European nomad

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Sorry, I wrote this a few days ago, but I'm just now getting the chance to post it. Today we leave Barcelona and I got to Madrid to meet my host family (finally).

As I write this I’m on a bus from Granada to Valencia, our next stop on the Mediterranean. I’m not sure which town we’re driving thru right now but there are huge mountains to my left and the blue sea is to my right. I reluctantly boarded the bus leaving Granada at 9 this morning. So here I am, about a half hour past Alicante.

I didn’t expect it to be so dry and mountainous in Spain. I’m always surprised that European countries differ so much in climate and geography even though they seem so small. Before I came to Spain I was aware of the “no worries” way of life and the siestas but for some reason I’m surprised to see how true those stereotypes really are. Of course, I’ve spent the past two weeks in Granada, a small Mediterranean city with 100,000 students, so I’m sure it’s a it more relaxed there than in Madrid. I really do appreciate how well Spain has maintained its culture but I guess I was just expecting some of the stereotypes to fall short. However, if you need to buy some batteries after class at 2 pm there’s a good chance you’re just going to have to wait until 5 pm to buy them. And, if you are in the cell phone store at 8:30 pm trying to explain to the sales clerk in broken Spanish that your cell phone isn’t working there’s a good chance that they’ll just tell you to worry about it manana. Yes, many of the stereotypes are true. Dinner is at 10 pm and dance clubs open at 3 am. At least this has been my experience so far in Granada.

I got to do some really neat stuff my last week in Granada. I went to Alhambra, the cathedral where Ferdinand and Isabella are buried, and I got to see a flamenco show. I don’t think I’ve gotten a chance to post some Granada history so I’ll take this opportunity to sum up the city I’ve been living in the past 2 weeks. Alhambra is an old, Muslim fort and palace that’s been around for about 1000 years. It overlooks the city and when you go to the opposite hillside to look at Alhambra the Sierra Nevada is in the distance behind it. I believe that Alhambra means red palace in Arabic, but I could be wrong. (All of our tours are in Spanish so I’m doing my best to learn as quickly as possible). At sunset this is supposedly one of the most beautiful views in the world. According to my roommate’s guidebook, Bill Clinton saw this view in college and insisted on bringing his family back years and years later, which is saying something because Granada is certainly off the beaten path. For hundreds of years Granada had mainly Muslim and Jewish populations until it was the last town in all of Spain to fall in January of 1492 to Ferdinand and Isabella. One positive way to look at the Spanish Inquisition in Granada is the timing and how it would affect the city hundreds of years later. While Ferdinand and Isabella were hanging out, building an enormous cathedral in Granada, their newly conquered city, an explorer named Christopher Columbus came to them asking for funding to check out what’s on the other side of the ocean. Plan America was launched from Granada in 1492 and that is why I passed a beautiful fountain everyday on my way to class of a man (C-Bus), slightly kneeling, presenting a scroll of paper to a queen (Isabella). And so, ladies and gentlemen, that’s why Granada has some significance in this world—it’s where a modern Spain began and it’s where our country started.

I have a quick anecdote that I forgot to tell about in my last blog entry when I mentioned that I went to a flamenco dancing show in the caves of Sacramonte. About 20 of us were really interested in seeing a flamenco show where it was born, the province that Granada is in. So after a bit of difficulty Rafa, our field trip director, set us up with a “great deal” for Thursday night. We all meet up and load onto the bus to head up the mountain to see the show. As we got onto the bus it was hard not to notice that we were the only people under 70, but it didn’t faze us too much. The package deal also included a nighttime bus tour of Granada. The bus starts and we all start chatting about the obvious age difference within the two groups on the bus. A friend of mine and I notice that the old people on the bus are speaking a language that we can’t recognize and decide that it’s probably Italian but we don’t think much of it. A few minutes pass and the tour guide gets on the microphone and starts giving our hour-long tour..in Romanian. Hahaha even though we didn’t understand a word it was so much fun laughing at the situation we were in: sitting through a bus tour full of elderly Romanians and twenty American college kids that couldn’t understand a word of the tour. Eventually we switched onto a different bus with our Spanish-speaking tour guide.

OK! That’s all for now! I’ll be in Valencia until tomorrow (Sunday) evening and then we take off for a few days in Barcelona. And then we finally end up with our host families in Madrid.

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