granada

I spent this past weekend (May 30-June 1) in Granada, Spain.  Granada is well-known because it is home to La Alhambra.  Granada is a beautiful city that’s right beside the Sierra Nevada mountains.  La Alhambra was a Moorish palace, and so there is a lot of Arabic influence throughout the city.

I left with 6 other girls from school on Friday.  We took a bus from Sevilla to Granada.  The bus ride was about 3 hours, but we had beautiful scenery to look at: mountains, hills, fields, and orchards.  This was my first bus trip on public transportation, and I was impressed with how nice the bus was.  The bus system and station was easy to understand and navigate, and it was fairly inexpensive.

When we arrived at the Granada bus station, we knew we had a hotel, I had directions, and we had planned to walk there.  However, our hotel was actually in a pueblo outside of a neighborhood in Granada.  We didn’t know anything about the Granada bus system, and it’s super complicated.  We ended up camping out at a bus stop and asking each bus that came along if they were going to the address of our hotel, and finally we found one!  At the bus stop, we were trying to understand what some locals were explaining to us about the bus system, but one woman only spoke French (super  confusing when you’re in Spain, I know).  We had to take a bus from Granada to Abolote, and then we had to walk to our hotel that was still about 15-20 minutes away from the last bus stop.  The road to get from Abolote to our hotel was literally dirt.  We also arrived in Abolote during siesta time, so no one was outside and all of the shops and restaurants were closed.  Thankfully we found a couple walking their dog, and I asked them how to get to the hotel.  And thankfully, they were very nice and told us how to get there. 

  

We arrived at our hotel (I’m still impressed that not one of us cried all weekend) and checked in, and we really didn’t feel like doing anything after our adventurous start to the weekend.  Not only 10 minutes after we had arrived, we got a phone call to our room from the front desk.  The receptionist told me that there was a English immersion course taking place outside if we wanted to join.  The receptionist only spoke Spanish, so when I answered the phone, I was assuming I’d misunderstood.  We went out to the lobby to see what was going on, and indeed, there were several Spaniards talking in broken English.  They invited us to their BBQ in the hotel’s garden area, so we went!  We got to talk in Spanish, and they got to practice their English.  I don’t know how or why, but we talked about rednecks a lot in our conversation.  I learned that the Spanish word for redneck is “gañón,” and there used to be a TV show in Spain called Gañón; he was basically a super hero.  They were a group of about 20 who have been studying English to advance in their careers in the Spanish Army, so they spend weeks immersed in English with teachers who only speak English.  We were all impressed with their English speaking skills!

That evening, we walked in to Abolote to find something to eat.  The dirt road was not nearly as intimidating once we knew where we were and where we were going!  We had no problem finding a tapas restaurant called “Mississippi.”  Tapas are done “traditionally” in Granada, so when I ordered a drink, I received a free plate with tapas.  We were all surprised when we had only ordered our drinks and ended up with a plate of bread and ham!  I probably spent less than 25 euros on food all weekend, and I wasn’t necessarily trying to limit meals or anything.  

We spend the rest of Friday night walking around and enjoying the beautiful landscape and scenery around Abolote.  We walked back to our hotel around sunset because no one really felt like walking down a dirt road in the dark, and we ended up going to a truck stop restaurant across the street to get some desert, play Uno, and watch some fútbol.  We’d had enough adventures for our first day!      

Saturday morning we got up very early to take a cab to La Alhambra.  We had already purchased our tickets for a guided tour- all in Spanish- and we were ready to go!  The first tour guide looked at us and said, “English over there” and pointed towards a different tour, but then we explained to her that we actually did want the Spanish tour.  Everyone else in our tour group got a laugh out of that.  Thankfully our tour guide was easy to understand, so I actually did get a lot out of the experience.  Having a tour guide was so nice because the Alhambra is HUGE.  I wouldn’t have known where to start without having someone to lead me through.  The only thing I can almost compare La Alhambra to in the US would be Monticello or Mount Vernon (presidents’ homes), but I have never seen anything like it.  It’s even harder to comprehend because La Alhambra was mostly built in the 11th century.  That’s where every “historic” monument in the US starts to seem funny.  There is genuinely nothing man-made in our country that is anywhere close to that old!  There are beautiful gardens all throughout the palaces and around the outside too.  Almost every room and patio in the palaces has some sort of fountain, and the water “aqueducts” that are outside are so impressive.  The views of Granada and the mountains from La Alhambra made the trip worth every penny.

  

After we spend the morning at La Alhambra, we continued into the center of Granada to find some lunch and rest for a little bit.  We didn’t want to pay to take a taxi back to the hotel during siesta, so we found a cafe with internet that we went to after we’d eaten lunch and spent an hour or so there.  A professor from our school had told someone about a church in Granada where Ferdinand and Isabella are buried.  We went to La Capilla and were able to see their tomb and their actual caskets.  The church also has a small museum with the actual crowns and some robes from Ferdinand and Isabella. Ferdinand and Isabella were the Catholic king and queen (los reyes catolicos) of Spain who funded Christopher Columbus’s trip to the Americas.  We also toured La Catedral of Granada, but we weren’t allowed to take pictures inside either location.  For the rest of the afternoon, it rained and rained and rained.  We didn’t really know what to do, so we walked around shops, went to H&M of course, and found a place to eat supper before heading back to Abolote.  On the way home, I asked the cab driver if it rains a lot in Granada, and he said, “No, just bad luck!”  Another day full of unexpected adventures...  

On Sunday, we had nothing planned except for our 4:30 bus back to Seville.  We slept in and planned to get into Granada and spend time there until we needed to catch our bus.  We went in to Abolote to get churros for a early lunch/breakfast, and thought we knew exactly how we would catch the bus into Granada.  We ended up waiting for a bus just to get to the Granada bus station for about 1.5 hours.  On the bus, there were some teenage boys who loved having 7 American girls in front of them.  We were taking pictures, and they wanted to be in them, and somehow they eventually ended up following us on Instagram.  We later found out that the bus we were on wasn’t going to get all the way to the bus station.  We ended up having to walk (through the rain) to get the rest of the way to the bus station.    

After we got to the bus station, the rest of the trip was a breeze.  We had enough time to use the bathroom, get something to eat, and find our bus.  The bus was extra fancy, and we got a snack bag for the trip back to Seville.  When we arrived back in Seville, we were all talking about how much it felt like “coming home!”  We were just blocks away from the river and our bridge, the sun was shining, and all was good!