Man, was it a long walk from the piso this morning: we ended up all the way in Barcelona – but damned if it didn’t take all day!

Last week, Jorge instructed us (during a typically long-winded but surprisingly dramatic meeting) to meet at 9.45 at the bus stop by El Corte Inglés that we might catch the 3€ Gonzalez public shuttle bus to the airport. (At first, we wondered why he told us that specific stop, which isn’t really convenient except for a couple people. We later caught wind of his motives, when we pulled up to other bus stops and the bus was nearly full, too bad for the other people trying to get to the airport. There’s a few other things Jorge told us that we didn’t understand, but more on that later – and no, it wasn’t the language barrier.) That really was the longest walk of all, though: while I had bought a reasonably decent mountain backpack (40L, two side pockets, a small pocket on top, various straps and buckles, and a fancy mesh backing to keep your back well aired-out), Akin instead packed his wheely mini-suitcase. All the freaking way up Alhamar, ch’k'ta-ch’k'ta-ch’k'ta-ch’k'ta-chnnnnnnk-ch’k'ta-ch’k'ta-etc. It really depended on whether the wheels were rolling over cobblestone or concrete, and my, is there a lot of cobblestone in Granada, but either way: chk’ta or chnnnnk, take your pick.

Akin and I realized while we were en route to the bus, that having stayed out late last night to celebrate our flat-mate Youssef’s last week in Granada may not have been, it might go without saying, the wisest idea. Oof. Nevertheless, the bus ride itself was quite tranquilo. We arrived at the airport with plenty of time to sit around, check in, sit around some more, move over to the waiting area by the café and sit there for a while, go through security, and sit on our patooties s’more! At least we were in time for Jorge and his daughter Stefania to catch their plane, a RyanAir flight direct to Barcelona.

Oh, didn’t I tell you about our flight plans? Thank you to the excellent planning of Iberia Airlines and their package deals for the University of Delaware / UGR groups, we were eagerly awaiting an Iberia Airlines flight from the Granada-Jaen airport to Madrid, a 50-minute layover in Madrid during which we had to run across the airport, take a 20-minute tram, get through Madrid security, and catch the next leg of our flight, a plane from Madrid to Barcelona. Jorge told us about the perils of this journey; that was the dramatic part of last week’s group meeting. He charted it all out for us on the whiteboard, how our flight from Granada gets in to the airport in terminal D and our flight to Barcelona leaves from HJK (which is one very long set of townhoused terminals and they don’t typically assign gate numbers until about half an hour before your flight) and how that’s ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE AIRPORT and oh you’ll have to run (at this point he mimicked running, muy gracioso) and while it’s not that big of a deal if you miss the flight to Barcelona because there’s flights basically every hour between Madrid and Barcelona, if you don’t catch the plane home to Granada on Tuesday, you’re probably SOL or maybe you’ll have to bribe a bus driver in Málaga to drive us all the way back to Granada like last semester, because Iberia Airlines hates Granada and usually only has one or two flights a day into the Granada-Jaen airport. Oye. So that’s what we were looking forward to, hellz yeah! Also, that’s why Jorge said to heck with that whole mess and booked a direct flight for himself, because he doesn’t particularly enjoy running in a suit.

The plane ride was … yup, it was a plane ride. Getting into Madrid airport is always fun since it’s so nicely designed, quite artsy, and it so turned out that we got all the way across the airport (in not too leisurely a manner) with twenty minutes and change to spare. Hurry up and wait, guys! The smallest comfort in all this was that Jorge didn’t have anything else to do with his time, either, since he and Fani (which is the Spanish version of “Stef”) were just sitting around the Barcelona airport waiting for us to show up so they could bring us in to our hotel.

Meeting Jorge at the airport was rather nice, though, but we had to sit around a little more while people collected their belongings from the baggage carousel and … from the plane, where they’d left them. Group backrub time, folks! Life is good. Soon enough, though, it was time to get up and go catch a bus into town, so we could sit a little more. I love my life sometimes, really and truly.

According to our itinerary (which dates back to last November, incidentally), we were promised a walk down Las Ramblas, the main pedestrian drag of town. Well, … kinda. We hopped off the bus at the Universitat stop and walked… lessee, there’s Ramblas right over there … yeah, we went around the corner to find, voilà, Hotel Gravina, a three-star hotel tucked neatly onto a side street. Rooms got divvied up pretty quickly and we went up to drop off our stuff, then reported back to the lobby to get briefed by Jorge on plans for the evening and report time for the next morning. Plans were that there were no plans, and breakfast is in tomorrow morning at 8.30 in the hotel dining room; we leave at 9.15 for touristing. Before we left, though, there were two nice things: first, our per diem, an even 100€ for food (but not drink); and last, a flute of cava for everyone (gratis with the room). That’s some mighty fine sparkling grape juice they make in Cataloña, I’ll let you know.

Our throats wetted and our appetites whetted by our hotel’s hospitality, the class split up and struck out in search of food. After wandering for a bit and turning down pinchos (Basque tapas) and a cafeteria, we decided we were tired and hungry enough to settle for some legit Spanish food at a little café called Abellana. Most of us were satisfied with personal Margherita pizzas, but Ashley and I got a little adventurous; that is to say, we got paella. (We convinced her to try seafood paella, the way it’s supposed to be done, but she refused to eat anything that could stare back at her – so Jason tore the heads off the shrimp and ate them himself.) I had a lovely meat-lover’s paella, which ahd sausage, chicken, another sausage, some other meat, and I think a third kind of sausage? I savored that paella SO HARD AND SO LONG. That’s right, Laura. I SAVORED IT.

Following our hearty meal of … pizza and paella (which has got quite a ring to it, wouldn’t you agree?) we hit up El Corte Inglés, of which there are about a dozen in Barcelona, for food and beverage to support us for the next few days. First stop: the chocolate shop. Second: the market. Third: they were turning off the lights and making noises about people listening, so, the door. We took our rations back to the hotel and enjoyed the heck out of them. I’d show you pictures except that I apparently didn’t pop off the camera lens cover at all after dinner, which is probably just as well.

