Travel

I got an early birthday present this week:

My mom and stepdad came to visit me in Granada! We spent the week running around Granada, both touristy attractions and more typical parts of the city. We got to walk through the Albaicin, toured the Alhambra, had tapas with my Spanish host parents, and took a day trip to a wonderful bed & breakfast in a tiny pueblo in the Alpujarras (Alps).

Jean Claude, the cook/owner of L’atilier (our B&B), made us some amazing vegetarian food – our dinner was the best meal I’ve eaten in many years, possibly ever. Our friends Beth, Lee, Dave and Cory had highly recommended L’atilier to us and practically insisted that we go – and for very good reasons. Thanks, guys, for making sure we got to experience such wonderful cuisine and hospitality! 🙂

Having my folks out for the week was so much fun… It was great being able to show them my new stomping grounds and share the city with them. They’re spending the next few days in Amsterdam before returning home. (My Amsterdam trip will be in early May.)

I got a lot of great pictures during their visit, I will post them after the “read more…” link since there are so many (Facebook and RSS readers, this means you’ll have to follow the link to the original post to see all the pictures.)

Read more

The real semester has started up here, and with it comes the sad reality that I’m not here on a five-month vacation. 😛

Classes in my program (Hispanic Studies) are mostly taught by University of Granada faculty who normally teach Spaniards. The classes happen at full-speed Spanish, and don’t normally stop to cover aspects of Spanish language except for a few obscure vocabulary words. My most interesting class by far is Hispanoamerican Culture & History. I haven’t been able to take history classes since my junior year of high school, so I am happy to be back in one. My class schedule is pretty similar to that of an American university, except that Study Abroad students here never have class on Fridays.

For the last few weeks, I’ve gone out to different districts of the city on my own to explore everything a bit more. The whole city center feels pretty familiar now, and I’ve started to venture a bit into a couple of areas off the tourist map of Granada. This morning I went with my friends Megan and Korie to one part of town that seemed more suburban and modern – it had a big view of the Sierra Nevada, which made me feel almost as  if I were in Colorado!

Other times I’ve explored more of the Albayzin and Sacromonte districts. It’s great how so many neighborhoods here have such distinct personalities in a small area.

I’ll post a few odds-and-ends photos from the last few weeks here – a little bit of everything from different paseos I’ve done, plus a couple of other things that don’t fit anywhere else.

Paseos & More