Chilling at the Alhambra with Meredith on Mar 27. Later, Tapas for dinner at Café Futbol, tontería all night

Tapas with Meredith and Akin at Poë, a Brazilian tapas bar. Also, flaming shots. Crazy times.

Hanging out at Paula’s (my spanish sign language / english intercambio friend) at her place, practicing la cultura de reciclaje at the green market, and dinner of the same. - sunday Mar 27

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.)

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!

Best part of life: making vague “let’s go hang out at this place” plans with people, then checking back in with them an hour later to hear “oh, we’re actually meeting these people here — do you want to come with?” Pretty nice. That’s how it pretty much rolls with this group of Americans, they’re just genial “let’s go hang out” folks, not exclusive. So, that’s how we ended up sitting on the River Darra at a little sitting area they’ve built right next to the water, where there’s plenty of river to see (instead of later down, where it’s but a trickle, or farther up, where it’s a lot of rocks and plants). That’s all we did, just sit around on a blanket and chat and make plans for the evening. People are fun and not at all goofy. =)

Our evening plans were to go out dancing at this little salsa club called La Habana after meeting up at the Burger King on the corner of Recogidas and Calle Isabel Católica. It’s a great meet-up point because it’s this big BK/Haagen Däs on a big plaza at a big intersection with a nice sitting area outside and fountains and people walking around and whatnot. Well, we met up there, first one or two people, then three or four, and then we ended up with over a dozen tipsy Americans hanging out at a big table in BK at half past eleven at night. There was also a nice Utahn Mormon family at the table next to us, which was probably unfortunate for their small sons.

We decided we’d caused enough ruckus around 11:30 to show up for the 11:00 salsa lesson at La Habana. Spanish Standard Time for the win, folks, for the win. Turns out most of the Americans don’t know salsa, except for Marissa, who learned in Mexico (so she danced with some really tall Spanish guy she brought) and me, who used to help teach it at UD. Nonetheless, we had a good time trying to follow the dance instructor (some really short South American dude) and then just dancing around. Whee! The Latino dancers that were there were great — it’s like they had dancing in their blood or something, go figure. Lotta hip-shaking, sliding across the floor, all that shebang, just a bunch of hot dancers who knew what they were doing instinctually. Kinda jealous that I didn’t grow up that way, but c’est la vie.

Most people left arond 1am, though they plan to come back sometime; and the few of us who were left (Megan Spilatro, Kristen Kenedy, Andrew, and I) peaced out eventually to get a few drinks at Babylon and packed it in around 2:30, when we headed back down to hang out and chat for a bit, then sleep. Mmm, sleep.

Manuel Mayor shared with us a fun story about Carnavale traditions after class today, when we were chatting about our weekends. (Akin wasn’t the only one to go to Granada from the Delaware group; Andrew - the first one in the alphabet - and Hilary also visited.) It used to be the way that, during Santa Semana (Holy Week), all the prostitutes in town would be rounded up and taken to live on an island so that the good men of the pueblo wouldn’t be tempted by their wily ways. After Carneval, though, any meat that was left had to be disposed of somehow, so it would be gathered and the men of the town would pass through the waters and *ahem* throw their meat at the prostitutes. Oh my.

Lunch was a new meal: una cazuela habichuelas blancas, una patata, tajadas de churrizo (white beans, a hunk of potato, and slices of sausage). Num num num.

Since April isn’t too far away, it’s about time to plan for spring break; so, for siesta, we met up at the Café y Té on the corner to enjoy their coffee and their wifi. (Incidentally, I feel as though I’ve seen that mark before, the Café y Té logo, like in Costa Rica or Peru. I’ll post pictures and see what you guys think.) Unfortunately, the wifi router was broken, but the coffee and the pound cake I ordered were yummy (if a bit dry — the pound cake, that is). The people who actually wanted to research trips walked up to the CLM school building, where I joined them later, to take advantage of wifi without too many people in the building. General conclusion of the afternoon: Laura, Karen, and I will probably take a little tour around Brussels, Stockholm, and … um … some other country up that away.

