A Little Taste of Home

This week has been, yet again, a short week.  After having my alarm not go off on Monday morning, I started my week on Tuesday.  So just like all of you reading this.. I celebrated President's Day too, and Spain doesn't even know what that is!!!!  I did a whole lot of nothing on Monday, I feel like after the weekends I need a day to relax.. I think my teachers would understand this!  Monday evening, some of my friends and I wandered around and looked at shops.. our favorite past time!!  As we were walking around we saw this very interesting store.. we didn't go in, but it was definitely a little reminder of home..

On Tuesday, I went to class (yay!).  I had so much homework to do for Wednesday, I thought I would never get it all done.  Since our teachers are trying to pack as much in before our exams on March 2, they're trying to give a lot of homework so we have more grades in the gradebook; otherwise, we have like 3 papers we've written and that's it!  Amanda, Brittney and I met up at a little cafetería (coffee shop.. not like a school cafeteria!! hahah).  We drank coffee, ate tapas and used their internet.  As you can probably imagine, this was not the best scene to do homework, but it was FUN!!


A few weeks ago, one of my friends, Crystal, Facebooked me and told me that her aunt and uncle live in Granada.  Crystal gave me their Facebook sites, a few days later, I received a message from her aunt asking if I wanted to come over for lunch one day.  I was thrilled to be able to finally eat with English speakers!  We agreed that Wednesday (yesterday) would be a good day to meet up, so after classes, I walked down to our meeting point and walked home with Deborah.  Her family and I had a great lunch.  We talked about all the differences in Spain compared to the USA.  I had a great time over at their house, for a second i felt like I was back at home.  It was a great little get away from the Spanish world.


Today when I was walking home, I saw this little frutería on the side of the road.  I stopped by and bought some strawberries (fresas).  They are by far the BEST strawberries I've ever had.. they are so sweet and delicious.. and so cheap!!! I wish I could bring some home for everyone to taste.  They're fantastic. And Encarna said she would cut some up and put them in my yogúr for dinner!!! Woo Hoo!!! I have a meeting at the ISA office to talk about our homestays and how everything is going with classes and such.


I've learned that if I take bus 23 it takes me right to the front door of the building that all my classes are in.  So the bus driver has gotten to know who I am.. he talks to me everyday and on days that I miss class (like Monday) he becomes very concerned with why I'm not going to school.  I think the bus driver is more concerned with why I'm not in school than Encarna is! haha how funny.


Well I'm off to my meeting, hope everyone's having a great week!! Just think.. I took off President's day and Friday this week.. I'm going to Barcelona this weekend and we don't have class on Monday because it's El Dia de Andalusia (which I'm not sure what exactly that entails, but I'm not complaining because it means a day off school!)!!  I could for sure get used to this schedule!

Senderismo en los Cahorros

This past week felt like the longest week of my life.. which is crazy since I was sick on Monday and slept all day.  So I only had a 4 day week of school.  But luckily the weekend came and was soooo fun and so tiring!!! I took so many unexpected adventures around Granada.. things I didn't even know existed.  Friday night, a few of us decided to go out for sangría and hang out.  We went to a little tapas bar to begin with where we made friends with the owner and the owner's cousin.  They gave us extremely cheap drinks and were so nice.  Then we decided to go to another little bar that looked fun.  Later in the night we went home, we knew we had a big day of hiking ahead of us on Saturday.

Sarah, Chante, Me

In a lot of the restaurants, there are random pig legs hanging from the ceiling.. at first it was really gross to look at, but the more I see them, the more I get used to them being there.

Saturday morning, I woke up bright and early to meet at Isabel la Católica.  While I was waiting for the other girls to meet me, I saw a lady with the brightest orange hair I've ever seen.  I'm not sure why she thought this looked good, but it was something I had to take a picture of!

pumpkin head

After meeting a few girls at Isabel la Católica, we walked down to a bus stop across the river to meet up with the rest of our group to go hiking in Los Cahorros.  I wasn't exactly sure what we were getting ourselves into, but it turned out to be one of the best days I've had in Granada so far.  We took a 30 minute bus ride to Monachil, a pueblo outside of Granada.  We walked through the city and began our adventure on the trails of Los Cahorros.  There are a lot of pictures on this blog; I hope you enjoy the beautiful scenery that we saw!

