Bordeaux and vistor

After Dublin, I took a couple weeks off of traveling to write my papers, and the next trip I took was to Bordeaux, France with a friend from school who was visiting from the US. We started in Madrid, where I picked her up at the airport, and we spent a few hours in Madrid's central park before catching our bus to Bordeaux. We were taking an over-night bus, and we went to Bordeaux because there was a bus (maybe not the best reason to go visit a city). The bus ride was ok, but we didn't get much sleep, and we got to Bordeaux before dawn. We ended up going to the train station and waiting there until it got light, and then we took a taxi to our hotel, which wouldn't let us check-in until 3pm. We spent the rest of our first day there in the mall that was next to our hotel and in a park that was between the two. Once we checked-in, we both slept until the next morning. The next day we spent exploring the city, which is really industrial, although the old part of the city was pretty. Our train left the next morning, so we didn't spend too much time in the city. The train ride back to Spain was very pretty, especially when it followed the coast, and when it was in the Pyrenees foothills. We had to switch trains at the border (Spain and France don't use the same gauge train tracks), and we had a tense moment, when we were afraid that we were going to miss our train, but we made it home without too many problems.
My friend stayed with me that week and we did all of the Salamanca things and went back to Madrid the next weekend, where we saw a clothing museum and an Ancient Egyptian temple (it is the only complete, authentic temple outside Egypt and was a gift from Egypt to Spain after Spain helped them save some monuments from flooding). The clothing museum was probably the best museum I've seen in Spain, and it was really well-designed and interesting. The next day, I bid my friend farewell at the airport and headed to the Reina Sofía art museum in Madrid for the Dalí and Guernica, a famous painting by Picasso about the Spanish Civil War. After that, I went home to finish my essays before Semana Santa.
These are pictures from the cathedral in Bordeaux.