February 16

2-16
Warning: this is a long blog. Very long.
We just got back from Granada last night. Wow, what an experience that was! It was a student-led trip from the university, and it had to be one of the worst-planned and organized trips I’ve been on. I enjoyed the city and what we saw, but it was just so disorganized that it would have almost been worth it to go on our own instead.
We left Madrid on a huge double decker coach bus at 8:30 Friday morning. It was a 5 and a half hour bus ride, and we drove south through all of Castilla La Mancha into Andalusia. Those are two of the autonomous communities, in case you didn’t know. Granada is in Andalusia, which is the southernmost of the communities. It’s close-ish to the sea, but doesn’t have any coastline. It’s warmer there than Madrid, too; it was about 65 or 70 in the sun every day, but much colder in the shade. The scenery was beautiful; lots of rolling hills and fields. In some of the fields there were the ruins of little buildings with half a wall or no roof or something. I don’t know if they were ancient or not, but they looked like it, and in Spain you never know when something is 500 years old! When we were driving through Castilla La Mancha, there were a couple of times I saw Don Quixote-like windmills on a hill in the distance. They weren’t the windmills from the story (I think there’s a place where the supposed real ones are that you can go see), but it reminded me of it. And it was in La Mancha, so it was very cool. On the bus, we met three Italians that we hung out with for a lot of the weekend. There were two girls, Alessandra and I think Maria, and a boy, Riccardo. It was Riccardo that we hung out with most. He spoke English, but the girls only spoke Italian and Spanish. It was cool; they spoke Italian with us and we spoke Spanish with them, and we all understood each other! I knew that the languages were very similar, and I had heard that you could communicate using different languages, but it was a lot easier than I expected, and it was cool to experience!
When we got to Granada, they dropped us off at our two hostels. In the email they sent, they had told us we would be staying in hotels. I wasn’t sure if that meant a real hotel or a hostel, so I brought shampoo and soap and a towel just in case. But most of the other people in AYA who went were expecting a real hotel with all the accommodations included. Ryan (one of the guys in AYA) even said he expected there to be an iron and everything, which I thought was a bit much to expect even from a hotel. So they were all really upset about that miscommunication. The hostel we stayed at was down a narrow alley and it was a little dingy. It was pretty clean, but we were still wary. It was weird; when you walked in the front door it led into a kind of courtyard with an open roof and little balconies on the windows of the rooms above. It was pretty cool, except that the main area was then cold because it didn’t get much sun.
When we got there, they gave us a few hours to eat and do whatever we wanted before we took a walking tour of the city center. We didn’t know where we were or where to go, so we found somewhere close to eat and then met up for the tour. It was led by a student who seemed to know quite a bit about the various places, and I took lots of pictures. Granada was where the Muslims lived before they were kicked out in 1492, so there’s a lot of Muslim architecture and influence, with mosaic tiles and intricately worked plaster-ish stuff on the walls. A lot of the tourist shops had Arabic stuff in them. Granada also was the place where Christopher Columbus got permission from Ferdinand and Isabel to voyage to America. There’s a big statue of Columbus and Isabel in the Plaza de Isabel la Católica, which we used for a meeting place all weekend.
After the tour they dropped us off in the city center and gave us some more free time. We didn’t really know where we were or where the hostel was. This whole weekend, if we asked how to get somewhere the leaders told us to just ask someone on the street. They didn’t know how to get anywhere. So we just wandered around for a while and then eventually found the meeting place. We took a bus to this flamenco thing that was on our itinerary, which I assumed was at a theatre, but it wasn’t. Well, first the bus took us to the Almaycin, which is the ancient Muslim neighborhood with all white buildings were there’s a famous view by the church of St. Nicholas where it drops into a valley and you can see the Alhambra on the next hill, all illuminated at night (it was about 10:30). It was pretty, but it was freezing and we didn’t need to stay there long. Then the bus took us to the flamenco. Ryan described as an underground speakeasy, which is kind of what it seemed like. It wasn’t covert or anything, but it was in a small, low-ceilinged, long, narrow room where we sat around the perimeter so there was a kind of runway in the middle of the room. There were people that danced flamenco individually or in pairs, really close to us. It was kind of cool; we could see all the fancy footwork. It was like a kind of tap dancing; they would stamp out intricate and very fast rhythms with their feet, using their toes and their heels alternately, sometimes with guitar and singing, and sometimes with just people clapping. It was very loud in that little room, what with the stomping and at least two people clapping all the time.
