(Above is a view of the Alhambra palace. Below is a view of the city - I took both pictures from lookout points in el Albaicín, which is an old Arabic or Moorish neighborhood)
Well, I've been in Spain since Monday, and since my internet at home now functions very well, it looks like it's time to update you all on my life! I landed in Málaga on Tuesday morning, and despite the rather miserable flight (think lots of turbulence and nausea) getting out of the airport with all of my belongings was surprisingly simple. The customs people hardly even looked at my passport, and my bag was one of the first ones out. Maybe that was to make up for the rocky last few hours...
Anyway, we got to the hotel in Málaga without any issues (in my second-ever taxi ride...interestingly enough, both taxis that I have taken in my life have been in foreign countries) and did some business-y things, like buying a European cell phone (which feels like a Barbie phone. Seriously. The buttons are all squishy and it's super-lightweight). We walked around the city a bit, but at that point I had been awake for about 30 hours, and I was ready to crash, so after dinner that night I went right to bed.
(This is the view from my hotel.)On Wednesday, after some brief orientation activities and a whole lot of information about Spain, we took three buses to Granada. Although I had been feeling a little bit iffy about Málaga, the ride to Granada turned me completely around. The city is located in the middle of the Sierra Nevada, a large mountain chain, and the drive there was through the mountains and little towns in the hills with farms, and since it was rainy the clouds around the mountains made it look so beautiful and majestic.
(On the road from Málaga to Granada - from the bus window...)We met our host families once we got into Granada, and after that we went home. Thus began the first adventure of my stay in Spain: Hortensia (my host mother) was very worried because her apartment hadn't had electricity for the day because someone had hit the transformer in the neighborhood and knocked out the power. Sure enough, when we got to the apartment, there were no lights. This made carrying our heavy suitcases up the stairs very interesting, but we made it without dying, fortunately, and got a brief tour of the apartment by candlelight.
Since we couldn't see anything in the apartment, Hortensia took us out for some tapas and dinner. It felt kind of funny at first to go bar-hopping with my 65+-year-old señora, but it's part of the culture here to enjoy a drink and food and talk to people in the neighborhood. At the second bar that we went to, we had a conversation with a couple of the people that were there (it was before 10, so the places were pretty much empty), and despite my rather broken Spanish, I think that we managed to communicate pretty well.
We started orientation classes yesterday, which are based on language level and involve an interesting mix of language instruction, a crash course in Spanish history, politics, geography, and culture, scavenger hunts, and walking around the city with our professor, whose name is Fabiola and who talks really fast. At first I couldn't understand anything she was saying, because granadinos (people from Granada) have a distinct accent that I had not heard before, but today I felt more confident and talked to her a lot about the area and also about Maine, since she had visited before.
Anyway, there's a lot more to tell, but I'll save it for another post. Based on my first impressions, Granada is a beautiful, fascinating city with a lot of places to explore. One thing that I love already is that it is a walking city, meaning that at any time of the day, there are people walking along the streets, talking with their neighbors, and enjoying being outside. It's considered weird and unhealthy to shut yourself in your room when you could be taking a walk (like I'm doing now...oops). I hope that I'll be able to explore more, meet more Spaniards and granadinos, and report back to you all frequently!
Os amo muchísimo :)
