Neighborhood of the day - squatter city - casa okupa

So every trip Giovanni, (our travel professor) tries to get a "local hero" to give us a tour of the city.  Usually it is a friend of his who actually lives in the city.  This way the guide can give us better insight and an untouristy view of the city.  In Madrid he got into contact with a group of architects to give us a quick night time tour of the city.  We started out in casa okupa - which is also known as squatter city.  It's essentially a part of the city that has so many squatters that they have created a self-governing neighborhood.  We started on top of the roof of a building in the neighborhood, and they spliced together a bunch of video clips so we could get a feeling for the city.  They took clips from old movies that showed insight into the life of locals, i.e. in the 50's they showed how this middle class family with kids was looking for a new house, they showed how in the 80's kids moved away for jobs and how families struggled etc.

view from roof

the building we were in

from there we moved on and walked around the city.  We went to Gran Via which is the main street of Madrid.  We went into a hotel and tried to find a bar on one of the top floors.  Unfortunately, the bar was no longer in business, but we happened to run into some locals who allowed us onto their terrace.

Gran Via

So we would run around the city, they would show us a new movie clip, and then we would move on to a new place.  It was really interesting.  The group of guys who were showing us around were SO excited to tell us about Madrid.  There was a guy from Paris who moved to Madrid, a guy from Belgium who moved to Madrid, and a guy who grew up and lived in Madrid his entire life.  It was really cool to get the different points of view on Madrid through each person's unique experiences.  The tour started around 7, we walked around until around 9 and then we had tapas and dinner with the entire group after that.  Spain is on a completely different schedule than europe.  For example, McDonald's don't open until 12:00 pm.  Which is just weird to me.  Everything is just done later in the day.

On a side point, it occurred to me last week that the Big Mac is sold by MCdonald's.  Why did they add the "a"?  I want a big MC not a big MaC.  Isn't this inconsistent with everything else?  They dont sell chicken macnuggets.  They are chicken mcnuggets.  How strange.