South Spain!!

Tuesday morning we got up bright and early so as to be able to meet the bus near the train station at 8:00 am. We got there and the bus had not yet arrived, and rather than calling the bus at around 8:15 when it was STILL not there, our teacher instead decided to go and look for it. When he came back 15 minutes later without having found it we waited yet another 15 minutes before actually calling to find out where it might be. We get a hold of then and find out that we never had a bus set up for the morning. I don’t know where the whole 8:00 came from, but they said that by the time they can get someone in and over to us it would be 10:00. Not a great way to start off the day when it’s cold out and I am not feeling 100% as is. We had a 5 hour drive ahead of us with a few stops along the way. We stopped in a city called Consuega that had windmills like those that good old Don Quixote attempted to fight! It was windier than you can imagine up there, but the mills weren’t moving. More for looks I guess. We finally made it to Granada at around 5pm and we went wandering through the town. We went to a lookout spot where you can see the whole Alhambra and right when we got up there it was just getting dark so we got to see it all lit up! We were right next to the Muslim Mosque and we got to hear chocolate syrup and it was one of the most scrumptious things I have ever had. It wasthe prayer being yelled so that basically all the town can hear. On our way back down from the lookout, we found some Muslim shops that had all kinds of fun stuff like the embroidered carpets that they use for their prayers and incense type things and cool Arabic clothes! We also found a sweet Indian restaurant and we sat on these benches or stools that were really low to the ground and the food was delicious. I got an Indian dish called Samosa. It was a bunch of vegetables all cooked and wrapped in a thin crust of some sort…sooo delish!! Then for desert, I got something called a Gofre which is a waffle covered in not like a US waffle at all, it was much sweeter and more dense. It was almost like a soft cookie in the shape of a waffle!

Wednesday we got up bright and early and went to the Alhambra. This place was awesome! I am usually the one that is really antsy to be moving on to our next destination, however, this place I just couldn’t get enough of. It was huge and there was SO much to see! There are a few different parts to it but the main part was the palace which was the palace of the Arabic King some 500 years ago! There is water running alongside the walkways and stair cases everywhere, and pools o f water all over the place as well. I have decided that my house will contain something similar to this when I am wealthy and own acres upon acres of land and can have gardens that span miles! Anyway, after that we got on the bus and made our way to Cordoba. We have this really crazy funny bus driver who yells at everything and everyone and likes to try and make us all laugh, BUT, whenever we stop for a bathroom or food break he always walks right up to the bar for a beer and then we continue on our way. Somehow I don’t think that a bus driver responsible for the safety of a bus full of college students getting a beer at each stop would fly in the US. We finally made it to Cordoba and our bus driver couldn’t park the bus by the hotel because the streets were so narrow, so we got off the bus and had a good 5 minute walk to the hotel which would have been completely fine except for the fact that the minute we stepped off the bus it started to literally down poor with rain. By the time we got to the hotel we were soaked to the bone and our suit cases and backpacks were soaked through as well. We got settled in the hotel and went to the mosque there, which this particular one was the head quarters for the Islamic religion in Spain. After that we were in desperate need for some food because we never stopped for lunch and still had about 4 hours until we were to meet up with everyone for dinner. We (we being me, Sami, Allyson and Sandy) were really feeling the need for some McDonalds since we have developed a strange addiction to it since coming here. We asked someone if there was one nearby and they told us that there was one at the Cento Comercial (mall). We had an easy enough time finding that and discovered a nice park on the way with a nice trail that ran alongside the river. It was really nice looking, even though the water in the river had to be the most disgusting murky brown water I have ever seen in my life. Sandy thought it looked like the perfect place to go jogging so we decided we would go for a run in the morning!! We all met up for dinner which was to be a three course meal! It seemed like a nice enough restaurant when we first walked in, however it turned out to be one big laugh. Everything sounded pretty good on the menu. As for the first course some people ordered spaghetti with meat sauce, some ordered a mixed salad (that’s what I got),and some got the paella (that’s what I got for my second course). The salads came out and they looked pretty good and normal with some vinegar and oil for dressing. The spaghetti came out and it was pasta swimming in what looked like tomato soup with a tiny bit of some weird kind of shredded meat. And the paella came out and people were taking bites and having to pull things out of their mouths that were not quite edible. Now, paella is usually some type of seasoned rice lots of times with seafood or vegetables or chicken in it and it is a very Spanish dish which until this day I had yet to try. I saw the looks on these people’s faces as they tried to consume their paella and knew that that was what was coming for my second course and there was no way that I could change it now, and that my first experience with paella was going to be a terrible one. I got mine and took a few bites and even tried a piece of the squid in it. I ate all that I absolutely could, which was about 4 bites and just told myself that any paella I eat after this will taste so good because of the expectation level I had at that particular point. After dinner a smaller group of us decided to try and find some sort of night time excitement in Cordoba on a Wednesday night and we ended up and some bar where we heard music. We walked in and sat down and everyone just kind of looked at us and they took a really long time for anyone to come and ask us if we wanted anything, however, we did stay for a while because there was a group of people who had guitars and drum type things that were playing and singing and even a few doing some sort of flamenco dancing that was really fun to watch. We stayed for about an hour and once we were sufficiently saturated with the smell of smoke we walked back to the hotel in the rain which had not at all stopped the whole time we were there that day. We ran around through the rain and puddles and had a great time and finally went to bed.

