el mes final

Right before May started we had a meeting talking about how we need to prepare ourselves to leave. The meeting seemed so early and so stressful when we still had a month left here! We still had plenty of time to get everything done! I will say that while I got a whole lot of things done, this time has flown by like none other. My goodness its May 24th and I leave this wonderful country in 6.5 hours. No worries, this is not my last post to say goodbye to yet another thing but to look back on what all I've done and why I haven't been blogging.

Before I talk about this month in Granada, my program did take one last trip together to Sevilla, which is a little northeast of Granada. It was another prominent city in both the Roman times and the Arabic times. It was one crazy fast day trip where we spent the same amount of time in the bus as we did in the city--6 hours each. But thats alright because we did Sevilla up right. We saw the Plaza Espana where Star Wars Attack of the Clones was filmed. While that was cool and all, the actually plaza itself was overwhelmingly colorful and brilliant! Each autonomy had its own mural, there was a small river canal with pretty little bridges over it, and the railings were covered in paintings. We had yet another gorgeous day so the sun shone off everything oh so brightly. We also saw the outside of the Cathedral which is the biggest in Spain. Although I haven't seen all of the cathedrals, I'll sure vouch that it was the biggest one I had seen. Lastly we went to Sevilla's own "Alhambra" called the Real Alcazar. It was in now way as impressive as Granada's but it still was cool to see all of the decoration of the walls and everything.

This month has mostly consisted of experiencing Granada and making sure to spend the most amount of time with my family and my friends who aren't heading back to Central in the fall. I went to the beach, the mountains, the dance clubs, the bars, the Albaysin, and even part of the Alhambra for one last time. There we so many hellos and firsts that had to be done before I could say goodbye.

One of the things I had to get done on my to do list was to 'ir de marchas' like a Spaniard. This means to go out all night and proceed to still make it for churros in the morning. I'd just like to say mission accomplished. A couple friends and myself decided the best day to do it was the night we got back from Sevilla because we slept on the bus to and fro Sevilla so we had our naps in. Therefore once we got home it was dinner time and then time to get ready. We were out again by 1130. We first went up to the Albayzin to take in the Alhambra at night. That sight never gets old. From there we went to the dance club that's semi near by and danced the night away from 1:45 until 6:30am. Crazy I know. While it seems like a long time it went by pretty quickly. It was cool to see the dance floor change from the American style music to the Spanish style the later (or earlier) it got. I will admit that at 5:00am it was the worst because all these people came out of no where and no one could dance. There was just pushing and drunks all around and I was tempted to bail out then but I held strong and after about 15 minutes all was well again. 6:30am comes around and we walk down to Cafe Futbol to have our churros and coffee. It was delicious but I was definitely gone by then. The only problem consisted of that when I got home at 8:00am, I had to be back out in Granada at 10:15am to have my last intercambio at a museum. Therefore instead of going back to sleep, I got on Facebook and stayed up until I had to leave again. The museum was pretty cool with all of its exhibits (I saw a whale heart!) by the last couple rooms I was a walking zombie. Finally after lunch, I was able to take a nap at 4:00pm. Its been a long time since I've pulled an all nighter but it still was a blast and quite the accomplishment. (Mandy has the final picture of us at Cafe Futbol dead tired; I plan on having a full blog of just the pictures I missed out on)

While that was my main goal, I still went to that dance club and another one a couple more times because it was fun and something to do. I had a week off from classes between the last class and my exams (they thought we'd be using that time to study or something...) so I used those days to relax, go to the beach, and go to the mountains. Get this! I skied. Yep, it was the middle of May and I'm up in the mountains skiing. Granted the area wasn't that big nor was there much of an incline but I'm still tacking it up that I've skied in Europe. The best part of this was that the previous day I had been sunbathing at the beach. It was that day at the beach too that I took my first real dip into the Mediterranean Sea since the water wasn't overly cold. I went one more time to the beach with my host family and got the experience of diving off of a rock into the Sea. Sure it wasn't a cliff dive, but it was still pretty cool.

One last pretty cool thing I did in Granada was have my own 'Tulip Time.' After hearing/seeing everyone's statuses about tulip time, Renee and I wanted to have our own. Since last year we went out and took pictures, we continued the tradition of going out this year to take pictures...only in Granada there are no Tulips (que pena!). There are a lot of Roses though so we called our time a rato de rosas (time of roses but it keeps the whole same letter thing going one). It was a lot of fun! We may have got some weird looks, but we definitely enjoyed ourselves.