Dinner brought a new delight: a hamburger. A straight-up ham-burger, like a ham pattie grilled on the stove. None of this ground beef and lettuce & tomato business for Carmen, nope, just a ham pattie. It was actually okay, just a little .. um .. pink. Of course, we also had boquerones fritos, fried anchovies, which I’m getting better at eating: I’ve learned to take off the head first, split open the fish, and peel out the spine (which takes off the tail, too). S’ok, just a little messy. They go nicely with the tomato chunks Carmen serves alongside them, too.

Since I feel like it’s the thing to do here after dinner on an off-night, I went out for tapas with Kristen Cadillac, one of the girls from the trip. Since we were both feeling pretty relaxed, I found us this little tapas bar / cafetería which looked genial, not too busy, just a few tables; so we sat there for a while, chatted, had a few beers (Cruzcampo) and tapas. The camarero brought us out first little sammiches of what looked like chicken breast with cheese, along with a bunch of potato chips, for the first round; and on the second round, a long slice of cured ham on bread. Quite a genial evening, we went home when the bar closed around 12:30 or 1am.

Instead of going out to the bars last night, everyone crashed last night — that is, except for Akin, Teela, and Youssef, who didn’t return from Carneval festivities in Cadíz until noon-ish, after I’d already been awake for an hour. While I finished up writing these blog entries from last week, they all passed out (after imparting some choice stories about how Akin managed to get his pockets full of sand). From what the told me, Cadíz was pretty crazy: people running around in crazy costumes, some people running around without any costume at all, people drunk before 9pm, people relieving themselves everywhere including on the cathedral, people passing out and getting carried out on stretchers, not to mention the trash piled up to three feet deep in the morning. They had some loco party stories all their own, too, but those ones aren’t fit for print. Dang, man, dang.

The day passed peacefully enough, good for them to recuperate and me to slog through all the journal entries I’d been neglecting. Lunch was a filling casuela de los fideos, or beef and potato stew with noodles. (Los fideos are the noodles; they’re just a type of cylindrical, medium-sized pasta noodle.) Good and hearty, accompanied by the typical salad (plus avocados and carrots) and fried calamari. Incidentally, casuela translates literally to casserole, but it’s more of a soup pot than the casserole dish you see in the South.

Reasonably well-rested, I met up with Karen to go get some churros con chocolate, which is pretty popular around here. There’s a churrerría cafetería over in the Plaza Bib-Arrambla, below the church, that Georges from Belgium recommended to me, so I took us over there. A plate of churros was a heaping pile of fried dough sticks, pretty amazing; and the chocolate was a mug of thick hot chocolate in which we could dip our churros. We got there around 4pm, not too soon after lunch but before the post-siesta rush, and we sat around and chatted (in mostly Spanish, too). This was all in preparation, of course, for us to go to the theatre…

Bodas de Sangre, by F. Garcia Lorca! A story of jealousy between lovers, a worried mother, etc. etc. The play is typically performed as a flamenco, which was good, since I couldn’t really follow the text (which I probably should have studied last week in preparation to watch this). The theatre itself, el Teatro Isabel Católica, was pretty fab: a pretty typical proscenium theatre with two or three balconies, the seats were wood upholstered in velvet and actually pretty comfortable to sit in. I managed to get us tickets on the floor, but they were also way far in the back (a few seats over from the sound guy, actually). Interesting staging notes: the entire company started out on-stage, dead on the floor and all laying upon each other, and the son and mother dragged them out to the edge of the stage; then, as each member of the chorus spoke, they rose up from the dead and then collapsed when they were done. A coupla times, two members of the chorus would attach to each other, one standing directly behind the other with her arms around the other and moving/speaking in unison; and some other times, the entire chorus would speak in unison, kinda reminded me of reconstructionist Greek theatre. For the last act, they dropped two white scrims (see-through sheets) down and the dancers interacted with the scrim, batting at it to make ripples or waving their hands around in it. Pretty cool effect, though it’s horrible for the scrim since it stretches it out and gets it dirty, which we noticed when they brought all the lights up. So, cool show, I got the gist of the emotional content if not the text of it, we enjoyed ourselves.