Welcome to Barça, kiddies. It’s time to sleep.

Today’s Facebook album: (2009-03-20–21) Barcelona, Fri/Sat morn

Waking up was fun. We woke up the poor Utah yoga girl who was put in her room. No chats, though. Laura and Lisa, after packing up, peaced out real quick – almost as quickly as they had been in sneaking her in last night. The rest of us took a bit more leisurely attitude towards getting out. I took some photos around the neighborhood, too. Then we all met up at the metro, hopped on (as soon as we actually determined which metro stop we’re supposed to go to – it was a long few days since we came in), and made our way to the shuttle bus for the airport. Lisa parted ways with us at that point, as she was merely taking a train from Paris back to Nantes, where she was studying.

All was going well until – dun dun dunnnnnn! – we had to run across a 4-lane highway to make it from the metro stop to the bus stop. Laura made it OK. Jess made it OK. Ana made it halfway across and her clutch fell open, spilling money and credit cards everywhere. What ensued afterwards was a hilarious mad dash back and forth across the four-lane highway to grab 100€ in notes and a credit card. Oye. One hurdle down.

Next: turns out you’re supposed to catch the shuttle bus an hour and forty five minutes before your flight. We got there an hour and forty minutes early. Oye. Well, Ana sweet-talked the bus ticket seller and it turns out they already had a list of the passengers from our flight, as they were associated with the airport, and thus knew we had missed our bus. So, they just tossed us on the next bus, which was in ten minutes, so all was good. (Seriously, it’s a 4-gate airport, we didn’t really need to be there until about half an hour before.

Once we got to the airport, it was lots of hurry up and wait. We met up again with Alisha, who had actually caught the right bus (and figured we’d get there eventually), and enjoyed an awful lot of hanging out, nibbling on baguettes and pan de chocolat, and doing nothing. That was the theme of the rest of the day, really.

Things of note:

• Chocolate shot bottles. Jess found me a pack in the duty-free shop; they’re dark chocolate bottles, about an inch tall each, with half-shots of alcohol inside and aluminum wrappers of the appropriate liquer outside. Adorable little things, I’ve been looking for them since I went to Stratford upon Avon my sophomore year. They ran me 20€ and a little drunkenness in the airport.
• Karen wasn’t allowed to bring unwrapped cheese across country borders, so she ended up having an early lunch of cheese and breed while sitting in the airport lobby. Eventually she got through security, and it was delicious.
• Alisha had been waiting for a month to use a new pack of cards she’d been given, which had a different curse word on each card and its translation into four other languages including Spanish. We had an awful hard time focussing on the card game, but we learned a lot.
• Apparently I look French, since the waitress in the Barcelona airport said “merci” to me instead of “gracias.” She was Catalan, so nbd for her.
• Albondigas (meatballs) are delicious when it’s a huge 8€ dish in the Barcelona airport and you don’t have anything to do for a coupla hours.

Neeeeeeeext our flight to Granada-Jaen from Barcelona-Gerona. Yup, puddle jumper. Good times. We got in to Granada and picked up the shuttle bus from there back into town, hopping off at the cathedral around 9pm – just in time to go eat some pizza on the street with the girls.

Goodbye, Paris – hello again, Granada!

Today, we visited Lots and Lots of Big Things. Breakfast was not a big thing, but we visited that nonetheless, because it was there and it was yummy. Our plan was to start at one end of Champs-Elysees, at the Arc du Triomphe, and work our way down it towards the Obelisque, which is a block over from the Louvre; then stop off at Notre Dame and spend the afternoon and early evening around the Eiffel Tower, with vague plans of dinner afterwards. (Ana decided to go off with her friends instead of partaking of our itinerary, but that worked out fine.) It turns out we actually stuck to our plan!

Thanks to the trusty French metro, we made our way to the Arc du Triomphe. Jess’s Rick Stevens travel guide has some funny things to say about the Arc du Triomphe: “Lady Liberty – looking like an ugly reincarnation of of Joan of Arc – screams ‘Freedom this way!’ … Today, the Arc du Triomphe is dedicated to the glory of all French armies.” I’ll leave you with that. Actually, I’ll tell you about what happened when we got off the metro stop. In order to get from the metro to the Arc proper (which is in the middle of a bunch of roads, if you’ve ever seen the Tour du France), we had to walk through an underpass and go up an escalator to the plaza. We get near the end of the underpass and suddenly Laura bolts off and runs up the escalator. We catch up to Laura and she’s wrapped around a tall blonde American! That’s how we met Lisa, Laura’s friend from Connecticut who’s studying in France.

After spending some time taking photos of the Arc du Triomphe, we made our way down the Champs-Elysees. It’s a big road. There’s lots of big things on it. Go check out the photo albums. We just wandered around and chatted, really, nothing overly interesting. Eventually we found the Obelisque, where we called up one of Laura’s other friends who was also touristing through the city; she was in the metro and otherwise engaged with her group, so no go. Across the street was the Jardin du Tuileries, which got me all excited since I’m a fan of Pictures at an Exhibition. At the other end of the park, we found the Louvre, which meant it was time to go.

For lunch, we followed the advice of our native French guide – or at least, the closest thing we had handy – Lisa, who suggested we find a little square with a boulanger (for bread), fromagerie (for fromage, I mean cheese), a something else (for meat), and a patisserie (for dessert); apparently they’re pretty common in her town. We couldn’t find them all together, but after wandering a bit (and getting some fruit from a market, too), we came out with a fine take: baguettes of various types, a tub of Camembert, oranges, and a bag of grapes too! We took our victuals and headed over to our next stop to eat them (and, incidentally, ran into Analecia with her friends on the corner while they were en route to the Latin Quarter. Go fig.)

It’s a little stupendous thinking about what daily life might be like in Paris. Walking around these monumental edifices which litter the city, there are simple boulangers, apartments, and their ilk. Oddly enough, though, around the corner from Notre Dame is a theatre which plays the Rocky Horror Picture Show. (Too bad we didn’t have time to come back later to watch that.)

