museo de las americas, etc.

today we went into madrid (again) and visited some really cool places. the first was the museo de las americas, which has all of this cool ancient mayan and aztec and incan stuff (i'm really uneducated about things like this, so sorry if those are all the same thing or something and i just look really dumb) back from when the spanish people came in and conquered/overtook all of south and central america. i saw incan gold! for the first time, which was really exciting because it sounds really cool... and there was a real live mummy there! (i just realized that mummies are not alive. but it was a real mummy, that's what i mean.) and shrunken heads!

and the largest mayan codex to ever have been found. there are only FOUR codices (that's the plural of codex, according to wikipedia) like this in the world. it's basically a giant folding book on paper that has all of these really intricate drawings, written by mayan scribes and there used to be libraries full of them until the spanish conquistadors came in and burnt everything that the mayans had. it was really very cool.

we then explored around, took a really excellent picture (see below), and planned out our conquering of the world (the 45-minute train ride allows for a lot of interesting games... we basically assigned chris to be the emporer of the world and divvied up the countries between the rest of us like we were playing risk and it was incredibly fun. that's kind of what the picture is below... chris is the emporer of the world in the middle).

we found this EXCELLENT record store that has the greatest collection of records i have ever SEEN! we're going back later and i am sooooo excited. it's amazing... i can't wait to actually look through and investigate to see what they have.we also tried to go get tickets to see one of the last bullfights... and couldn't get in. but i got a picture outside the plaza del toros.