Yo he llegado!

I'm back everyone! Hours of flight time and airport mishaps / 800 yard dashes with suitcases......it was quite a trip.

I hope this is interesting to some people. I was going to take pictures of the house where I was living but it didn't really capture it well, so here is a video tour instead! I put it on youtube since it is a bit longer.

The House!

Granada

So! Pictures from Granada are finally posted!

Some windmills overlooking olive trees on the bus ride there! 5 hours from Madrid to Granada...not too bad!

At a rest stop, we discovered that they were selling tamogochi's in a vending machine. I totally would have done it if it hadn't been 4 Euros!

This was a view down from a weird walkway / balcony thing in the hostel. It was a really interesting building. Made more interesting by the very strong hippie-esque decorational vibe.

Nothing says "working hard" like a city employee taking a nap on the ground.

We had no map so we aimlessly wandered for a while. We got into an old hospital and met a brother of San Juan! It was neat!

And later we found an old convento / monastario, the San Jerónimo. This is probably my second favorite church in Spain (after the Sagrada Familia, obviously). It was just gorgeous. And we listened to part of a Vespers service here!

That evening for dinner we asked for hambuergesas and ended up with fish. A period of mourning was observed in Jessica-land.

The Alhambra at night from the muslim quarter!

Something cool in the muslim quarter! Too dark to stop moving with purpose to find out what though!

Bright and early in the morning, taking pictures from bus-stops that are mislabeled.

Alhambra

Here are some pictures of the Alhambra! It was an extraordinary palace / fortress / farmland. The pictures do a poor job of capturing its beauty and size!

Below is the Generalife (basically gardens but it sounds like they used to be a lot of crops, etc raised for the small town encircled by the walls).

Whoo hoo, de Falla! Te quiero!

A tour of the Nasrid Palaces? Don't mind if I do! Every single freaking room was this incredibly ornate. I can't imagine the work that had to go into these buildings.

Cute! Probably not so great for the building though!

I'm getting better at using the macro setting on my camera!

Time to tour the fortress! Looking down from one of the towers:

Hey, why not? Macro setting, here I come!

Mountains!

Whoo hoo Granada!

¡Granada!

SO! Lexi and I decided that rather than go see caves in Candelada, we would hop on a € 15 bus for a few hours and end up in Granada, where we would have almost exactly 24 hours before leaving again on an equally inexpensive bus. It was a beautiful plan for a very beautiful city. We got there at about 3 in the afternoon and went to check in at our hostel. We found it without any problems and discovered ourselves in what can only be described as a hippy-stoner's paradise. It was a tad ridiculous. Also extremely orange. But the hostel was very nice, the staff was exuberantly helpful in an absolutely not helpful way (maps? What are those? Oh, the buses....well, they run sometimes and stuff. Here's a coupon for free sangria!), and while there were no lockers there was a safe for our passports, so it was pretty okay considering it was dannnnged cheap.Anyway! Lexi and I struck out into the city looking for stuff to do for a few hours. We decided to go to the cathedral right away since it wouldn't be open Sunday morning and because it was only a few hundred yards from our hostel. It was a very nice cathedral but not really my favorite. It was the only Renaissance cathedral that I have seen in Spain so far though, so that was nice. While we were walking around the outsides of the cathedral, some gypsy looking women sudden set upon us. My person shoved rosemary or something under my nose and then put it in my hand. I figured she wanted money, and tried to give it back, but then she seemed to be letting me go so I thanked her and started walking. Then she caught my arm rather quickly and started reading my palms. Fortunately, I am very intelligent, have a good heart, and will have luck in love and marriage. Fantastic! Five euro. I was a tad annoyed, but I had expected it, so I explained to her that I hadn't asked her to do this and I wasn't going to pay her. DUH. I ended up giving her a euro just to say "fine, we're even," but she persisted that I needed to pay her five. I refused and she ended up swearing at me and pushing me several times haha. At that point I tried to rescue Lexi from her gypsy and we continued on our way. We would be accosted the next day as well, but escaped unscathed as we were more prepared for battle the second time.

After the cathedral we walked around for a long time looking at interesting buildings. We found an old hospital and worked up the gumption to go inside further than we were possibly welcome to. We even tried going down the mortuary hallway! There were incredibly detailed murals / etc on the walls so we took some pictures. There was a man there also taking pictures and he came up to talk to us for a while. He was from Cameroon and he was visiting the hospital because it was a hospital of San Juan de Díos. He explained that he was a brother of San Juan and told us a little about the history of the church and stuff. Cool! Then we came across another church that was friggin awesome. The admission unleashed us into a very very unpopulated monastery / convent type church and all of its many interesting rooms and incredible sanctuary. It was probably my favorite church of the entire trip. There will be pictures up of it soon and I need to find it on a map so I know its name. But yeah, it was sweet. We heard Vespers while we were there, so we sat outside a door and listened to the nuns singing for a while.

Dinner was the weirdest thing ever. We ordered hamburgers (I know, super adventurous -- sometimes you get tired of spanish tortilla and weird bacon strips) but when we got them it turns out that this restaurant's idea of a hamburguesa was fish. FISH. Noooooooooooooooo it was pretty gross but I managed to conquer mine because I was very hungry. Then we hopped on a bus and tried to get to the muslim quarter but it was already night and the bus stops are so poorly marked that while I think we were in the neighborhood it was impossible to tell where we should walk to see mosques, etc. Bummer, man. But we got some night shots of the Alhambra from a distance, so I guess that was cool.