That aside, Notre Dame is a Fancy Big Building. Also, we ate a lunch of baguettes and cheese in a little park out back, then went inside for a while to check out the Big Fancy Building. It’s very massive; also, there’s they had some theatrical lights mounted way up high to light up the pulpit and the altar. They also had a big projection screen mounted behind the altar with a projector. Outside of Notre Dame, Lisa peeled a perfect spiral peel off her orange. I peeled mine very badly, ate it, and then met a poor gypsy begging for money. I gave her some grapes instead, which she was very appreciative of. The next gypsy wasn’t impressed with the oranges, though.

Next stop: everywhere, en route to …

The Eiffel Tower! It’s big. Huge. World Fair huge. We got there around 4pm to see it during the daytime. Also, it’s big. We took the elevator up =D Lots of pictures up in the windy, windy observation decks. Suffice to say, the girl wearing the dress with tights didn’t come upstairs; Karen sat in a café on ground level instead. We walked down, though, which took an awful long while. Whee! By then, it was 7.30 and we could see the Tower all lit up at night. Additionally, every hour on the hour of the evening, they have lots of flashy bulbs for five minutes. We were up there at 7pm to see it Then we met up with Karen and got to see it at 8pm from afar.

Since Karen was a little chilly come evening (and a little culture shocked by her experience at the café), we sent her home on the metro while Laura, Jess, Lisa, and I went to meet up with Lisa’s friends to pick up her stuff and eat dinner. Amazingly enough, we got dinner for 15€ each (formula meals, or menú del día) plus a bottle of wine. It was in a little cave-y; also, in the middle of a gay district. The meal was delicious – and the clientele, flaming. It was a nice mellow dinner, thanks to our waiting for an hour for our food and enjoying the wine the whole time. Also, Canadian!

After dinner, which we finished off around 12 or 1am, we hopped the metro back to our hostal to meet our new, um, guest. Some other woman got put in the sixth bed in our room, one of those crazy hippy Mormons who practices yoga and spiritual stuff. We were going to put Lisa in that bed, dangit! Instead we walked very quickly in through the lobby and up to our room so that Lisa could spoon with Laura for the evening. Poor girl who was stuck in our room had to deal with us calling Laura’s boyfriend Scott, who, as it turned out had been enjoying his beach house, so we had a nice Skype video chat with the lad. Then, to bed for another eventful day!

Well, good morning, Paris! It’s a great sight in the morning to see, through the drizzle and light fog, a one-star hotel across the street from our hostel. I fear we may have the better accommodations. We also have a French-style continental breakfast downstairs in the foyer, which is to say, toast, butter, jam, coffee, hot chocolate, and various tables to eat on with stools to perch on during your breakfast. Before breakfast, though, we needed an itinerary! No, of course we didn’t have any idea what we wanted to visit, just to be a bunch of tourists in gay Paris. Good thing there’s the internet – and tourist information spots!

Speaking of tourist information centers, I might have to say that the goofiest encounter we had in Paris was Karen talking in Spanish to the French guy at the one by the metro. He actually spoke pretty fair Spanish while he pointed out sites to visit on the map, but it was rather weird to hear it with a French accent. The guy did peg us pretty easily as English speakers, but I think we might have tipped our hand when we talked amongst ourselves in English and American Spanish. At least he thought we were England English, not American.

Another person who did speak a little English was the apothecary. Analecia had a bad cold, so her brain is a little clouded. Since she was incapaz, not in condition to wander around the streets of Paris in order to get herself some Robitussin, I asked at the front counter of our hostel for where I might find a pharmacy, ever-so-prevalent across Europe. Apparently one was right around the corner, so I walked over and hailed the man working, asking if he spoke enough English to get the concept across. A little, he says. So I tell him my friend as a cough (illustrated by a little hacking) and her chest is stuffy – ah, yes, an expectorant would be great. Also, her nose is stuffy, not runny, just lots of phlegm – oh, right, a decongestant, yes, exactly. Finally, a headache, so some OTC French-style Advil. Grand total: 14€ and a smile for accommodating the poor tourists. Now, back to our initial timeline, already in progress.

After a time at the tourist info booth, we went up the hill to the closest site: the Cathedral of Sacre-Cœurs. (Really, I’m just telling you about that so I can use the “œ” character. It really was a cool place, though.) Besides being a typical fancy cathedral, though, we ran into a few shenanigans there.. more than a few, to tell you the truth. I’ll start at the bottom of the hill and work my way up.

The cathedral is placed atop a mighty hill, with stairs and greenery leading up to it. At the plaza at the base, where are various tourist shops and a carousel, stand lots of African guys (mostly from Senegal and Trinidad) ready to intercept tourists. Analecia had sat down on the bench there to rest, because she had a cold which had rendered her lungs useless; so, when I came down the hill to fetch her, one of the black guys caught my attention and I let him spout his spiel. He had a length of string, various colors, with a loop on the end which he hooked over my naïvely outstretched finger, then proceeded to make into a finely wrapped bracelet while he talked an awful lot of nonsense at me in heavily accented Spanish and English. I must admit that I heard the phrases “gulag gulag” (”good luck” in his language, so he said) and – this is no lie – “hakuna matata” while he wrapped up the bracelet and gave me a little finger massage for, as he mentioned, more gulag gulag. When he finished chatting me up, he tied the bracelet around my wrist with an ingenious knot which, as of the time I write this (a month later) still hasn’t come undone – then he asked me for a tip. I dug in my change purse and came up with a 20-cent piece. No, no, too little, he said! He wanted 5€ which I didn’t want to pay; maybe 2€, but I didn’t have that coin. After a moment of haggling over the matter, I realized what I had in my back pocket: a collection of friendship bracelets I’d made in Spain, fit to rival any five-minute creation at the foot of Sacre-Cœurs. Moreover, one was in the French colors of red, white (well, cream), and blue! That set of macramé came out of my pocket and to my aid: his friends all came over to admire them while he pondered my offer of barter. After a moment, he said to me, “Alright. I change you this one for that.” Parfait – especially since I couldn’t take off the darned bracelet without cutting it! Meanwhilst, Ana was just finishing with her attendant Senegalese, who had a slightly more sour look to him than my genial host; the man had convinced her to take one by pointing to me and saying, “Look, your husband is getting a bracelet, you should too!” Cute line. Thus adorned, we went back up the hill.