We left the flamenco a little after midnight. On our itinerary, it said there was going to be a party at a club called L’Scandalo starting at midnight. Instead, we went to another club first, until about 1, and then moved on to L’Scandalo. I have no idea why they changed plans, but no one told us about it. We stayed at the other club until about 1:30, and then we wanted to go home, because we didn’t know where to go and we had a full weekend ahead of us. So all the AYA people and quite a few other people told the leaders that we wanted to go back to the hostel, and they sent one of the leaders with us. Only, he didn’t know where to go. We were wandering around the streets with a map, asking random people on the street how to get to our hostel. I think that if you’re going to be organizing a trip for students, you need to at least know how to get back to where you’re staying. That’s a must. It was ridiculous. It took us about a half hour to get home, and at one point when we were getting close, we got to a point that Ryan recognized and knew how to get home, but the other people thought it was the other way, so we split up. They ended up getting there a few minutes after we did. By this time it was 2 in the morning and we just went to bed.
The next morning we got up and went to the breakfast provided by the hostel: toast and jam. Really gourmet, but whatever. At 11:30 we got on a bus to go up to the Alhambra. I don’t think our bus driver knew where he was going, because we turned around at least 3 times, and it took us like a half hour to drive there (it only took about 20 minutes to walk back to the city center afterwards. Granted, there are a lot of one way streets and stuff, so that’s probably why it took so long). I don’t know how much everyone knows about the Alhambra, so I’m going to give a brief description. It’s an ancient city where the Muslim sultans lived in the 1100s. It was a city, but it’s really quite small, and all encompassed by the city of Granada today. It took only 20 years to build, which is amazing, because it’s several large buildings, and it’s very intricate. There were about 2000 people living there when it was used for that purpose. It’s got a main palace complex and then extensive gardens called the Generalife. When the Muslims were expelled from Spain in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabel were in Granada, but they didn’t live there. Their nephew, Emperor Charles (Carlos) V was going to make it the basis of his Spanish empire, and he lived there for about 6 months. During that time he had it added on to, making a round, Romanesque plaza sort of thing with columns where today they hold concerts and parties. It was only because Carlos V built onto it that the Alhambra wasn’t destroyed. All the other mosques and Arabic buildings were demolished in an attempt to wipe out all “heathenism.” After 6 months, though, Carlos decided that it was too far away from the hub of things to make it his home, so he moved somewhere else and abandoned the Alhambra. So, the Alhambra is one of the best and most famous examples of Muslim architecture in Spain.
It was beautiful. There were tiled mosaics on the walls and ceilings, and intricately carved plaster or something, I’m not really sure what it was made of. There were even some original carved wood shutters that were preserved by rubbing oil and dust into them. The ceilings were tall and pointed so that the middle was taller than the sides, and there were arches everywhere. The Muslims had tapped into a water source somewhere at the top of the hill and brought water into the complex where it had previously been all dry. They had some fountains, but also a lot of courtyards with pools of water that run so slowly that it looks like the water isn’t moving at all, so there’s a perfect reflection of the building. It was really cool. After the palace part of it, we went into the Generalife, which are the gardens. It’s on a hill, so there are different levels, and it has tall hedgerows that you can walk through and pathways with fountains and flowers (cheerily blooming in the middle of February!) There was even one huge bush I saw that had the middle carved out of it so you could walk inside! The Generalife was filled with all sorts of things that look like a stereotypical palace garden. It was beautiful. At the end of the tour, we walked down a street, I think it was called the Paseo de los Tristes or something like that, that is one of the oldest streets in Granada. It was downhill on cobblestones with small steps every few feet, and loose stones and very treacherous, so we couldn’t really look around at the buildings, but it was still cool.
