the last days...

I can´t believe that these past 16 weeks have gone by so quickly and a week from now I will already be home! I am having mixed emotions about leaving, while I want to see everybody I can´t imagine leaving Granada.
To begin our countdown to home, on Monday night we walked up to the Albaizyn, a really cool neighborhood up on a hill overlooking Granada with the typical white Spanish houses. We went to Mirador San Anton which is this just like really cool spot where you overlook not only the entire city of Granada but right in front of you is the Alhambra (according to Molly, it is the most visited monument in Europe, which none of us believed, upon further research I believe it is the Eiffel Tower). Our original plan was to drink a bottle of wine, eat our bocadillas, and watch the sunset but we actually couldn´t see the sunset. We could only see the reflection of the sunset on the Alhambra which I think is just as cool and as it started getting darker outside they turned spotlights on the Alhambra. It is so crazy to me that I have lived in such an awesome place for the past four months and can walk 20 minutes from my house and see this anicent fortress built hundreds of years ago. After the Albaizyn, we went and got tapas at Bella y La Bestia (Beauty & the Beast for all you English speakers), I obviously don´t eat meat and Molly doesn´t eat pork (after watching the movie Babe) and the first tapa they serve is a ham and cheese bocadilla so we asked for all vegetarian tapas. The guy clearly didn´t like this. He not only tried to cheat Kristen out of 10 euros but then literally poured hotsauce all over our french fries and sauteed mushrooms that could have potentially been really good. After a very unsuccessful attempt at getting tapas, we made our way to Dolce Vita. The night was fun and ridiculous as always. Funny story...Kristen, Molly and I were going to the bathroom and Molly was trying to close the door and as she was trying to shoulder it close she completely wiped out and was laying on the bathroom floor (disgusting, I know) and then I, trying to be the good friend that I am, tried to help her off of the floor and the back wall of the bathroom literally fell on my back. Granted it was only plywood but it was hilarious to say the least.
On Thursday night, Isabel (my host mom) invited Carol and I out for tapas with her friend Pilar and Pilar´s two host daughters (so random, one of the girls was from Charlotte and the other girl was from Georgia). We went out to this little tapas bar down the street from where we live and sat at a table outside and drank wine and ate tapas. It was so much fun, I wish I had gone out with Isabel more often but we always assumed Thursday night was her time away from having host students in her house all the time. I also realized how much of a partier my host mom actually is. Her friend Pilar is crazy. Pilar is Isabel´s ex-husband´s sister but they still go out and get tapas every Thursday. After we went to tapas they were going to another bar down the street and invited us so I went and got another drink with them before going to meet up with my friends. When we went into the bar, Pilar and Isabel not only knew everybody there but Pilar was making her way around the room and trying to teach all of us how to dance flamenco/reggaeton.
I am currently in the bus station waiting for Meghan and Lauren to get here from Barcelona, I got the time a little off on their arrival so I am sitting in a little internet room. We are going to the Arab baths this afternoon that used to be public baths when the Moorish people lived in Granada and now have been converted into spas. Hammam, the one we are going to has 3 pools--one hot, one warm, and one cool and you just make your way around the room in the different pools and at the end you get a massage. I am so excited!

sorry i suck at updating my blog

Sorry I suck and haven’t written on my blog in FOREVER. My internet broke and I never figured out how to fix it and now my computer is also broken so it has made blogging a little difficult. So here are the last couple of weeks of my life.

            April 10-13: Dad and Susan came to visit me April 10-20^th and we had so much fun. The first weekend they got here we walked around Granada and saw all of the Semana Santa celebrations. In southern Spain, the week before Easter there are Christian processions organized by churches where people volunteer and dress up in cloaks and carry these giant handcrafted structures with Jesus and Mary on them. The parades got a little redundant but they were really cool, we were fortunate enough to be able to see a parade that only comes to one town every 100 years so it only comes to Granada every 10,000 years. On Monday, dad and Susan went to a small town in northern Spain to visit one of Susan’s friends for a couple of days. We went out for Molly’s 21^st birthday that Monday night to Dolce Vita. A bar we go to most Monday nights and pay 5 euros for all the beer and sangria we can drink.  Dad and Susan came back to Granada on Wednesday night. Isabel, my host-mom, invited them over for lunch on Thursday and she prepared a huge feast for them. A delicious salad and paella, it is one of the biggest meals we have had in Granada. It was really fun to have them come over for lunch and see where I live and how I eat lunch everyday. Ignacia, the grandmother that I live with, didn’t really understand that they didn’t speak Spanish so she would just yell louder in order for them to “understand.” After lunch (dad and Susan had rented a car to drive to northern Spain) we started driving to Gibraltar, which I realized was only 3 hours away from Granada. The Rock of Gibraltar is one of the coolest things I have ever seen, it is so amazing to see something that I have seen in textbooks all my life in real life. We went to Europa Point, the southern most point in Gibraltar and to your left we could see Spain, we were standing in England, and looked across the Strait of Gibraltar to Africa. Wow.  

