Cuevas El Abanico Granada

... some time in Retiro Park (similar to Central Park in NYC) before we went to The Prado museum for a few hours. I as pretty shot early in the night from my classes that day and thus Scott and I headed to bed early so we could get up at a decent time to head to Granada,
Since I am living between my homestay and the hostal this week while everyone visits, Scott and I had to get up quite early so I could head back to my homestay to grab some more clothes and drop ...

... the pond. The American author, Washington Irving, explored the palace in the 1800s (after it had fallen into disrepair) and stirred up interest about it with his Tales of the Alhambra. It is a truly magical place.

It's hard to list highlights – every room had details and stories about which many books have been written. Some views that stuck with us, though, include:

• the Islamic writings sculpted into the walls
Granada, Andalusia, Spain and Canary Islands jennyandpaul2

... tapas... wonderful. After a few of these, we caught the bus to Bobadilla, which is a 10min walk to the campsite, and conveniently has a typical Spanish (loud men, even louder women serving) bar, where we continued to consume beer and tapas; 4 rounds later, we had spend just Euros 7 per person and felt sated not just Alhambra (the local beer, very good) but the variety of hearty tapas. We walked back to camp for a well earned sleep.

... and we were very close to the stage. The way they danced gave me goose flesh. There was some geezah there who kept looking at us and eventually he offers us the left overs of his paella. As any poor raggamuffin traveler should do, I happily dug in. When I think about it, maybe I should not eat the left overs of geezers anymore. But whatever, that´s not the point. The guy had taught at the University of Rochester and lived in ...

... have no business cracking jokes, but off course that's never stopped me before.   At 8:30 or so, Steph had to go back to her home stay (she and Kim live with a Spanish family) for dinner, so I grabbed a Kebab and a La Habra's, the local beer named after the huge castle that sits on the hill above Granada and retired to my room to eat, read, drink, and watch a soccer match on TV.  I took a quick shower to prepare for the night, and was traumatized when I pulled off my shirt to see that ...

... to the place was quite steep and long, and a stream of muggy water seemed to be running down the pavement. Fortunately, when we reached the entrance it stopped raining for a while.

The Alhambra, a masterpiece of the Arabian architecture, a must-see place in Spain, of worldwide fame, beautiful .. I was reading the brochure that I got from the Information Centre and was looking around to find all this ...

... into a tiny elevator that hardly fit us and our 2 duffel bags. We made to our rooms. The room was pretty small, smaller than a typical single dorm room at a university. Our beds, heavily spring-bound, were clad without sheets, but with a thin, substance-filled comforter that looked just SO appealing to sleep on. Our bathroom felt like an icebox with a shower that size of a sink with telephone-esque shower apparatus. Somewhat confused, we began to ...

... Christmas presents for our relatives in Canada.  This was followed by an extensive struggle to find somewhere affordable to eat at dinner time (our dinner time, not Spanish dinner time which seems to take place around 10 or 11 pm).  We eventually settled for the old backpacker standby of sandwiches and called it a day. As this post is dragging on, we'll keep this brief.   Our last day was fairly relaxed.  We had a brief stop at the train station, where we ...

I will just briefly explain the highlights of my yesterday... As a poor college student I decided it was in my best interest to spend all of yesterday traveling on three seperate flights where I booked my own connections becuase it was the cheapest way to get back to granada. We got up at 4:15 to get to the Edinburgh airport for flight number one. We only had carry on baggage because we didnt want to miss our connections sooo I ...

... as I kept wondering when my last picture would be, and thinking about making the trek back to the hostel to recharge it, and how I would possibly explain the situation to the guards at the enterance who were thoroughly checking everyones times on the admissions tickets, in the hopes to get some sympathy and be allowed back in with a fully charged camera. Thankfully, I never had to find out how the scenario in my head would have gone in reality.