Monachil

Before we even started our hike this was what we saw.. the beautiful Sierra Nevada in the background.  I can't imagine what all this looks like when the trees have leaves!

There was a part where we had to walk over a small suspended bridge.  Jamie and Eric decided that they wanted to take the Indiana Jones route and walk through the aquaduct.  Not a route I wanted to take!

livin on the edge.. literally

There were several suspended bridges that we walked over, this was the longest one.  There was a sign in front of it that said we were only allowed to have 4 people on it at a time.

Some of the trails were very, very small spaces.  As you can see in this picture, there is a mountain on one side and a river on the other.  Makes it so you really have to watch your footing as you go through this hike.  When we were passing an area like this we saw rock climbers.  One of the guys in my class, Devin, goes rock climbing here all the time!! He says it's absolutely amazing.

There were even some parts that weren't big enough to get by just walking.  So we had to plant our feet and hang on to the handles  for dear life!  There were many spots like this.

Brittany

And parts where we had to duck-walk through.  This trail is only for people that are hardcore. haha

We walked through a cave, this is what we saw on the other side, it was absolutely gorgeous.  In the caves, there were rocks to climb on, except it was very muddy and wet.  One of the guys we were with is like a monkey, so he was climbing on all the high rocks.. crazy!

Being a swimmer came in handy as we were walking through some parts.  There was a part of the hike where we had to jump down onto the rocks in the stream below because the trail was too small to walk on, and then lift ourselves back up onto the trail.  Some people had problems getting back up, but since it was like lifting myself out of the pool, it was easy for me.  We all did a great job of helping each other in these situations.

When you first look at these yellow flowers, they're pretty and smell good.  But when you look closely, they are covered in thorns.  Some people in our group found this out the hard way and tried to pick them and got stabbed.  We climbed up pretty far off the beaten path and climbing back down was kind of scary, so there were a lot of people sliding on little rocks, after panicking, they would grab these plants that we scattered all over the place.  OUCH!  Amanda's hand was somewhat stunned from grabbing one of these plants.  She was in pain from it like 2 hours after it had happened!

"Whatever you do, DON'T pick the yellow flowers!"

Hahahah, Chris found this big rock and noticed it looked like an old man's face, so he's getting words of wisdom from the old man! hah

We found a nice place to eat lunch.  During our time eating lunch, the temperature dropped like 10 degrees!  Eric, Mr. Outdoors, made us a little fire to warm up!

After walking, about 5 minutes later, we saw this sign.  It says, "Starting Fires is Prohibited"..oops.

I love this picture! With the Cahorros sign and the scenery in the background.  So beautiful!!

We passed by real live toros!  I'm not sure who takes care of them because they're just out there by themselves!  But it was neat to see them! No worries, there was a fence protecting us from them.  As we walked on the trail we had to watch out for GIANT patches of cow/bull/horse "caca".. it was disgusting.

We were on the hike for a total of 6 hours!  It was so fun and so beautiful!!  After our hike, there were 7 of us that went and got Kebaps.. amazing pita/wrap things and ice cream!  Much later that night, we decided that we were all going to meet up to go to a Salsa bar called Copacabras.  The bartender put sparklers in our drinks and lit them on fire! It was the craziest thing!

Some of the girls that went..

Chante, Brittney, Amanda, Me, Brittany

Sunday morning, Yanira called me asking if I wanted to go to an outdoor market type thing. Vendors go there to sell their things for really, really cheap.  There was everything there from Moros trying to sell their knock off jewelry to farmers selling fruits and veggies.  It was quite the experience. The people that were there to buy things were nuts; they would fight people for the items that they wanted to buy!  The vendors would heckle people that were at different tents because they would have "the same thing" for a lower price.  I ended up buying a nice watch for 8 euro from a knock-off-selling Moro, a pair of leggings for ,50 centimos, and a pair of flats for 5 euro.  I thought I got away from there pretty well off!

Kids play area near my house

Later on Sunday, Yanira and I decided that we wanted to go to the park to do our homework.  She lives kind of close to me, so we met up and walked to the park.

Notice how the park has no grass.. this is normal. Granada doesn't have much grass at all.

The huge Spanish flag from the park.