What was up the hill (but slightly earlier in today’s timeline) but more people selling tourist goodies! Laura saw a great deal at the top of the stairs: a youth with a blanket covered in Eiffel Tower sculptures of various sizes and a sign listing “3 = 1€.” Not one to pass up a bargain, she handed him a one-euro piece and took her three, one in each color of bronze, silver, and gold. Pretty typical, right? Only until a woman standing there took the euro back from the boy, put it in Laura’s hand, and closed her fingers over it. Laura looked at the woman in confusion, who started taking in French and took out her wallet to flash a badge at us. Karen’s reaction? “Time to go, Laura!” I hung back a little and spied on them from above. It unfolded that the boy didn’t have a license to be an ambulant vendor – that is to say, a street seller – and the woman was a police officer who made him pack up and ship out, much to his chagrin and Laura’s joy, for she had both three miniature Eiffel Towers and a euro still in hand!

Here’s the last story of the Sacred Heart: Karen made friends with a juggler! On the steps just below the cathedral was a guy, twenty-something, with a pair of Chinese yo-yos: two sticks with a long cord in between the tips, with which he juggled the yo-yos, two rubber figure-eight objects. When we first came up, he wasn’t doing anything particularly impressive; but then Karen did the most amazing and magical of things: she threw some change in his hat and watched appreciatively. The yo-yos started flying higher and higher, going around and about his sticks in such a manner that you couldn’t tell whether his strings would be knotted in a moment or completely free! Looks like I neglected to get a video, though – sorry!

The next hour so was not as eventful. We meandered around Montmarte and saw some sights, but didn’t visit anything in particular. The Salvador Dalí museum looked interesting, but we didn’t have enough time for it! The guy playing a string bass outside the museum was interesting, too, and we only needed a few minutes for him. Some cool graffiti adorned the area, including a doe walking out from behind a tree – the tree was real, the doe was painted on the wall – and a flying cat up high on an apartment building wall. Le Chat Noir, the same one of the famous bohemians and poster with the aforementioned cat, is indeed a real café over in Montmarte and we almost ate lunch there! The Moulin Rouge was a little shorter than I thought it would be, but it was still cool to see; however, the big air vent in front of it was more fun – we did Marilyn Munroe-style poses for schlitz and giggles (mostly giggles). Since the street down the way from the Moulin Rouge is lined with sex shops, we dropped in one for giggles as well. It turned out that the proprietor, a black guy from one of the French territories, had previously been an economist but had retired from the market to open his shop and, what’s more, had studied in the U.S. at University of Maryland, College Park, so he was familiar with Delaware. Nice guy, he gave us a little discount too.

For lunch, we ended up at a café on the corner just across the street from the Moulin Rouge. At least, half of us did, since we couldn’t find the other three people until we were sat down, when I spotted them on the street, leaped up, and tore out of the café to hail our friends for lunch. Lunch was served by a very genial old waiter who lacked a few teeth and any knowledge of English, so we weren’t exactly sure what we were getting or how much it cost. We ended up with some tostadas (toasted baguettes as open-faced sandwiches), mineral water, and of course a beer for me. Pretty tasty, although when the check came, we were a bit sticker-shocked by Parisian prices – I think my entire meal came to 18€, as opposed to 7€ or 10€ around Spain. Ah well, gotta eat to live, gotta pay to eat, gotta go to a patisserie and get bread for tomorrow.

Next stop after lunch: the National Opera House. This place – specifically, the National Academy of Music – is a fantastic opera house and also the setting for Phantom of the Opera, so of course Karen especially wanted to make the 3pm tour. We finished lunch a little late, which gave us … not enough time to find the opera house. We were further delayed by a fire in the top floor of a hotel along the way, which didn’t really get in our way, but was interesting to watch anyway. The firemen brought out their fancy fire truck, extended the ladder up to the top floor, rolled out the water house, and in short did all the typical things that firemen do in this kind of situation. They had cool helmets, though. Well, in between this fire, general cluelessness about where the Opera House was in the city or how to get there, and misinformation from the tourist booth (since the tours were at 2:30, not 3pm as he told us), we didn’t make the tour. We did eventually find the place that we might go back tomorrow and get some nice tourist photos today.

Our eventual goal for the rest of the day was to make it to the Louvre for the evening, since it was free to under-25’s every Friday evening, in an attempt to culture the youth of France. Ana’s mind was getting clouded, though, as her dose of cough medicine from the morning was wearing off. Unfortunately, Ana’s drugs hadn’t kicked in early enough in the morning to grant her the presence of mind to put the medicine in her Mary Poppins bag before we left the hostel, so I elected to take her home that she might take another dose, and to meet up at the Louvre. Several metro rides and a bit of a walk later, Ana found herself a rejuvenated woman and we found ourselves outside the Louvre, waiting for the free entrance time and to gather everyone up. Outside the Louvre proper was a skate-park of sorts: a large plaza in between two hotels served as recreation area for a bunch of teenagers on rollerblades chasing each other around and doing stunts; also, a priest. Cool guy. Anyway, we all came together after a time and two of Ana’s friends found us waiting in line, per their plan, so we all split up into mini-groups and wandered around the museum for a bit.

What’s in the Louvre? Plenty, man, plenty! Statues, paintings, the Mona Lisa, boys playing with Rubik’s Cubes, etc. and so forth! I wasn’t particularly impressed by the Mona Lisa, I will say, though I was entertained by their presentation of it. It’s mounted in a huge, empty brown wall in the middle of a room, the walls of which are covered by equally huge paintings, while the Mona Lisa itself is only about 2 feet tall. She’s certainly pretty, but I must be a Philistine, for I don’t get all the hype. The crowd was pretty cool, though, and I was amused by the singular security guard posted by the painting to make sure nobody rushed the barrier to try and break the lady out of her glass cage. As for the boys with Rubik’s Cubes, it was a pair of them sitting on a soft bench near the Gregorian art. They were something, alright, with timers and bags full of different cubes: 3-by-3-by-3, 4-by, 8-by, even a little 2-by-2 keychain one. One guy showed off for us when we started talking to them about it: he solved the cube in 21 seconds, one-handed, on his left hand. Cool hangouts, man.