When we got back to the city center (at about 3:30), our student leader was like: now’s free time, go do whatever you want. But again, we didn’t know where we were or how to get back, so we wandered until we found something familiar. The next thing on our itinerary was a party at a bar called Mae West, which said time to be determined. We realized after we separated from everyone else that they hadn’t told us what time we were supposed to meet. Of course. We assumed that it probably wasn’t until midnight or so, since that’s when the party the night before was, so we didn’t worry yet. We looked around some of the tourist shops, but once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, so we decided to go back to the hostel to shower and rest for a while. We managed to find it on our own this time (yay!) and so we were there for about an hour when the rest of the people from AYA came back. We hung out in the hostel for the rest of the afternoon. We found out from our Italian friends that the party was going to be at 12ish, so we had a few hours. The club we were going to was supposedly a dress up one, so we put on our nice clothes and Ryan did everyone’s hair and Jillian did everyone’s make up and it was a fun little makeover session. We found out at about 11 that there had been a pre-party party at 10:30 that no one had told us about, but I’m not sure if that was for everyone or just a smaller group. But it didn’t matter. We were having fun in our hostel.
We didn’t even all meet to go to the club together. They had given us the name of it, but no directions or address, so some of the people in our group went on the computer downstairs in the hostel to MapQuest it and find out where the heck we were going. Right before we left, the Italians told us that they heard we were going to a different club first, that was close to Mae West. We all went together, which was good, because none of the AYA people knew where we were going. The first club was small and crowded, and I kept getting bumped and jostled, and it was annoying. They played some American music, but there was also some Spanish music, which is different from the other clubs I’ve been to. I actually tried to dance and have fun, and it was pretty ok for the first hour or so. But then I just got bored. Around 2:00, all the Erasmus students were herded out of that club, counted, and then taken over to Mae West. It looked like it was in a shopping mall. It was weird. But there was a huge flight of stairs that people were climbing and waiting in line to get in, and there was also an elevator. I don’t know why, but we all got in line for the elevator. Which took about a half hour longer than it would have if we had just climbed the stairs. That’s when we also got our coupons for two free drinks. There were basically two rooms to the club, off of a mall-like hallway. The bar part was absolutely packed; you had to wade through people, shoving them out of the way to get anywhere. It was ridiculous. We got our first drinks in there (I got a lemonade and vodka, which pretty much just tasted like lemonade even though there was a lot of vodka in there) and then went over to the pub. That was less crowded. Relatively. You could stand up on your own with a little bit of personal space. They played American music in there, but it wasn’t the normal bad club music. They played some Bon Jovi, and a Spanish version of “I Wanna Be Like You” from the Jungle Book, and Greased Lightning, and some other fun music. I decided that I might as well use my other drink ticket, because it was free and I couldn’t imagine two drinks would kill me. So I got vodka with orange soda. Again, a lot of vodka in that little glass. I’ve never had two drinks before in my life. I was a little dizzy, but I’m not sure how much of that was the alcohol and how much was the fact that it was going on 4 in the morning and I was about to fall asleep on my feet. I was feeling completely lucid, though, and perfectly fine other than that. When it was almost 4, the AYA people started talking about leaving. We all met in the hallway to make sure we had everyone. There were two people who had decided to go back into the bar, so we were trying to call them to let them know we were leaving. One of them didn’t have her phone on her, and the other one picked up, but we weren’t sure how much she could hear. Finally we got through and said we’re leaving, and she said ok, but we didn’t know if it was an ok you can leave or ok we’re coming. So Ryan went around the bar like 4 times looking for them, and finally we decided just to leave. We walked home with no incidents or getting lost (which was a huge relief) and got back to the hostel about quarter to 5 in the morning. I was so tired. Apparently the other girls got back about 15 minutes after we did, but I was asleep by that time. It was way past Bethany’s bed time.
