Nun Cookies

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Yes. That's right. "Nun made cookies". On the plane I sat next to this older lady who told me about this tiny church located in downtown Madrid. She said if I went to the backside of the church, and found the door, I could ask the Nuns who lived at the Monastery for some cookies. Seems legit right? So three days of Madrid and we have kept an eye out for these nun cookies. NO luck. So we visit the "tourist info center" in the town plaza (literally the town square) and we get the directions for the church that has the nun cookies. It must be a popular thing to ask because the lady I was asking at the Tourist desk didn't bat an eye. She just took my map and made a dot. Me and dad head off on the search for Nun Cookies. Dear lord I never knew how hard that was going to be. We kept circling back to this one street but there was NOTHING there. It made absolutely no sense. There was this bicycle shop right down the ally (I am not going to bother calling some of these streets "streets". No. It was not a street) and we ask this guy for directions. He says we are on the right street but knows nothing of supposed nun-cookies. Now remember. Almost all of these conversations are going on in Spanish. So basically, he has no clue. Anyway, long story short- we find this tiny little button on one of the doors on this huge building taking up an entire side of an ally. The button has a label "galletas". Then it has the hour posted of business. (16:30-18:00) but it was only about 1 in the afternoon. Take in mind this entire time it has been raining and a bit chilly. So my dad and I travel back up the street and make it into this indoor market that sold EVERYTHING. They had hot chocolate, coffee, fish, prawns, gifts, chocolate and everything else all in these little stalls not more than a closet space big. You just went around from vendor to vendor deciding what you wanted. Very pretty and upscale. So finally 4:30 hits and we head back to the Nun cookies. This time there are some Americans or Canadians looking at the door we had been looking for. We speak to them and find out both of our groups would like to purchase cookies. We ring the bell, nothing happens. We hit the bell again (maybe I didn't ring it hard enough?) finally we end up hitting all the buttons on the registry ( I was afraid an angry nun might come out and slap my fingers with a ruler for being a jerk and ringing all the bells). A voice comes on over the speaker that says something along the lines of galletas, and a buzzer for the door, and a click.

So to first understand how creepy this was, you have to remember, I hardly speak any Spanish and can really only understand what is being said to me and I am very bad with my directional/propositional language except "left" and "right". The buzzer goes off and we open the door. Now, the cut-out of the door is I guess normal size for a European house, but when you turned the handle, only a smaller door opened, kind of like a hidden door. This was some Alice in the rabbit hole kind of creepy. So you walk through this smaller door and you are now inside the monastery. But now what? there are stairs to my right so we start climbing. This is about the part in the story where "stupid Americans" can be said. We ring the bell on every door on every floor before giving up and going back down two flights of stairs. We (both groups, remember?) to the back of the monastery through a courtyard and into another tunnel system of hallways. On this revolving plate, with sectionals, are two boxes of cookies. One for me and my dad, and one for the couple we were walking with. So we grab a box of cookies each and put down about 20 euros each. (WAY more than the box of cookies could ever be). the nun rotates the plate around (we cant see her, she cant see us) and says something in Spanish and our money comes back. Okay, maybe we did the math wrong. Both parties put more money on the tray and it rotates again. Now the Nun-lady is none too happy. she says something yet again in Spanish, and a number. Finally, she turns the tray with money towards us once again and I realize there is way too much money on the tray, and she wants us to pay together, not separate. long story short and a lot of math later, we got our nun cookies.



Hardest and most well deserved cookies ever.

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Photos

We took a picture
.. all so that if we did not end up with cookies we could at least prove we made it there.