When in Spain, live as the Spainards

Main Classroom Building

Sign outside the school:  Center for Modern Languages

 Hello everyone!!

Just a few little non major things that I did this past week that I wanted to share with you.  I know so far I've shared mostly the major trips that have happened and other such things.  But there are some cute little things that happen to me throughout the week that I thought you guys might like to hear and see pictures of.

 So since we only have classes in the mornings, most afternoons I have free.  Most people take a siesta or go to the park during that time.  On Wednesday we had our cultural meeting where we got to all get together and talk to Paula about some of the differences we have noticed since we've been here in Granada.  Mostly we talked about the food, the mannerisims, their attitude towards life, and other small little things.  For example, in case you guys didn't know, their eating schedule is vastly different from ours at home.  I eat two pieces of toast and some colacoa (hot chocolate) for breakfast.  Then I go to class from 9-1 and come home for lunch at 2:30ish.  Now, lunch here is not just a small grab food and keep on going about your day, oh no, lunch is the main event.  Everyone starts heading home around 1:30, 2o'clock for lunch.   All the stores close from about 2-5 and everyone is home eating lunch with their family.  The main news is on at 3, so you usually eat lunch with the news on, around the table, that is situated near pretty much in front of the couch.  Also, under their tables there's like a small little fire thingy.  It's not a real fire, it's just a little heater.  So you sit down and tuck the table cloth over your legs and have nice toasty warm feet and legs during your meal.  Here they don't heat anything that doesn't need to be heated, so the heater is very nice to have during meals.  All the floors are tiled and you most definitely have to wear slippers all the time, otherwise you will freeze your feet off.   So everyone coems home for a full fledged, three course meal for lunch.  Generally it's a soup of some sort, served with bread of course, a meat, and then some fruit for desert.  I'm always very full after lunch and have to either take a siesta or at least sit in my room and digest for a bit.  Sometimes my Senora's nieta (granddaughter) and hija (daughter) come over for lunch, other times it's just me and my roommate is Julia (my senora).  The food is very good though, and today I ate it all, so I was very full afterwords.  Then people generally just rest, go to the park, run errands, go shopping, you know the drill.  Then people will either head out for tapas around 8ish, tapas is a small little appetizer, that is usually free when you buy a drink.  Or people will go home and eat dinner anywhere between 9 and 10:30 here.  Mind you though, dinner is very small.

So aside from just describing the bizzare meal schedule here, which I have surprisingly already gotten used to, like it doesn't even phase me that it's about 4:30 and I won't be eating for another 5 hours.  So, back to what I was saying.  On wednesday we had our cultural meeting and just talked about differences.  After the meeting me and a few people decided we wanted to hang out and just chat for a while.  So found a nice place around the corner, sat down outside because it was gorgeous outside, and ordered ourselves some churros, icecream, coffee, what have you.  I know I'm not in the picture, but this is the group of girls I went out with after the meeting.  After we were done eating we went across the street and took pictures at the very pretty fountain/ Plaza.  There a ton of Plaza's here, and all of them are different with very pretty fountains.

So here's some pictures of me at the fountain outside, and a pic of the fountain.  On top of the fountain are pomegranates.  Pomegranates are actually the cities good, and Granada also means Pomegranate, which is pretty cool.  So all on the streets, in the little side streets where there's poles designating a sidewalk have pomegranates on some of the poles.  It's pretty cool.  While we were in the park talking pictures Bree, Allie and I were just standing around talking to each other when the cutest little kid came up to us and asked us what language we speak (?que idioma hablais?).  When we told him English he got all cute and said he knows a song in English.  Then the cutest little boy started singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow.  It was adorable and he and his sister introduced themselves, it was adorable and made by night.  We then made our way home and stopped in Corte Ingles on the way home.  For those of you who don't know, Corte Ingles is a huge store here.
Corte Ingles has like 5 or 6 floors and has everything you can think of.  They have food, clothes, jewlery, books, everything, including American name brands.  We just walked in and wondered around, although I have a feeling I'll be heading over there to get a magazine every now and then.

Then on Thursday I went to the park with my friends.  We just walked around and found some cool exercise machines to play with.  We walked over to the small little lake in the park.  We saw some cute ducks, and even saw the police training some horses, which was pretty cool.  We also saw a random lady dressed up in like flamenco dress with a video camera.  Actually, in the past few days I've seen some strange things over there, but it's very pretty and a very nice place to just lay down and relax, stretch out and read a book.

 So this is just two pics of me at the park with my friends.  The first one is on the day we went to the park after the Albaicin, and the other is when I went to just walk around with my friends.  Both days were very nice, it's gotten to be close to 60 here in the afternoons, which is soo nice!

That's pretty much it, just a few little things I've been doing.  Of course I could write more, but that would be overkill.  I just wanted to share some little things with you.  Now, hopefully I'm going off the plan some pretty awesome trips.


Love you and miss you all.

Until next update!