El Escorial = AMAZING.

Holaaa.  Today was my second full day in Madrid, Spain.  Our program took us to El Escorial which is a little bit less than an hour away from Madrid.  I had heard of El Escorial many times before, but I had no idea what it was.  It turns out that it is an old Spanish monastary.  Some of the first kings lived there and they are buried there.  El Escorial is in a smallish mountain range that is so beautiful, a lot of the mountains had snow on top and as we were driving up the mountain there were a lot of goats, cattle, and horses.  Once we got to El Escorial we first went into the monastary, where we met our tour guide.  She gave our tour in Spanish, but luckily she spoke English as well so she was able to clarify things that we did not understand.  I was pretty excited though, I understood most of what she was saying!! (but she was speaking very slowly).  I cannot believe how much she knew, she was also very funny and made the tour very entertaining.  For anyone in my family reading this, I swear that she was the Spanish version of Nonny, which was awesome.  She first showed us around the kings' rooms and stuff like that, these were the Catholic kings who came before the Bourbons (I forget their names).  They all lived incredibly modestly for kings, because they were so religious.  My favorite part of the trip was going into the room where all of the dead kings are.  Our guide brought us down several sets of stairs under the monastary and into a beautiful marble room with an extravigent gold chandellier.  There were about 12 or 15 fancy marble tombs stacked in sets of 3 along the walls.  In these tombs are the kings of Spain! Apparently when a king or queen or someone closely related to the royal family dies, they are put into something called a "rotting room" (it sounds less gross in Spanish I promise) for about 40 years.  After these 40 years there are only the bones left of the corpses.  They are then put into the tombs in the fancy shmancy room.  It was such a strange feeling being in that room, strange, but cool.  That specific room only had the Kings and their wives who had produced sons, if one of the wives hadn't bore any sons or children, they were buried in a less special room.  Our guide then showed us other tombs of kings/princes/queens/etc in other rooms, they were all so cool.  Then we went into the Cathedral.  It is modeled very similarly to the Vatican.  I cannot describe how incredibly beautiful this church was.  The ceilings were all very high and painted with "frescos" (ceiling paintings) of saints/Jesus/Mary and stuff they were so so so sooo beautiful.  The guide said if we want to get married in that church you need to reserve over a year in advance, so in a few yrs from now when I get married I hope you are all okay with visiting Spain for my wedding! (Joking I promise).  After the church we went into the library.  The library was almost as impressive as the church.  The ceilings were painted with beautiful frescos of the gods.  All of the books were covered in some kind of gold, and apparently some of them were thousands of years old.  She said that they had about 30,000 books just in the main room of the library that we were in.  Their coolest book is something religious I can't remember but the writing itself is in gold.  They paid  50,000$ (I think) for it because it is the only copy of the original, I cannot imagine how much the original must be! Thats all for now, I'll try to post some photos of El Escorial soon!