So this morning(Thursday)started off interesting…Sandi and I got up at 6:30 to go running through the trails along the river. We crossed the bridge that’s right by our hotel to get to the other side of the river and the plan was to run along the river to the bridge a ways down and then go back across and get back to our hotel. We got to the bridge and there was no way to get up to it and we could see the next one was really close and looked like we would be able to get up to it. So we made it to the next bridge and got up on it and started crossing the bridge on the walkway while the cars were passing us. We got to the end of the bridge and the walking trail also ended and as we were going along we realized that we were not just on a road, but we were in fact on the shoulder of the freeway!! We assessed the situation and decided that as long as we didn’t get arrested or anything that it would be faster to hike along the outside of the railing and take the next exit than go back on the bridge. So that’s what we did, and I can now say that I have walked the freeway for over a mile and taken a freeway exit by foot! We had breakfast at our hotel and we walked out into the dining room to find plates set for each of us with literally a whole round loaf of bread on each plate with some bread and peach jelly for each of us. That was breakfast! Bread here is like a glass of water in the states. You have it with EVERYTHING!! We then made our way back on the bus to the great city of Seville!!! After checking into our hotel we went to The Cathedral which, according to Guinness Book of World Records it’s the largest cathedral in the world. This building was SOOO cool. I had to take lots of pictures of the outside because I loved it so much. When I build my castle someday it will look similar to this cathedral and it is in fact massive. Apparently when they built it they said they were going to build it so big that the world would think that they were crazy and its pretty crazy huge! After that we founds some Kebops for lunch and did some shopping and later went to see a Flamenco show! It was seriously one of the coolest things I have seen. I took a little video that ill put up! It started out with just the girl and we were all just sitting there with our jaws dropped through her whole performance, then the guy performed and he was equally amazing. They wouldn’t let us take pictures until the last 5 or so minutes unfortunately but it was absolutely amazing!!! We decided to do paella for dinner so that I could taste some that was good unlike dinner the other night. We found a restaurant and sat down at the table outside. The waiter came out to take our drink orders and then the fun began. First off the group of men sitting at the table on the other side of the window by us started knocking on the window and waving at us. Then, after our waiter brought us our drinks, knowing that we were American decided that rather than waste his time trying to figure out what we wanted to eat, he would just drop the pad of paper to take orders on with a pen in front of Ben (one of the boys with us) and have him take the orders. I didn’t end up ordering paella because they only had the sea food ones, and that didn’t sound all that appetizing to me since I don’t even like most sea food to begin with. Then, out of a different window was a different group of guys and one of them pulls out a camera and starts taking pictures of us. And to top it all off, this place was not cheap and none of us really liked any of what we ordered. Even the two people who got paella said that it tasted about like what we had in Cordoba.

This morning (Friday) we got up and went to a place called the Alcazar. It was really pretty and there were lots of garden areas to walk through. After that we went to the bullfighting museum which was really cool!! I wish it was bullfighting season so that we could go see a fight! The season is from April to October. That night we went to this place our teacher recommended for tapas. Tapas are kind of like appetizer type things that they serve at pretty much all the bars in Spain. This particular place had a huge variety and they were 2 euros each. We just got a few different ones and shared them all. We got some fried mushrooms, two types of chicken, and some paella. It was lots of fun and it was our first real tapas experience. Saturday we had a long 6 hour bus ride home with about a 45 minute stop in Italica to see some Roman ruins! The ruins were pretty cool…the ampitheater was sweet! We finally got home and both Sami and I had chills and sore throats!! Great way to end a great week!!

Don Quixote wind mill!!

Windmills again!

The Alhambra lit up! Its huge!! thats not even all of it!

Some more cool graffiti!

Khasba the Indian Restaurant

Muslim souvenir shops!

So green and pretty!! Not much of that in Alcala

Look at that reflection!

pondering...

Beautiful day at the Alhambra

The Bell tower!!

This was really pretty, flowers and waterfalls

Beautiful!!

This is random, but i had to get a pic of this because this is the typical middle Spanish old lady look. Bright red hair with a fur coat!

The Cathedral in Cordoba had a million of those red and white arches...pretty cool

This statue has a spear in her heart, but the facial expression she had wasn't anything like "OH MY GOSH I HAVE BEEN STABBED" it was more like she was calmly and peacefully saying why did this have to happen to me. I was confused by it.

Supposedly Christopher Columbus is in there. Thats pretty awesome!

The largest cathedral in the world. I was climing up the tower and this was the picture outside.

The Cathedral...its huge!!!

Right before the Flamenco performance. We could have been the performance!



Its hard to see but this is a video of the boy and the girl dancing with the other guy singing. Just listen to that rythm!

This is the group that went to see the flamenco!

Ben playing waiter

Almost all of the group!

I could so be a bull fighter!!

In the bull fighting rink!

This was kinda funny, this is the prayer of the bullfighter before the go out to fight and one of the Goddesses is named Macarena, but when I first saw that it said Macarena celestial I thought it was some holy da nce and chant they might have done and it was funny it imagine it!

The roman amphitheater