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……