Pomegranate City

Beginning your day with an 8:30 bus time is not what I would call the most fun I've ever had. Especially if you are planning to be on that bus for roughly 8 hours. We did stop twice for a quick rest stop and for lunch, but that's still a LOT of time on the bus. In any case, we arrived in Granada after 8 hours, two movies (Million Dollar Baby and Casino,), two bocadillos (sandwiches), and many, many short naps.

About an hour from Granada

After checking into the hotel, we decided to go wander the city and track down a place to eat dinner. We ended up in the shopping district, so we wandered around there for a while, ran into some pretty city scenery, and almost found the Cathedral (we could hear the bats screeching as it was getting dark, that's how we knew. The bats in Salamanca scream all the way through our French class, it's horrible.)

For dinner we found a Mexican restaurant (after wandering in the rain for a while, part of which involved me walking into a very deep puddle and soaking my shoe…). But the food was fantastic. We were all starving by the time we got our food so we downed it all in about 15 minutes from when our waitress brought out the first plate. But the food had actual spice in it!! That was a big win of the night, which made sitting there with my jeans soaked to the ankle slightly more worth it.

After being fed we were all much happier, and we headed back to the hotel to meet up with ISA for a flamenco performance. Which was also incredible. You have to have a crazy sense of rhythm and be able to move your feet to two different beats to do it, which is hard enough without adding the other moves they do. It's amazing

The next morning, we got up and had another fantastic breakfast at the hotel. I'm telling you, I'm going to miss Spanish hotel breakfasts. They serve good stuff, and there's no syrup involved which I actually really love.

After breakfast, we walked up to the Capilla Real, where the Reyes Catolicos (Ferdinand & Isabella) are buried along with their daughter, Juana la Loca and her husband. Photos were technically prohibited… but that never stopped an army of college students armed with digital cameras, right?

Outside of the Capilla–this was technically acceptable.

The graves beneath their pretty marble carvings up above

Yeah I took this photo of the altar without looking. Sneaky awesomeness.

So if you ever studied Columbus in school, there's always a photo of this cool box that the King & Queen give him before he sails off to the Americas… turns out the box is real!

After the chapel, we did more tourist shopping, obviously. We're really good at that. And just wandering cities in general. It's the best way to see it sometimes. We ended up in a marketplace where everything was all shoved together and it was hard to tell one store from the next one, because they all carry roughly the same set of merchandise. I got some postcards, but nothing too exciting.

 Oh yeah, and we found this fountain next to the awesome kebab place we ate lunch. Foods America needs to start loving more: kebabs and peach juice. They don't have to be together, although that's not bad either...