nice. John, who is fluent, charms every older Spanish woman we pass. Sam and I are getting our old Spanish skills back, too. I am proud of my ability to explain to a Spanish woman on my jog that her schauzer looked like mine except that mine had blanco in addition to negro.
Tonight, we searched long and hard for a market, a type of store that apparently doesn´t exist in Spain. We found a 7/11 type store and bought ham, crackers, fruit, and grape juice.
We hit the playground, shared deep secrets, and headed to the paella place we had seen earlier in the day. It was closed, but we improvised, and ended up having a fancy duck and seabass dinner (our grad presents to oursevles).
We walked to the Sol (the central part of Madrid), found a blues bar, walked in, clapped along, chatted up the locals, learned how to eat sunflower seeds (they thought Americans didn´t know how, that sunflower seeds were somehow a Spanish tradition foreign to us, and we played along), and listened to the surprisingly good guitar and harmonica. We clapped hard on our way out, shouting ¨Arriba.¨ Clapping, singing, and giving in to our homoerotic tendencies, we headed home.