The next morning we had to be out of the room by 10:30; a cruelly early time for us. Five hours of sleep just isn’t sufficient. But we did it, and then found out that there was no breakfast waiting for us. No idea why. So Katie and Jen and I went out into the city and found a little bakery/café where we bought breakfast. We were going to go to the Corte Ingles to buy some supper for the bus ride home, but it was Sunday, so it was closed. The Corte in Madrid is open on Sundays, so we weren’t expecting it to be closed, but I guess Madrid’s is just open because it’s a bigger city. Almost everything in Granada was closed except tourist shops and restaurants. In Spain, everything is closed on Sundays and often Mondays. What is open those days is generally closed from 2-5 for siesta. So the reason we were staying in Granada until the afternoon with nothing to do? I have no idea. We wandered around for a while, then got lunch and sat there at the tables outside in the sun for 3 hours (it took almost that long from the time we got there to the time we got our check; we only sat out for about a half hour after we paid). After that we found another bakery, bought food for the bus, and then sat on a bench along the street for another couple hours. We went back to the hostel to pick up our bags and found the rest of AYA there, so we chatted with them for about a half hour before it was time to meet up to go home.
The original email we had gotten said that we were going to get back to Madrid in the afternoon, so I told my señora I would be home for supper. But when we got there we found out that we weren’t leaving until 4. The bus was supposed to pick up the people from the other hostel at 3:45 and then come get us at 4. Of course it didn’t arrive until 4:30. But then we got on and drove home. I tried to sleep for the first part, and I think I almost succeeded, but not quite. I just listened to my iPod for the rest of the trip. We got back to Madrid at 10:15, and by the time I got home it was about 10:40. I talked to my parents for a while and then went to bed, glad to have a real bed again. I don’t have classes till 4 on Mondays, so I was able to sleep in this morning. I slept until 11:30, and by 2:00 I was ready for a nap! But I forced myself to stay awake and finish some homework. Now it’s 10:30 and I think I’m going to go to bed soon. 5:00 in the morning really is too much for me!
Oh, one more thing about how disorganized the trip was. Two girls from our group had a class on Friday morning, so they bought their own bus tickets to come after class. They arrived around 5:30 or 6. The Erasmus people had put them on a list of the hostel rooms so they would for sure have a room. I know they did that, because when we were all signing up for rooms, we switched one of them out so they would be in the same room (they had been in separate rooms) and I would take her place with my friends. Then the Erasmus people put up a big stink because they said we couldn’t switch it like that, so we put it back the way it was. When the girls got to Granada, they called the leader and were told to just ask people how to get to the hostel. Luckily they had picked up a map from the bus station. They found the hostel and then were told that there was no room for them there. So they went to the other hostel and were split up. One of them was told that she was going to have to room with 5 boys she didn’t know. I’m not sure how she got out of that, but I wouldn’t have done it either! Somehow they ended up together in a room full of strangers, but I have no idea how their hostel got changed. They said there were people there sleeping on the floor on mattresses, so I guess there weren’t enough beds for everyone. Then they didn’t know where we were or where we were meeting when, so they wandered around the city for a couple hours. They just happened across us when we were all gathering to go to the flamenco, and we left 5 minutes after they found us, so if they hadn’t been walking by at that exact time we would have left them. I couldn’t believe that the leaders were that irresponsible with two of their group. It was inexcusable that they weren’t given a place to meet or a time, and that their housing accommodations were changed without telling them, or that they weren’t given directions, or anything. The girls were almost in tears when they found us because they had no idea what they were going to do. It was unbelievable.
Anyway, that’s my rant/story about the weekend. All in all it was a good trip, just badly planned and organized. I’m glad I got to see Granada, but I wish we could have gone with Patricia instead. She would have made it a great trip. But whatever. It’s over now. And I’m going to bed.
G’night!
Bethany