Before the entire facility closed, we took a break around 8 or 9pm for dinner at a food court underground, in the complex but outside the Louvre proper. Instead of proper food stands with brand names, each one was a different regional menu: Moroccan, French, Italian, Asian, and the best of all, Spanish tapas. Not too expensive for the meal, either.

Shortly afterwards, the Louvre closed, so we went out to street level to see the pyramids all lit, spy on the Eiffel Tower from afar, and take goofy photos. Some teenagers were taking GQ-style photos, so we got a few with them and even made friends on Facebook with one. Good times at the Louvre. After a bit, we took the metro home, got some freshly made crêpes on the street (mine with Nutella and almonds!), and headed back to the hostel for the night.

Good night, Paris, we’ll be back tomorrow for more!

Facebook albums for today:

• (2009-03-13) Paris - Fri, Louvre
• (2009-03-13) Paris - Fri, after Lunch
• (2009-03-13) Paris - Fri, through Lunch

Class couldn’t go by fast enough today. It was a typical enough Thursday morning, with grammar and culture class. It was also the last class of the week, since all the students had plans to take a three-day weekend and we’d informed our professors of the same. (We’re not really bad students, though, since two of our three profs had already cancelled class due to personal plans! The third prof was still holding class session for anyone who wanted to come, so we could watch a Spanish movie on the classroom projector. I hope Jason enjoys his personal showing of Pan’s Labyrinth.) The weekly meeting after class with our program director Jorge was pretty entertaining though, what with his dramatic presentation on how we would have to run through the Madrid airport en route to Barcelona next weekend (more on that next week, after we go) while various clumps of people drifted out throughout the meeting to go catch flights out of Granada.

Laura, Karen, Ana, and I were one of the last clumps out, to take our rolly suitcases and backpacking backpacks with our nice plastic sacks filled with bocadillos and fruit down to Gran Vía and ditch this country of fried food and bulls for the weekend. Before I tell you about all our shenanigans, let me give you a quick run-down of our travel plans from door to door:

• 1408-1300 – the 3€ Gonzalez shuttle bus from Gran Vía by the cathedral
• 1645-1815 – RyanAir flight from Granada-Jaén Airport (GRX) to Barcelona (Girona) Airport (GRO)
• 1955-2140 – RyanAir flight from Barcelona (Girona) Airport (GRO) to Paris-Beauvais Airport (BVA)
• 2200-2245 – BVA airport shuttle into Paris … I forget which metro stop –
• Metro ride to Anvers
• 0030ish – Walk over to Woodstock Hostel to check in

Ten hours to ditch school and get to a hostel in another country? Not too bad, I guess! It was a fun-filled adventure, though. We met another American girl from the CLM, Alisha, at the Granada airport while sitting in the waiting area for our plane. A pretty nice girl, fun to chat with, up from Connecticut where Laura hails from. Her plans were to visit her friend Mike who’s studying in Paris, but her travel plans were just the same as ours, so we hung out for the rest of the trip into Paris.

Baggage was a bit of a problem. This is basically our first time travelling on our own, so it was definitely going to be learning experience. I think Analecia learned the most about luggage. Laura brought a mountaineering backpack; Karen and Jess, duffel bags; for me, a small rolling hand suitcase; and what of Ana? Her medium-sized rolling hand suitcase, three inches too thick for the RyanAir hand luggage restrictions. (We realized why when we got on board and saw that the overhead luggage bin really is that small on RyanAir’s economy flights.) That was the lesser of our worries though, when Ana weighed her luggage. Advisory to passengers: hand luggage must be 10.0 kg or less; checked luggage, 15.0 kg or less; overage is charged at 12€/kg. Analecia’s oversized hand luggage? 17.6 kg. Let’s pop that baby open and see what’s inside: a laptop, five pairs of shoes, a full outfit for both days in Paris, and a variety of bottles for the bathroom. Oh man. Well, let’s take out that laptop, they don’t let you check them, and redistribute some of those bottles, and throw some out, and … well, the check-in lady let her get away with checking in a 16kg bag (and, of course, paying to actually check a bag). Karen, on the other hand, pulled a sly move and yanked her fruit and sandwiches out of her carry-on bag before she weighed it. Nope, they don’t care how heavy your pockets are, and a good thing: her bag barely made the cut.

Other things to giggle about: since Jessica and I both went on the CLM-hosted bike trip yesterday and received snazzy blue CLM Sports Department t-shirts, we wore them (along with some of the other girls) to school; and since we’re in marching band, we’ve been using our little blue UDMB knapsacks that were the party favors for last fall’s band banquet; and then we ended up sitting together on the plane. We made a pretty cute set of band buddies, in our matching blue shirts with matching royal blue bags. Also reminiscent of home; the hot dog listed on the RyanAir in-flight food menu as a “Premium Hot Dog with [Heinz] Ketchup: You know … New York style.” On the flip side of the menu, you could also find 3€ one-shot “Bullseye Baggies” of whiskey, vodka, etc. (that looked like condom wrappers, honestly.)

Flash forward to Paris: we had an easy enough time finding Alisha’s friend Mike at the bus station and, with his aid and advice, getting to our metro stop in Anvers. Once we got off the metro, though, it was a bit of a cluster. Mike informed us that that part of town, in Anvers, was a tourist pocket, and darn if he wasn’t right: first we asked two French girls by the metro stop for help, but they were just visiting Paris for the weekend; and the next group of girls we asked, who incidentally spoke Spanish, were an Italian school group! C’est la vie. By dint of wandering around and trying to follow the scant directions provided by the hostel, we eventually found Rue Rodier, home to Woodstock Hostel. (P.S. I’ve been having a really tough time typing “hostel” with an “e” because, in Spanish, it’s spelled “hostal” with an “a” and there are literally hundreds of hostales in Granada.)