You can't see these guys very well, but they were extremely drunk, or messed up on drugs or something, and causing a huge scene in the park.  There was a big group of college students sitting on the steps to the left of this picture, and one of the guys got into the trash can that dumps over and was screaming (in Spanish of course), "I am the Captain of the alligators! If you want to follow me raise your hand!!!" and the college students would raise their hands to lead him on.  It was ridiculous

After a great weekend, and being so tired, I didn't wake up to my alarm this morning.  So just like the rest of you.. I had a 3 day weekend too! woo hoo! Luckily my teacher is very forgiving and it won't be a problem!  I'm excited to see what this week will bring.. and I'm extremely excited to go to Barcelona next weekend to visit my friend Kassie! (and a 3 day weekend next weekend!!!!)

P.S. my dad told me that there are lots of people that, after reading my post, want to vacation to Spain.. I'm writing you DOs and DON'Ts of Spain.. You'll love it!

"Está lluviendo gatos y perros" (It's raining cats and dogs)

What a gross week it has been this week!!!  It's been raining off and on all week long, which has made it miserable to go to and from class!  I was sick Monday from the excursion over the weekend.. I think I just needed to catch up on sleep, so I didn't go to school on Monday and slept for 13 hours instead!!!  Tuesday through Thursday it was raining the whole time, and finally today it's gorgeous!!!  My host mom tells me every morning, while I'm eating breakfast, how cold it is outside.. she walks outside onto the little porch off the kitchen and walks back inside and says, "Hace muchiiiiiiisimooooooo friooooo hoy!!! Necesitas llevar la bufanda!" ("It's veryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy cold! You need to wear your scarf!").  This happens everyday, I kid you not.  

On Tuesday, I decided that I would take the bus to and from school because my umbrella was tiny and breaking.  There's a stop very close to our house, so I decided to check it out.  I knew that buses 7, 11, 33 and F stopped at this stop.  So I hopped on bus 7 and got off at another stop to get on bus 23 which takes me right to school.  Coming home I figured bus 33 would be a straight shot home.. BOY WAS I WRONG! I got on bus 33, and it took me an hour and a half to get back to the stop I wanted. I thought I was so lost until I saw La Plaza de Toros and I knew I was finally home.  Once I got in the door Encarna told me about how she didn't know where I was and she was worried, but when I told her about my adventure around the city she just laughed and laughed.

On Wednesday, I took bus 23 to school again, but this time I knew better than to take 33 back home.  So I stood at the bus stop and waited for bus 4.. hoping I would have better luck.  While I was standing there I met a girl name Lauren from New Jersey.  She's also studying in Granada.  Eventually, bus 4 pulled up to our bus stop and we got our bus cards out ready to hop on the extremely crowded bus.  When it was our turn to get on, the bus driver shut the bus doors in our face and said it was too crowded.. which was an understatement of how crowded it was.  Lauren and I were the only 2 people that weren't able to get on the bus!!! hahahah! So we shared a cab home.. Encarna again was wondering where I was since I had waited for that dang bus for so long! Haha.. the buses are just not my friends!

Luckily, yesterday was a much better day for me.  I got on bus 4 (not so crowded because it wasn't raining as hard), and got off at the right stop and everything was great!  I introduced the phrase "It's raining cats and dogs" to Encarna.. she laughed sooo hard!

Tuesday was the last day for 6 of the students in my class.  All the European exchange students have a different schedule that we do, so they were only studying for 2 weeks or so in that level.  Since Federico was going back to Italy, a few of us decided to hang out with him and go out for a little bit.  We started at Burger King (haha), because they have the most amazing brownie sundae there!  It's amazing how the fast food restaurants are so much better here than they are in the USA!

While we were at Burger King some man came up to our table and asked where we were from.  After we told him the United States, he wanted to talk to us in English and wouldn't talk about anything except American sports.. which none of us wanted to talk about at the time.  We eventually got up and left him.. he was probably still talking about the NFL or something.

After Burger King, we went to a Chinese restaurant and ate the most amazing Chinese meal ever.  At all the restaurants there's a Menu of the Day.. which usually consists of 3 or 4 courses and a drink.  The menu of the day is definitely the best and cheapest route when eating out.  We were the only people in the restaurant, so we acted very immature.  

Mike and Holly

Me and Federico

We met up with Vittoria, she's an Italian girl that was in our class, and went to a tapas bar and hung out.

