Look at the map of Spain and point at the center. You've located the country's capital and one of Europe's most beautiful cities: Madrid. This popular destination is considered a city of contrasts with its abundant historic sites, resting in the shadows of modern skyscrapers.

History

This city of over 3 million people is proud of Western Europe's largest royal palace, and some consider it to be Madrid's most beautiful building.

Inside the Royal Palace 2,800 rooms are decorated in glory with museum-quality furniture and artworks. Tourists can tour 50 of these large and splendid rooms.

Art

The Internationally respected Prado Museum is the largest and most impressive art gallery in Spain. Opened in 1819, it is filled with works of art that feature the world's most comprehensive collection of Spanish paintings.

Shopping

Madrid has some of Europe's best shopping, and potential buyers love to look through the stores looking for bargains. But for 500 years, shoppers have gathered to an extremely large outdoor flea market known as the Rastro where they find everything from antiques to CDs.

Entertainment

No trip to Madrid is complete without seeing a performance of Spain's famous art form, flamenco. Every day, flamenco performers sing, dance or play the guitar in small cafes and grand theaters alike.

Food

Madrid has a wide variety of restaurants, but because the Spanish typically eat late at about 9 or 10 p.m., it's difficult to find good dinner food earlier. If you get hungry before then, the best solution is to try a tapas bar where light snacks are served. Be sure to try the jamon, a kind of dry-cured ham: Spain is famous for it.

Why do you go to the library? For books, yes—but you like books because they tell stories. You hope to get lost in a story or be transported into someone else’s life. At one type of library you can do just that—even though there’s not a single book.

At a Human Library, instead of books, you can “borrow” people. People with unique life stories volunteer to be the “books.” For a certain amount of time, you can ask them questions and listen to their stories, which are as fascinating as any you can find in a book. (If you attend, be sure to review the habits that make you a good listener.) Many of the stories have to do with some kind of depressing topic. You can speak with a refugee, a soldier suffering from PTSD（创伤后遗症）, a homeless person and a woman living with HIV. The Human Library encourages people

to take time to truly get to know and learn from someone they might otherwise make a snap judgement about. According to its website, the Human Library is “a place where difficult questions are expected, appreciated and answered.”

The Human Library Organization came to be in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2000.Romni Abergel and his colleagues hosted a four—day event during a major Northern European festival. After the success of this event, Abergel founded the Human Library Organization, hoping to raise awareness among youth about depression, which has been growing ever since.

Though there are a few permanent human libraries, most aren’t places at all, but events. Though many do take place at physical libraries, you don’t need a library card—anyone can come and be part of the experience. There have been human library events all over the globe, in universities and in pubs, from Chicago to Tunis to Edinburgh to San Antonio. Check out the organization’s Facebook page to see when the Human Library might be arriving near you.

Sam is a fourth-year student at Harvard Medical School，but poetry is still a big part of his life，now with a new teacher，Rafael Campo，who believes poetry can benefit every doctor’s education and work. Rafael is a physician，professor and a highly respected poet.

“Poetry is in every encounter(邂逅)with my patients. I think healing is really in a very great way about poetry. And if we do anything when we’re with our patients，we’re really immersing(使沉浸于)ourselves in their stories，really hearing their voices. And，certainly，that’s what a poem does，”he said.

Rafael worries that something important has been lost in medicine and medical education today：humanity，which he finds in poetry. To end that，he leads a weekly reading and writing workshop for medical students and residents(住院医生).

He thinks medical training focuses too much on distancing the doctor from his or her patients，and poems can help close that gap.

Third-year resident Andrea Schwartz was one of the workshop regulars. She said. “I think there’s no other profession other than medicine that produces as many writers as it does. And I think that is because there’s just so much power in doctors and patients interacting when patients are at their saddest. ”Not everyone believes that’s what doctors should do，though.

Rafael said，“I was afraid of how people might judge me，actually. In the medical profession，as many people know，we must always put the emergency first. But，you know，that kind of treatment，if it’s happening in the hospital，very regrettably，sadly，results in a bad outcome. The family is sitting by the bedside. The patient hasn’t survived the cancer. Don’t we still have a role as healers there?”

In a poem titled“Health”，Rafael writes of the wish to live forever in a world made painless by our incurable joy. He says he will continue teaching students，helping patients and writing poems，his own brand of medicine.

One of the greatest sources of unhappiness, in my experience, is the difficulty we have in accepting things as they are.

When we see something we don’t like, we wish it could be different. We cry out for something better. That may be human nature, or perhaps it’s something ingrained(根深蒂固的) in our culture. The root of the unhappiness isn’t necessarily that we want things to be different. However, it’s that we decided we didn’t like it in the first place. We’ve judged it as bad, rather than saying, “It’s not bad or good, and it just is it.”

In one of my books, I said “You should expect people to mess up and expect things to go differently than you planned”. Some readers said it’s too sorrowful to expect things to go wrong. However, it’s only negative if you see it as negative and judge it as bad. Instead, you could accept it as the way the world works and try to understand why that is.

This can be applied to whatever you do: how other people act at work, how politics works and how depressing the news media can be. Accept these things as they are, and try to understand why they’re that way. It will save you a lot of sadness, because you’ll no longer say, “Oh. I wish bad things didn’t happen!”

Does it mean you can never change things? Not at all. But change things not because you can’t accept things as they are, but because you enjoy the process of changing, learning and growing.

Can we make this world a better place? You can say that you’ll continue to try to do things to help others, to grow as a person, to make a difference in this world. That’s the correct path you choose to take, because you enjoy that path. Therefore, when you find yourself judging and wishing for difference, try a different approach: accept, and understand. It might lead to some interesting results.