About one in the morning, we finally check in at Woodstock, which has a cute paint job (lots of purple and green solids) and half a VW Beetle in the lobby with bumper stickers all over it. Some guy was sitting downstairs playing guitar while another traveller surfed the web. We paid for the two nights, got the key to our room, six beds (as Laura’s friend Lisa would be joining us for the next night), got a couple slips for wifi access (which they limited to 2-hr blocks, but as many of those as you wanted), and went upstairs to dump our things and get ready for bed. “Going upstairs” entailed carefully picking our way up a slightly sagging, but still sturdy spiral staircase two stories up to the 200s. Three pairs of bunkbeds awaited us, as did a sink (with hot water!), a small terrace, and a funky painting over the beds. The toilet had its own little room, as did the shower stall (which also had a sink). All in all, it seemed a pretty typical hostel, although I was a little surprised to see the sign downstairs asking residents not to consume outside alcohol in the lobby, as it violated the hostel’s liquor license. Yay Europe!

I spent a little time outside decompressing and taking night-time photos of our neighborhood. Next door was a Thai restaurant, a boulanger (bread shop), about forty bikes, and about twenty motos. Laura joined me outside to stand around and chat while I photo’d and, while we stood on the corner, a couple walked by and started to speak to us in French. “Parlez-vous anglais?” Yes, they did: “We are ze stars of Pa-ree! You should take pictures of us for magazine!” Work it, baby, work it! They wished us a good stay in Paris.

Then, it was time for bed.

Today’s photo album on Facebook

This week hasn’t been anything notable except that it’s back to school and life as normal in Granada, so I’ll give you a rundown of our evenings and a little bit of the mornings.

Monday night, the flatmates (sans Youssef) went out for tapas with Penny and Jenny, who live together in an apt across the river and are in the same program as Teela. It was nice, since I’ve spent two weeks hearing stories about the girls but hadn’t had the chance to meet them yet. We just hung out at the bar for a while, had some beers, enjoyed our tapas (except for the mini bagels with ham, they weren’t so good), and came home.

The next night was Tetería Tuesday, or martes marroquí,, which was all the flatmates and some of Youssef’s French friends at the Tetería de Bañuelo up in the Albayzin. The proprieter, Abrahim, came over to hang out and enjoy himself with us as well. Oh, and Becky - the Egyptian tea is delicious!

Wednesday for merienda (tea-time), I called up Penny and met up with her, since she has a lot of random free tea time during the day. We got coffee (and churros with chocolate, though she doesn’t like them so I ate most of it) and sat around for a couple hours trading bad jokes. Here’s a Spanish joke Penny translated for me:

A boy was walking through a countryside village and stopped by at an old farmer’s house. While he was there, he noticed that they had a pig with a prosthetic leg, so he asked the farmer, “Why does your pig have a false leg?” The farmer replied, “Because we don’t have an icebox!”

If you didn’t get it, don’t fret — Penny had to explain it to me (and translate it, too). The catch is that Spain eats a lot of pig meat. Regardless, a rather nice way to spend an afternoon. I walked with her back to her apartment in hopes of playing some pool, as she lives across from a billiards hall, but that bar wasn’t open yet.

For the evening itself, I don’t have any photos or anything, so I suspect we just stayed in and hung out in the apartment. Quotes from around the piso: “Akin, you’re a man!” and “Get your face out of my face.” I ♥ Teela.

For Teela’s pre-birthday night, we went up to Dolce Vita for the open bar and then, after the clock struck twelve and we sang Happy Birthday, I peaced out to check out karaoke with the Delawareans at Hannigan’s & Sons II, a pub very close to the CLM building. It was Real Good Times; I sang Aerosmith’s “Love in an Elevator” and people were fans, especially when I pulled Jill up on stage to dance. We got home around 3am, not too bad for a Thursday night (when we actually have Friday morning classes).

I probably ought to mention something scholarly, since that’s technically my lot in life until I graduate. In culture class, we were talking about big Spanish festivals, one of which is the fería de abril or the April Fair in Sevilla. Families set up tents to sell food and goods, there’s amusement park rides, and people dance sevillanas, which all good Spaniards know. We asked our professor, María Jose, if she knew how to dance it — she did — and if she would show us — she would! She pulled another professor who was a trained dancer, got some music from the school library, and danced us a few minutes of sevillanas. I’ll leave you with the video of it here. (P.S. She’s always this chipper and smiling in class, it’s pretty cute.)

Since I got ahold of a panorama stitcher program, I’ve been having a little too much fun with my nice shiny camera (thanks Grandma!). Because Facebook can’t handle photos with an aspect ratio larger than 1×3, I’ll make new posts/notes linking to my server over the course so everyone can see them. Click any picture to see the larger version (and when I say larger, I mean anywhere from 3mb to 20mb). Enjoy!

The Royal Palace of Madrid, in the courtyard facing the front

Along Principio Pio in Madrid, the road which passes along the back side of the Royal Palace

Plaza de los Reyes en el Monasterio Real de San Laurenzo (el Escorial) — Plaza of the Kings in the Royal Monastery of Saint Laurence (Scholar’s Place)

At the corner of the basilica in Valle de los Caídos, Valley of the Fallen, Frederico Franco’s tomb.

Standing out front of said basilica

Overlooking the woods surrounding said basilica

Segovia, Madrid: the famous Roman aqueduct and a view of the town

Toledo, Madrid: overlooking the town

Toledo, Madrid: overlooking the river running through it

Castilla de la Mancha: the molinos (windmills) of Don Quijote

Granada, Andalucía: along on a road in Sacromonte, overlooking the gypsy warren and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada

Granada, Andalucía: atop Sacromonte

Wise timing, Jorge: morning call, 12am to check out of the rooms, 1pm for touristing. We all roused ourselves out of bed eventually, around 10 or 11ish, and got a measly breakfast next door: tostadas con tomate (toast with tomato purée) at the ham place, then kebabs once the Turkish place opened. Ashley went cheap and picked up a baguette and butter at the alimentación two doors up (the one run by Japanese people with Pikachu and some other anime characters painted on the doorframe) and just buttered her bread at the Turkish place (since she’d buttered up the owner yesterday).

