Trip to Granada

This past weekend went really well. It started Thursday night at our dinner to find “intercambios.” These are people that we would meet with weekly so they could help us with our Spanish and we could help them with their English. It was rather awkward at first, but we finally got the guts to go talk to some of them. Natalie, Kate and I started talking with a group of four guys that were about twenty-five. They were all really nice, easy to talk with, and the best part…they would correct our bad grammar! That was exactly what we needed so we all exchanged numbers and ended up hanging out that night. They took us to the “cool” places in Toledo and we had tons of fun. They have this thing called a “botellón,” which is just outside of the walls of Toledo. All of the people our age go there to drink together and meet new people. Our original plan was to go home early because we had a trip to Madrid the next day and we had to be up kind of early. WELL, we had so much fun that we didn’t make it back until five in the morning! Oh well, it was fun and we survived the next day!

Madrid was a blast and we got to see so many interesting things! The first thing we did was went to el palacio real. This was where the king and queen of Spain lived and directly across from it was la iglesia (church). It was absolutely beautiful, but we weren’t allowed to take pictures inside the palace. After that we had a bus tour of Madrid and then went to eat at the museo de jamón. We had chicken, French fries and a salad….can you say AMERICAN!? After that we were all on our own to do what we wanted. My group (Maggie, Kate, Natalie, Daniella, Brian, Ryan, Jamie, Mark, and I) left for the bus station so we could get to Granada.

It was a five-hour bus ride, but we watched two movies and had a stop for food. I was also sitting with a random person who turned out to be a boy my age who was really nice! When we got there we all had to find our hostels because we all booked them at different times so we weren’t together. Natalie, Kate and I were the least prepared and had the least information and yet ours turned out to be the best! It was in a great location, very clean and the owner was sooooo nice. His idol is Jimmy Hendricks!! The boys said their hostel was ok, but a little dirty and kind of sketchy. Maggie and Danielle’s hostel was so scary and dirty that they ended up coming to our hostel the next night!

The first night we got there kind of late so we just went out to some local bars. Danielle knew some friends that are studying there so they showed us the fun places to go. The next day we woke up early and went to get tickets for Alhambra. We had to walk for 20 minutes up this HUGE hill and then we get there and the tickets are sold out for the morning session. Therefore we had to buy tickets to the afternoon session and then walk down the hill and then back up it like 3 hours later! We got a lot of exercise that day.

We did some shopping and then went back to Alhambra for our tour. It was once the residence of the Muslim rulers of Granada and is full of amazing Islamic architecture. Seeing this was really interesting. There were also a couple of other palaces we toured on the grounds of Alhambra and we also saw La Generalife. This was basically a huge garden with water fountains. It was gorgeous! The whole tour took almost three hours, so after we got ate and had really good ice cream. Ice cream is so big over here; they eat it all the time! That night we went to see Flamenco dancing in the Albayzin neighborhood. It was quite interesting and looked very challenging. I was actually pulled up on the floor to dance with them and I probably made a fool out of myself but it was a lot of fun.

That night we went out again, but not for long. We were all really wiped from the long day and all of the walking. Plus, in the morning we wanted to wake up early and go to the bus station so we could get back to Toledo as soon as possible. Well, we made it to the station really early but it turns out that all of the buses were full until one in the afternoon. So we basically sat around for three hours. It all turned out ok though, and we got back at a descent hour. We all had a really good weekend!