GRANADA!

I dream here! It's strange...

Today when Alex and I got up at 9, María-Carmen was already gone for work. We prepared breakfast for ourselves from the bread, bananas and cookies that are on the counter for us. Watched a little Spanish TV while eating, then left to meet our group by 11. The city is actually very condensed – nothing is very far away. It only took about 7 minutes to reach the Plaza where the Correos (Post Office) was. Finding it was the problem – our map wasn’t very specific, and we knew the general area, but this is a place that takes probably 4-5 minutes to walk the circumference of, and with the street and tented vendors in the middle, it was very hard to see names of shops. Finally we found it, and were also one of the first there. When we had everyone, we began our tour of Granada. Covered the big places we need to know – main shops, farmacias, both campus locations (one has a ‘main office’ while the other is just classrooms) and the API office building. After the tour, we all split up – Alex went with some of her friends and Amelia, the guys and I went to buy Ethan a phone. Also went to El Corte Ingles (the main shopping mall) for a Spanish-English dictionary for Amelia, but didn't find a good one. Eventually we all split up to go home for lunch - I beat Alex back and so talked with my host mom a little. She told me I need to speak more (if Alex is here, she does the speaking). We had a lunch of spaghetti with meat, onions and potatoes, along with bread, eggs and a white melon that I totally thought was potatoes at first! All fantastic food! Alex met back up with people at 4:30, me at 5. Between us leaving though, Fernando (the 30 year old brother) came home for the first time, so I got to meet him. He also gave me the info about the wireless connection here, which was GREAT! So I have internet at home!!! :D

Met everyone again (minus Jacobo) to get some more things and then we sat down at a cafe and ordered soda/coffee for the energy. Hung out for about 3 hours before all heading home for dinner (which I was early for again, but Alex's computer wouldn't sign in, so she used mine for a while). Dinner was the leftover meatballs, fried ham and cheese (basically a fried cordon bleu), bread, a pea-jam-onion, etc vege dish (which YES I ate some of, thank you!) and lemon yogurt for dessert. As soon as we were finished I met Amelia and Jacobo back at the Correos (they live in the same 'dorm'), and we walked to Ethan's house. We picked up Chris along the way (he lives in an apartment between us and Ethan). Ethan is living with some Spanish friends of his in an apartment about a 30 minute walk away, across town. They were out of town, however, so he has the place to himself. He had two other Spanish friends of his (that he met on his exchange in Germany) come over also - so between all of us, there were almost always conversations going on in 3 different languages! Apparently you can buy Tinto de Verano in bottles here, so we brought one of those over and watched Dracula in Spanish for a while before the other two girls arrived. They were both nice.

Walked back home around 2, then got online until about 4 am because Alex was awake and skyping her family. Finally got to sleep, then woke up today around 11 to get back online and BLOG. :) We decided we don't want to do anything until after lunch today. :) So after 3pm...