Yesterday, we had an intercambio.  It's a language exchange with Spaniards that also attend the University of Granada.  This is a way that we can meet Spaniards to practice Spanish, and the Spaniards that are invited are studying English, so they get to practice their English!  We had a great time, there were probably 150 people that showed up (both Americans and Spaniards) and we just talked and got to know each other.  I met two girls named Mel and Jenni (very unusual Spanish names), they were very nice and want to hang out sometime!


After the intercambio, a few of us went to Hannigans, the Irish Pub, to play cards.  All the employees of Hannigans speak English, so it's a nice get away every once in a while.

This is a picture of tapas.  When you go to a bar and order a drink, you get tapas for free with it.  This time we got "tortillas" (omelette type thing), some kind of chicken with sauce, potato salad, and of course bread.  The tapas are usually very delicious, and it's not bad to get a drink and tapas for around 2 euros everywhere you go.  I ordered sangría, the best drink in the world! They put real fruit in it, it's a very sweet wine. Sooo good!

This weekend we are planning to hang out with some of our new friends from our intercambio.  We are going to a salsa bar tonight! Should be really fun!  Hopefully this coming week I'll have better luck with the whole bus situation.. grr. Dang Spanish transportation! haha.  Also, if anyone wants to send me anything, I would be more than happy to receive it! And I have Barcelona to look forward too next weekend!!!!!! YAY!

Adventures and Our Excursion to Ronda and Malaga!

I have a feeling this post is going to be very long.  There are a lot of things that have happened in the past week or so.  Classes have been really good.  I have met so many new people because of class.  I'm in a class that would be like an English as a Second Language class.. except it's Spanish as a Second Language (or for some people in my class Spanish is their 4th or 5th language!!)  There are only 14 people in my class, so we have gotten to know each other really well; however, today is the last day for many of my classmates because they take exams and leave for their home countries this week. 

I have class for 4 hours everyday.. from 9:30-1:30 and I have 2 teachers for 2 hours each.  My first teacher is Mariangeles (Mah-ree-an-he-les), she teaches mostly grammar.  We have lots of writing assignments with her.. and we get graded on participation and our homework.  My second teacher is Fermin (Fair-meen), he teaches mostly nothing.  We watch a lot of YouTube videos and joke around in Spanish.  We have watched several movies and had to write reviews on them, so we still have some homework, but he doesn't really teach much.  This is a picture of half my class.. It's Me (USA), Anna (Poland), Mike (USA), James (USA), Federico (Italy), Jonnes (Finland), "Cecilia" (China) and Vittoria (Italy).  My usual seat is between Jonnes and Cecilia.. I had moved that day because I thought we were going to watch a movie, but Fermin didn't show up.. so our first teacher had to teach for all 4 hours haha.. so we did different activities.

And the other half of my class.. from left to right: Devin (USA), Laura (USA), Erika (Slovakia), Viktoria (Serbia), Holly (USA), Liza (USA) and me on the very end.  

Brittney, Mike, James, Federico and I decided we wanted to play racquetball one day last week.  There was a little racquetball store that told us we could rent the equipment for really cheap from the University.  So we went to the university sports area and looked around for a while.  When we finally went to the building to rent equipment, we discovered it wasn't cheap at all.  We decided not to do it, and we walked around for a while in my part of town.

We took tons of pictures with the statues that are in the median area near my casa.  We found some nice people to take pictures for us.

My host mom has been telling me a lot that there is a really really good churros place by my house.  So on our adventures around, we decided that since we weren't playing racquetball we would eat churros instead (perfect!).  Churros are fried things that you dip in chocolate.  Basically heaven on Earth!!!  After you're done dipping the churros you drink the chocolate.

Last weekend, we went on an excursion to Ronda and Malaga.  They are two small towns to the west of Granada.  We had a 4 hour bus ride to Ronda.  On our way there we saw a tonnnn of wind mills. They were so pretty!  Once we got to Ronda, we had free time to get coffee and breakfast, then we had a walking tour of the city.

We split off into groups.. this was our meeting point.  The bull in front of La Plaza de Toros.  Our tour guide was SOOO good!  His name was Jesus, so every time we would have people lagging behind, he would say, "Ok! Everyone follow Jesus!!" He said he could fluently speak Spanish, English and German.. pretty impressive!

