Our program had an excursion to Granada this past weekend, which was the location of the last Moorish kingdom before their expulsion by the Catholic Monarchs in the 1492 This is definitely one of my favorite places I’ve visited so far. All forty of us took a bus over on Friday morning and pretty much had the afternoon off until dinner. I went to a section of the city called the Albaicín. Its full of cobbled alleys and we hiked up to Mirador de San Nicolás, which was this little plaza that overlooks the city and the Alhambra, a city within a city full of palaces, gardens, and patios. When we got to the plaza, it was full of botellones (when Spaniards get together and drink and chill) along the ledge with a view of the city.

Classy Picture

At night, after our buffet dinner, we all hiked back up to the same view except this time, it was at night time and it was incredible. Alahambra was lit up and this picture doesn’t even begin to describe how nice it was.

DAMN!

On Saturday, we visited a bunch of different monuments including Capilla Real, a Royal Chapel, the Cathedral, which was built in the 16^th century, and the Alahambra itself. What was so cool is that what we were learning in our history class was actually starting to make some sense now that we could actually visualize things. Also, we had a teacher who was our tour guide(in Spanish) who explained all the important things making the visits much more than your typical lets hit up the cool places and take pictures visits. What struck me so much in the city and especially in one of the palaces, The Palace of Charles V, which is full of Moorish architecture, but you can see random Catholic influences kind of mixed in after they took it over. There was also the Patio de los Leones, a site that I saw in this book that I have at home about the best architecture in the world.

Yeah check out the mountains in the background

Fellas from the Program

Anyways, so Saturday night, we tried to go to a hookah bar, but to cut a long story short, we didn’t end up staying because they were trying to cheat us. The guy at first was really nice and told Dhruti that he really liked Hindi films and especially Sharu Khan(I dunno how to spell his name) and then he started singing some Hindi song; yeah it was really weird. So we went to this club after that. It was kind of sketchy so we only stayed for a little bit and called it a night.

I’ve been pretty busy lately, with a surprisingly large amount of homework especially from this literature class that I don’t like at all. Our teacher knew we had a scheduled program trip to Granada during the weekend and still assigned a project and paper due the day after the trip after giving us a test the day before we left. Yeah, she’s awesome. What else has gone on? I had a presentation on Spanish cheese today. I felt like I was in middle school when I brought in some cheese for everyone to try while listening to my presentation.

I hope it doesn’t rain here tonight. Every Thursday the guys from our program and our director get together and play basketball against some Sevillanos who are at least in their upper 20’s. It’s a lot of fun and really good exercise especially considering how much we’ve been eating here. Next time I am going to start taking pictures of what I’ve been eating. Oh yeah, one last thing. I just got tickets for a Sevilla football game for this weekend. I am really psyched. I got a craving to watch some sports.

Hope everything is going well back home.

Happy Valentine’s Day Dhruti! Love ya……

To take advantage of the 3 day weekends we have here, we went to Portugal and got back last night. We left Thursday at midnight on a bus and got to Lisboa about 6:30 am. The bus ride was no fun, not because it was hard to sleep, but also because there were a couple of drunkards along for the ride. Anyways, after we took a metro near our hostel, it was still dark and the first real glimpse of Lisboa I had was of Castelo de S. Jorge. The castle sits on the top of the highest hill in the historical district and it’s lit up during the night. We made reservations for two nights at a hostel called Lisbon Poet’s Hostel and we went to look for it after the long ride. When we finally found the road, I was like this is really sketchy and thanks Maria for booking it. There was not even a sign saying the name of the hostel, but once we got in the place, it was actually pretty nice and only 18 euros a night. We also met up with Laura, a friend of Dhruti and I who is studying in France for the semester.

View from near our hostel

Downtown Lisboa

We walked around a little bit in the downtown area and after going to a pastry shop, I realized none of us knew Portuguese. Some of the people in the city knew Spanish and my Spanish is already pretty bad so I didn’t think that would help at all. Luckily, a lot of the places people knew a little bit of English. Besides the language, there was a completely different atmosphere in this city than Sevilla. It’s hard to describe, but I could instantly tell I was somewhere else.

On Friday, we hiked up to the castle where we got a really amazing view of the entire city. It was a little cloudy, but none of us could complain because the day before we got there it was raining so we lucked out somewhat.

View of Lisboa from the castle

By the time we got back down from the hill all of us were starving and I already had my worse Chinese food experience in Sevilla the week before, but somehow I agreed to go to another one. It was actually somewhat decent and I was able to satisfy my craving for tofu. Speaking of meals, I know we were in Portugal and it might seem strange, but we ended up eating Indian food for dinner. Daal, roti, samosa, mango chutney what else could you ask for! On the note of food, the guy at the hostel recommended a bakery to go to that made this pastry called Pasteis de Belem. It’s made at this café that has been open since 1837. They make more than 14,000 pasteis each day. I don’t know how to describe it, besides they are damn good.

On Saturday, we ventured to Sintra, a small city probably a good hour away much less touristy than Lisbon, Sevilla, and all of those big European cities. It’s an old town with palaces and castles out in the country. We visited Palácio e Quinta da Regaleira. It was full of gardens and the architecture was amazing ranging from the tunnels underground, the turrets, and spiraling staircases.

Palácio e Quinta da Regaleira

All around in one of the turrets

We got back from Sintra and after all those random ethnic meals; we thought it would be nice if we tried some authentic Portuguese food. Portugal is known for seafood and especially bacalhau, which is codfish. I gave in and decided to try a dish and I hate to admit it, but it was decent. It wasn’t too fishy and it was a fillet rather than the entire fish (head and all) that Maria and Chandni got. I don’t think that this eating of fish is going to become a routine whatsoever though.

So that was my trip at-a-glance and now I have an awesome week full of exams and papers. I had one today that I studied about 20 minutes for and then I have one Wednesday and Thursday. One thing I learned last night while studying is that after dinner I can not climb into bed under my sheets expecting myself to stay awake enough to study.