The only tourist trip (and last for the weekend) was the Royal Palace. It was quite palatial: tons of rooms with vaulted ceilings, probably a thousand different art pieces, walls covered in tapestries, walls covered in embroidered fabric (not wallpaper but thick embroidery), etc., etc. The place is pretty amazing, the most opulent palace I’ve ever seen — and it’s still in use, too, aside from being a national patrimonial site. The tour was a little different than normal: we were issued radio receivers to pick up a feed from the tour guide’s belt pack, so he could just walk around wherever and keep talking and we’d hear him pretty well. Shame that I couldn’t understand most of what he said, since he talked so fast and monotonously. Nice trench coat, though, and the palace itself was plenty to look at.

We had a few hours free after the palace before we had to report back to the hotel to load up the busses. A handful of us wandered across the street to the Parque Oriental, which was just a plaza with hedges and gardens and a little playground, and got into a discussion about what determines fluency and being religious. Interesting, though when it got to be three of the more outspoken and opinionated people discussing, the two more reserved and moderate people withdrew to form a side discussion about people in general. Interesting group dynamics. Also, I was hit up by a Bulgarian girl with gold caps on her teeth to contribute to a UNICEF campaign to build a deaf/blind school in Madrid. She was real sneaky about it, too - when she held out the petition for me to sign, she put her hand over the Donation column so that I couldn’t see all the 20€ entries … or the empty ones. I gave her a 1€ coin, which was literally all I had left in my wallet but for 17 cents.

There were a few cool things on the bus ride home: more windmill power generators and a huuuuuge rainbow. For about twenty minutes we could see the entire arch, from one landing point to the other. “Physics!” Also, we stopped off at a hotel/café halfway back to Granada and ran into our flatmate, Youssef. Coming home was nice; Akin and I both remarked on how Granada feels like el hogar — home.

Welcome home!

Breakfast came early today for the American tourists, whose route was to take them to Segovia all today. Segovia is of note for its cathedral, which is one of the best examples of baroque architecture in Spain, its ancient Roman aqueduct, which still looks in pretty good shape, and the coronation of Isabel la Catolica, the better half of the Reinos Catolicos (Catholic Regnants). (I don’t think I’ve mentioned the pertinent history here: los Reinos Catolics were the pair in power when the Reconquista, the reconquest of Spain by the Catholics, was completed in 1492 when Andalucía was retaken from the Moors. End lecture.) Speaking of breakfast, I took a good idea from Bianca at my breakfast table and put together a few bocadillas (little sammiches) of bread, cheese, and sausage slices for later.

Our little walking tour of the city brought us first to the famous Roman aqueduct. Dang, man, dang. The thing is massive, three stories high and stretching way ‘cross town. Also, it carries water from one side of town to the other. Roman civil engineers for the win!

Jorge, in his infinite wisdom, made sure to pad our morning with just a moment of rest in between the aqueduct (tiring just to look at!) and the rest of the tourist sites, at a chocolatería! The place was delicious; they offered great churros con chocolate (which we had to sample with great haste, as we were served last and Jorge got impatient), bombones (bon bons) such as chocolate-covered orange peels, and a fair cup of café solo.

Jorge told us that the cathedral was fancy, and it looked pretty groovy from the bus park, but gosh darn diggity was that an ornate catheral! That’s an awful lot of little sticky-outy ornamental bits on the numerous towers. The inside was just as impressive, but of course neither did I take pictures nor remember how to describe it. Our tour guide did point up an entertaining feature to the seats in the chorus: the seats either were folded down and functioned normally or could be folded up, where they had a little cheater seat for the sacerdote (bishop) to rest himself during services and look like he was still standing. Sneaky sneaky!

While we were taking photos in the cloisters of the cathedral, Meghan pointed out that tourists contort themselves into the goofiest positions in order to record that perfect angle. Well, when they have chicken wire strung all around the cloisters, you do need to look like these folks in order to make it look good.

Next stop: the Alcázar, or the Royal Palace, where Fernando VII was stationed. This place was built a bit later and looks more like your typical Lego castle, with a moat, squared-off corners, conical roofs, and a parqué (parquet, tower) with the cylinder/torch-style decorations.

Inside, the Palace was typically palatial and also like a keep. There were many well-appointed royal rooms, a chapel in the middle, and many velvet ropes to keep the tourists off the old thrones. Also, a dungeon and a museum-y section showing off old arms and armor. For another 2€, thanks to Jorge, we were able to ascend to the top of the tower to look out over the town and countryside; also, get our cardio workout for the day.

The Alcázar concluded the touristy part of the today, as we were released to take lunch and enjoy the town. We returned to the Plaza Mayor, the main plaza which in fact used to be the bull-fighting ring of the town, to eat at a cafe. They served us tapas with our drinks, surprisingly enough, little half-sized hamburgers; afterwards, I took a sandwich of Iberian ham (cured ham slices) with salmoreja. Good times with good folks — I’m definitely enjoying the opportunity to hang out with people in the study abroad group whom I typically only see during class.

Well, what else is there to do in a town once you’ve seen all the tourist sites? Jason and I just wandered … and wandered … yup. Also, I snuck onto some terrace to take some baller photos of the cityscape. Jason played an awful lot with his whip — I mean that literally; he bought a whip en route to the castle and we stood out front of the Alcázar before going in. That whip is Damn Loud in the middle of a small-town street. Just saying.

The rest of the night is summed up pretty well: we went out to eat at a nice, medium-price Italian place, then went back and headed out to the bars around 1 or 2am, and come home early at 4am, then sat around the room for an hour or two while everybody wandered back to the hotel to share stories about the bars and the clubs.