The new bridge was built in (I think) the 17th century.. so even though it's not new at all it's called The New Bridge.  It was HUGE and beautiful!

Some of my friends and I in front of the beautiful view of Ronda.  Brittney, Me, Amanda, Brittany.

Another view of Ronda

One place we went into was a home for poor people.  It was given to English people a long time ago, and they turned it into a home for poor people to stay.  Since at the time there were so many people in need of shelter, they were only able to stay there for 4 years.  These were the people that the home was given to, and they are the ones that started this home.

We were able to take pictures in the back of the house.  More of my friends.. Brittney, Me, Amanda, Sarah, and Sarah.. in my group alone there are 5 Sarahs and 4 Brittanys.. its crazy and can become very confusing!

I loved the view with the Spanish flag in the background!

As we were walking, we saw one of these orange trees.  Like I said in one of my earlier posts, these oranges are very tart.  The tour guide said that you can always tell who the tourists are because they pick the oranges and eat them and have sour faces as they're walking through town.  So, with that being said, since we're tourists, we picked oranges and passed them around our group to taste them.  I thought it tasted like a lemon with a hint of orange mixed in.  The locals pick the oranges and make jam out of them and sell the jam.

The only way to tell that the oranges are tart is by the leaf.  Orange trees that you can eat from have leaves with only one part to it.  Orange trees that have tart oranges have leaves that have two parts to them.. a big part and a small part.

Back in the old days, this was a church.  Where we were standing was the bull fighting ring, so the noblemen and all the important people of the city were able to stand on the balconies of the church to watch the bull fights.  

View of Ronda, the white buildings are very Andalusian.  They painted the buildings white to make them look cleaner. 

The beginning of the Arab Baths.  This is where the people would change into their robes.  As you enter the actual baths, there's a hot, warm and cool room.  The Arabs would take an entire day out to bathe.  They would switch from the hot to warm to cold rooms to cleanse their skin and spirits.

Remember when America was mad because Michelle Obama took a vacation?!  Well Spain LOVED it!!! Our tour guide was also Michelle Obama's tour guide.  He said that she's a very nice lady.

We were only in Ronda for a few hours, then took a 2 hour bus ride to Malaga.  Malaga is a city on the beach!!!  Once we checked into the hotel, we had free time.  So of course we went straight to the beach!

The next day we had a walking tour of Malaga.  Our tour guide was TERRIBLE!!!!! Who knows if he even knew what he was talking about.  But this is a river.. it's no wonder this part of Spain is having problems with water!

Another part of the tour.. we saw the Cathedral.  This is the biggest building I've ever seen in my life! It was beautiful!

The bell tower.  When we were standing there the bells started ringing. I'm not sure if the Spaniards enjoyed the sound of them, but they were totally off sync and sounded terrible.. definitely not something we liked.

The theater.. again I'm not really sure what this was used for.. I'm pretty sure our tour guide didn't know either!

Sitting outside.. Me, Brittney, Amanda, Brittany

The pretty view overlooking the city!

FINALLY! We got free time to go to the beach.. which we took full advantage of!

There were teenage boys on the beach that had buried a bright yellow stability ball in the sand and were doing flips off it.  There was one boy that was amazing at this.. he would do flips over his friends when they were standing.

One of the girls in our group decided that she wanted to try this.. she was wearing a strapless dress, so she had to borrow a shirt from one of the guys in our group!  Every time she would bounce on it the ball would go flying out of the sand.. I'm not sure why it didn't do that when the guys were bouncing on it.

After a few attempts, this was her best shot.. she face planted into the sand.. definitely a hilarious thing to watch!

I have learned a few very interesting things about Spain.  One thing is that the reason that so many people take care of their elderly parents is because the government pays the caretaker 500 euros per month to care of them.  This is much cheaper for the government than putting them in a nursing home.

I got lost again on the bus today.  It was raining and I thought I was getting on the right bus, but it turned out I did get on the right bus.. it just took an hour to get to the stop I needed!!!  Quite the adventure.. Encarna was wondering where I was by the time I got home, but when I explained everything to her she just laughed soooo hard!  She was telling me that one girl that lived here before me got on a bus and ended up in a different city!!! AH! That would be scary!

Today is my friend Federico's last day in Spain, so we're going to go out to eat with him and hang out for a while.  I'm sure I'll have more pictures to upload very soon!