April 16-19: The next day we drove to Tarifa, Spain (45 minutes to the east of Gibraltar) to take a 35-minute ferry to Tangier, Morocco.  Once we got to Tangier we drove from Tangier to Fez. It was supposed to be 3 ½ hours south from Tangier but it ended up taking us almost 6 hours because it was so dark outside and the roads were so bad (not even striped).  We finally made it to Fez and to our hotel around 11pm. The next morning we had an amazing buffet breakfast with Moroccan tea (black tea with mint leaves). We decided to hire a guide to show us around the city since we didn’t really know where to go or feel really comfortable traveling the city by ourselves. Our tour guide, Abdul, first took us to see the king’s palace. The king of Fez is one of the last kings left in Morocco. Next, we went to a pottery factory and were shown around and saw every step of making pottery. The artisans in the factory hand-make the tiles and individually paint each piece with one bristle before putting it in the kiln. We then went to Medina, the old city in Fez, and ate lunch at the most delicious restaurant. I ordered Moroccan salad, couscous, and for dessert more Moroccan tea. We then went to a Berber carpet store and then a tannery. A tannery is where they dye leather and it was the craziest place I’ve ever been. There were like 90 vats full of dye and this man was literally standing 3 feet in bright pink dye, dyeing camel hide. Later, the same man was standing in a vat full of limestone he was wearing protective gloves and boats but they were certainly not fully covering his skin. After the tannery we went to a factory that sold saris and scarves, handmade in Fez. Walking through Medina was so amazing; it was like stepping back in time 200 years.

April 30-May 3: This past weekend I went to my friend Angel’s condo in Benemadlena, a beach 15 minutes east of Malaga. It was so much fun! There were eight of us (Angel, Joshua, Hicham, Josera, Molly, Kristen, Miriam, and me) staying in a one-bedroom condo from Thursday to Sunday. The weather last weekend could not have been more perfect. We laid out on the beach or by the pool all day. At the pool, there were 5 pools connected to each other and were all at different heights with slides connecting each of the pools together. The slides were so much fun, I think I probably went down them like 50 times throughout the weekend. These two slides were like 20 feet long made out of stone and ended like 4 feet above the water, you literally like flew into the water. Molly and I before we even went down the slides the first time decided that it was a great idea to go down together. Kristen and I were racing each other down the slides next and I told her that I felt like I was on the Jamaican bobsled team (like from Cool Runnings) so then before every time we went down, we would say “feel the rhythm, feel the ride, something Jamaica (we couldn’t remember that line), it’s bobsled time.” Towards the end of the weekend, we of course had to take it to the next level and would clap at the end of the slide and then either try to spin into each other or away from each other. On Sunday, Molly, Kristen, and I decided that we wanted to take the bus back from Granada earlier than the boys were going back so we waited at the bus stop for like 35 minutes and realized that if we didn’t hurry that we were going to miss the 8 o’clock bus so we decided to take the cab to the bus station, 25 minutes away. We got to the bus station at 8:02 and saw our bus pulling away. A little dumbfounded, as this was the first time that we have ever had any consequences for our unorganized, always-tardy travel we decided to make the best of the situation. There is a train station directly next door to the bus station that has a lot more stores than the bus station. We walked in and immediately saw that there was a bowling alley, obvious decision. While all of the cousins know how good of a bowler haha I shockingly didn’t win, Molly scored 101, Kristen 99, and I had a whopping 58.  After bowling, we got dinner in an amazing wok restaurant that had a buffet where you could pick all of your toppings and they stir-fried it in front of you. We were walking back from dinner to catch the 10 o’clock bus and all the boys came walking up the stairs thoroughly confused about why we weren’t already back in Granada.