Oh, Madrid.

Good morning, up and at ‘em! Seriously, though, wake-up call was 8am, breakfast at 8:30, on the bus at 9am. Breakfast was Spanish-style continental: sliced bread, either from a loaf or a baguette, which you could toast on a toaster with a track (put in bread on on side, watch disappear into toaster, toast appears eventually); butter and jams (many of which had crystallized into gunk); juices of various types; graham crackers (which we nicked for later): cheese and slices of sausage, several kinds. Spanish breakfast is pretty light in general.

Today’s touristing started at the Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo, the Royal Monastery of Saint Lorenzo, otherwise known as Escorial. Home to a seminary and a saucy tour guide (with a bit of a gravelly voice, to boot), … okay, really, I don’t have that much to say about Escoliar except that it had lots of Goyas, a lot of vaulted ceilings, very austere housing for the living royal family, and very well-appointed sepulchers for the dead parts. Also of note: before a member of the royal family is to be put to rest in their sarcophagus in the royal mausoleum, the body is left to putrefy (rot) for 25 years in a special room, which is called something like a putrificador (rotting room), after which time the skeleton is moved to its final resting place in the mausoleum proper. Oh, also, the tour guide teased us a little bit, about me joining the seminary, or Matt getting lots of earrings as tokens from all his lovers. That is all.

Francisco Franco was a real big deal. In other words, it’s good to be a dictator: he ordered a basilica to be built into the side of a mountain to house his remains when he died. When I say basilica, I mean BIG FREAKING CHURCH. The thing was massive. Just huge. We were told that a whole bunch of people died in the process of constructing it, of course. It came out pretty magnificently, though, since Franco was super-Catholic and did it up right. In addition to housing Franco’s tomb, they also buried his chief enemy on the other side of the dais. Some revenge =D but yeah, beautiful cathedral, and still in use: they had hours listed for masses.

Although Jorge gave us a big speech about showing up to the bus on time, because if we weren’t all in the bus on time, then the bus would be late, we’d miss our tour, etc., etc., … except for when we don’t have a tour: back on Spanish Standard Time, ten minutes late. We were amused, except for the people who prefer to kvetch than to laugh — they kvetched instead, so everybody was happy in their own way.

What’s the best way to cure kvetching? Food! The bus took us back to Principio Pio, where our hotel is, and the group split up to go to lunch. After looking at a couple different restaurants (The Wok, T.G.I. Fridays, and a Peruvian place), we settled on a Spanish chain called Cañas y Tapas on Gran Vía. We were mostly attracted by their menu del día, which Jorge had informed us was a selection required by the Spanish government: an entire meal for about 10-12€, with a variety of selections for a first course and second course. Of course, after spending twenty minutes trying to translate all the food words, we gave in and just ordered from the page that had pictures and decent prices. I ended up with, surprise surprise, a selection of tapas which included some ham with salmoreja on bread, fried mushrooms, and various other yummy things. Along with the meal, it was obligatory (of course) to drink a caña.

Lunch was but the mid-point of our day, though, and there was still plenty to do! Jorge’s itinerary for the afternoon: a whirlwind tour of the famous Spanish painters in the Prado and the Museo del Sofia Reina. Lots of great art! It was a bit bittersweet, though; while I was glad to glimpse all sorts of famous pieces of art I’ve studied in school, such as Picasso’s Guernica and the statue Hermaphrodite, I would have hoped for another few hours (or days) visiting the museums! Perhaps I’ll spend a free weekend and come back to see the art again.

To contrast the wide survey of all the high culture, Jorge took us down into the depths of Madrid, to take the subway home! It was, um, a subway, but it was efficient and clean, so we were reasonably impressed. That’s all I got, really.

What with all the art on our agenda, Jorge barely left us any time for dinner before our Thursday night “sorpresa.” So, hungry, tired, and rushed, we found a café for dinner: the Café Sereta, off Gran Vía. We step in to find nicely dressed tables with wine bottles on each table. Hmm. Well, we can afford to splurge a little, since we didn’t spend much on lunch — but we won’t open that bottle. The maestra came over to ask if we’d like anything to drink — oh, could we have a photo? Thanks! Now, let’s check out the menu: hmm, 15€ for one person’s portion of paella, minimum two-person plates … oh, this is a café de comida tranquil

The girls went the really quick and easy route, to the kebab place next door to the hotel, but Jason and I ventured a little farther away. Jason and I ended up at the PARAÍSO DE JAMÓN. OH MY GOD SO MUCH HAM. WE HAD A PLATE FULL OF SLICED HAM FOR DINNER AND THAT WAS EVERYTHING. Also a beer and some cake for dessert. PLATE OF FREAKING HAM. CALLED THE FUENTES DEL JAMÓN (sources of ham VERY LOUDLY). alright done now. oh wait sorry HAAAAAAAAAAAAM.

Onto the aforementioned surprise, which Jorge’s been talking it up since he gave us the itinerary last week. Now, he said it was a little expensive, so he hopes that Christina (the program organizer in Delaware) doesn’t mind, but it’s a very interesting event culturally speaking. Well, what is it? SARA BARAS, the world-famous ballet dancer and choreographer, in a flamenco rendition of Bizet’s Carmen. Although we were up in the nosebleeds (the 25€ seats), there wasn’t a bad seat in the house. Cool notes about the production: for the second scene, a wall with five doors was flown in (and the doors were used as dancers in their own right, opening and closing in ripples and whatnot); and for the second and third act, the instrumentalists were put on a dais upstage, sometimes with a scrim in front of them. Very professional lighting, of course, much smoother than Bodas de Sangre. Hilariousest moment of the show: an usher spotted Laura taking photos during the encore across the entire balcony and pointed a laser right across the balcony at her. FML.

The show, which started at 10pm (that’s right, ten at night), let out around midnight. A bunch of people were planning to go out to the clubs, but since another bunch of us unfortunately fell asleep a couple times during the show (thanks to Jorge for not building a siesta into the agenda), we went back to the hotel and Passed Right Out.

Good night — tomorrow is more touristing!