The next morning we woke up wayyyy early and headed out to find the Alhambra. We got off at the bus stop labelled "Alhambra," but this would turn out to be a misnomer. After walking a LONG ways we finally found a sign that cheerfully said "Uphill Pedestrian Path to Alhambra, 380 meters." Let's put a stress on the "uphill" part of that. Good gravy. But eventually we got there! And it was really not difficult to get tickets like everyone had warned us it would be. So for the next several hours we explored astounding gardens, palaces, and a fortress until we were tired and hungry. Then it was almost time to bus home! On the bus ride I couldn't resist taking a picture of some giants. Er, I mean windmills. ¡Hasta otra vez, Granada!

Captions:

1: The inside of a Nasrid palace

2: Ruins of the Alcazar / Fortress

3: Don Quijote's foes

The Weekend!

So! Here were are in the homestretch! It's our final weekend in Spain. Lexi and I opted to skip out on the school conducted trip to Candelada and instead we are going to Granada! When you find bus tickets for €16 and a hostel with good reviews for €12, it's time to throw a shirt in your backpack and get on a bus for five hours.

I'm pretty pumped. I've always wanted to go to Andalusia, and I'm excited to see things with a ton of Muslim influence as well. Not to mention our hostel has "paella" night on Saturdays, so when Lexi and I come back we will be experts at making and eating it.

So no updates until Sunday or Monday now, sorry guys. In the meantime, here is a picture of me and Kat! We wandered north from our house the other day looking for an old mosque. We found it about two blocks away (who knew?!) and then we stumbled across a good five or six other churches, convents, monasteries, whatnot in the immediate vicinity also. Within a several block radius there are just gads and gads of religious buildings (some of which have since been converted into restaurants or residences). We were leaving for school yesterday when we saw a nun walk into the building across the street from our door and when we looked in the doorway we found out that there has been some sort of a convent literally six paces away from us the entire stay. WOW.

Anyway, I will post pictures of Granada! I just got into a new pack of batteries for my camera, so now I can take copious amounts of photos again.

Have a good weekend!

FUTBOL - Paraguay

SO! As you may have heard, Spain won the world cup. ESPAÑA ahhhhhhh!!!!
When we first got here they had just broken out of their group stage. I have now seen four games, two of which I did not think we would win. Spain v Portugal was a scary one, as was Spain v Germany.

It turns out that blogger will only let me upload one movie per post, so from here on out you will get a special treat with every update, because down at the bottom I will post a movie for your enjoyment. This footage is from the Paraguay game early on (quarterfinals, right?). At this point in the game Spain had fouled someone in the goal box, so Paraguay got a penalty shot. Somehow our amazing goalie Casillas managed to block it! It was the first time I had been down on the ground when stuff got crazy. Then literally two minutes later THEY fouled Spain in the goal box and we got a penalty shot (which we made!!!!). Perhaps footage from that will be in the next blog.

This won't be a long post because I don't particularly feel like uploading pictures and things right now. Nothing too exciting has happened. This program has cruelly decided that all the classes need to sing and dance at the final fiesta (HA I'm pretty sure I'm going to accidentally be in the bathroom just about the time our group has to go up) and this is what our teacher has decided we will be performing: Mecano

If you are digging the 80s amazingness, don't worry, so is our teacher. Mecano 4evah!

The video from the Paraguay game!

Caption: Kat is proudly sporting a skirt that she considered buying for....her flapper parties? We're not exactly sure.

La Sagrada Familia

¡¡¡ESPAÑA!!! We won the world cup!!!! Holy freaking Toledo. It was absolutely insane last night. I got punched in the face among other things, plus met several interesting young spanish men drinking scotch straight out of the bottle as part of their victory celebration. Hard core. Andy, you would love it here. Actually, false, you would be the one trying to nurse your scotch out for an hour while the world erupted red and yellow around you. I'm going to wait a little while to put up photos and video from the game because other people were also taking pictures and I want to snag them from facebook before I craft my post.

I'm giving this entire update to Gaudí's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. For those of you who didn't take 10th grade spanish, this is a cathedral that has been under construction for over 100 years. It's slated to be finished in 2026, so obviously I will be going back to Spain in sixteen years. This was truly one of the most astonishingly beautiful things I have come across in all my time in Spain so far. We tried to get in the first day we were in Barcelona but there was a long line so the next day we went back early in the morning. € 13 (or around that much) seemed pricy for us college kids, but it was worth every cent. We spent two or three hours in and around the church listening to the audio tour. It was really quite amazing.

This is the outside of one of the three doorways (only two of which are close to being completed). This is the Fachada de la Pasión and details the Last Supper through to the Crucifixion. The supports are supposed to look like bones and eventually there will be a large crest above it.

There are only four completed towers at the moment, but there will be eight towers similar to these plus one enormous dome in the center.

The inside was amazing. It took your breath away. The columns and ceiling are meant to give the feeling of being in an enormous forest, and the stained glass windows were just tremendous.

I was pretty enamored with the stained glass. I have always liked it, but I think these were some of the most beautiful I've seen so far.

The following pictures are outside of the Fachada del Nacimiento, or the birth story! It is quite different than the Passion doorway because the latter is supposed to be very stark and startling whereas this one is incredibly detailed. It was nearly completed during Gaudí's life, whereas the Passion doorway has been under construction since his death.



I can't wait until it is done!!!! It is going to be absolutely ridiculous when it is completed.