Hola Amigos!
It has been a joyous first 5 days in Espana. Just like in any good mini-series I will start where I left off. I had successfully gotten sleep, met up with Blake and was about to head to Granada.
So Blake, his sister Brooke, his roommate Sarasota native Max and I all jumped on a charter bus in Madrid and made our way down to Granada. The 5 hour bus ride was filled with neck breaking nap sessions, coma inducing European Union reading, beautiful scenery and random ginormous blacked out billboards of bullfighters, bulls and other random Spanish objects. Turns out billboards were banned and so the owners of the billboards just painted them black and left them there. I had close to 37 different explanations conjured up before Blake told me that. Aliens were involved in 19 of them, yep, imagination is alive in this guy.
We finally got to Granada around 8 pm and it was still light out. It doesn’t get dark here until 9 pm or so, I immediately thought how it would be a great, cheap place to play baseball/sports, no need for lights on the field and after school neighborhood sports could go on for hours. We drop our stuff at the hostel and head out on the town. The cool thing about Granada unlike most Spanish cities is the unique Tapas situation. In nearly every tapas bar you get a free tapas when you buy a Cana (pronounced Kan-ya close to Kanye West but with an a sound at the end), aka baby beer), wine or sangria. This is so fantastical because you can bounce around from place to place drinking and eating for hours on end while never getting drunk. I felt like we hit the food and drink lottery. We only ate in this manner for the entire weekend and didn’t think twice about it. I actually just had my first real lunch and first dinner tonight.
Saturday night was a night to remember. The night was slowing down and we were headed home. As we walk up the street we see the happiest, fattest Obama bin Laden looking man any of us had ever seen. He was Algerian, had a huge beard and owned a hookah restaurant. Being the salesmen that he was we bought in. We ended up smoking coconut flavored tobacco while hanging out with our new found crazy friend. He danced with Brooke, tattooed our names with sharpie on our forearms (confirmed to actually be our names the next day), talked smack to all of us for about two hours, he definitely didn’t like that we predicted a US victory over Algeria in the world cup and served us the best tea I had ever tasted. It was a great time and will never forget our crazy, fat Bin Laden hookah restaurant owner.
On Sunday we embarked on a tremendously nerdy adventure. We segwayed our way up the side of a mountain. Blake, Max and I had never ridden segways and thought that why not cross that goal of our life lists: segway up a mountain in Granada, Spain uhhhhh check. We found out three things during our segway adventure: 1) Segways are never cool 2) It is impossible not to have fun on a Segway and 3) you can seriously injure yourself on one. As an athletic individual I had to swallow my pride when I thought I tore my ankle and knee up spinning out up the side of a hill. Lucky for me I didn’t tear anything and I can officially secure my athletic pride for some time longer.
Now regarding my speaking of Spanish……uhhhhh yeah, no bueno (that’s not good for the non-bilingual folk). Ok so I’m not that bad but I am nowhere near good and when I say good, I mean decent. Luckily Blake and Max had been living in Spain for nearly a year and could handle all situations and negotiations while they were here and my roommate can speak Spanish well. I do have something good going for me though, I have no shame butchering this wonderful language in an attempt to get what I want. I am told most people are much more shy when they have the vocabulary of a 3 year old like I do, I still don’t know if that is a compliment or not. I continuously fail at what I am trying to convey in Spanish but eventually the poor Spaniard figures it out after a few rounds of elaborate charades and well intentioned Spainglish. All in all though I can pretty much order food, get directions and stay out of trouble with my Spanglish, I can survive on that. Thanks Rosetta Stone, you’re the best!
Granada is known for the Alhambra which is this church/palace/village/fortress built from the 12-15th century by a bunch of Islamic Sultans. So on Saturday we went. It is planted on top of a big hill and is beautiful (see pic). I recommend that everyone see it in their lifetime. The inside of the Alhambra is amazingly ornate but I did find out that the intricacy was made from moldings not by hand. Still very impressive though. Our tour guide shared a pretty disturbing, Spartan-esque story about the Alhambra: The Sultan that ran Granada and lived at the Alhambra defeated by the Spanish (Ferdinand and Isabella) in the 16th century was crying as he left the city. His mother supposedly said to him, “Cry now like a woman because you could not protect this city like a man.” I just want to thank my mother for never saying anything like that to me……well at least to my face, BURN!
School has started and we have a different subject each week here, four in all. This week we have two teachers from the University of Granada teaching us about the European Union and I don’t want to kill myself. Yes beware huge nerd alert, the class is interesting. Seeing that no one is reading this to learn anything about the EU I will share only one interesting thing. The teacher informed us that the Marshall Plan ($ provided by US to rebuild Europe after WWII) was money given by the US not loaned and Europe did not necessarily want it because it helped the US export industry so much, interesting difference in view points. We have University of Granada students in our class which adds to the perspective change as well.
Went to an Irish bar last night and I am convinced that every time an Anglo Saxon goes into an Irish pub in Spain an angel dies. It just seemed wrong, nevertheless it was fun and there were tons of Americans. We also were taken up a hill and got a view of what Bill Clinton called the most beautiful sunset he had ever seen, it was spectacular. Ate the best paella I have ever had tonight and headed to Madrid to hang out with Blake and Max again this weekend.
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