welcome to granada

June 30, 2010

monica and i walked up 3 flights of stairs and arrived in our dorm room. it was surprisingly HUGE (bigger than the room i had at western my freshman year!) which was a nice treat. the first thing i noticed however was that our comforters were Disney Princess!! BRIGHT PINK. i laughed out loud. the cleaning lady looked at me like, "what are you laughing about?" gosh it was a funny sight. must have been all they had ;)
monica and i unpacked and settled in and i finally got to brush my teeth for the first time in nearly 24 hours (ewwwwwwwww). we then agreed that we shouldn't go to sleep (even though we had both been up for about 26 hours and had about 4 hours of sleep thus far) because we wanted to adjust to europe time and explore the amazing city.
we changed and went outside in the sweltering 97 degree heat. yikes. monica was fine with it cuz she is from southern CA but i was like "WOW." but i must admit, i loved it. this past year or so i have really come to love the sun and the heat. so i was thinkin, "ahhhhhh yeah!!!"
monica and i walked around the streets of granada. right away, we fell in love with the city. have any of you ever been to rome? granada is like a mini version of rome. tiny side streets, TONS of scooters with crazy drivers, buses, shops, foreign languages- but everything was just a few steps down from the huge city of rome. gosh i knew right away i loved it.
we came back to our dorms because we were hungry and in spain culture, 2-3 pm is "lunch time." (7-9 is breakfast which consists of TOAST, and that is IT, 2-3 pm is lunch and by this time you are STARVING and ready to eat and 9-10:15 is dinner which is SUPER late and as my dad has always said, "you shouldnt eat dinner past 7:00, or else your body wont have time to work out the carbs." well shoot. oh well). so the cook came out. his name is antonio. another sexy name, yes. however he is an older man with a THICK spanish accent and he talks SO FAST. i dont know what other facial expressions to use when he talks to me because the look on my face is of utter confusion. i have started to just nod and smile whenever he talks to me. one time after i did that, he came out with tons of food. apparently he was asking me what i wanted and i said i wanted it all by nodding my head. whoops. :)
we ate and it was soooooooooooooo good. well, those are monicas words. everything to her is, "sooooooooooooo good." its quite funny. ;)
after we ate we went back to our room and cleaned/unpacked a bit more and then headed out to meet up with hillary (from Tennessee) for more exploring and GELATO. mmmmmmmmmmm. we walked around trying to find a gelato place and we turned this corner and BOOM. this beautiful square with a fountain in the middle and an old man playing the accordian and sweet, candlelit restaurants surrounding the plaza stood right in front of me. i sighed in and thought, "wow. well, this is romantic." ;)
we found a gelato place right there and i ordered half kinder chocolate and half plain chocolate. in monicas words, it was, "soooooooooooooo good." like, literally. my mouth was thanking me. we took the ice cream and sat out in the square and began to enjoy it. suddenly i felt something drop on my arm and i look up and come to find, birds are up in the tree messing around dropping their food on my head. i dont know, but i must have been hit about 5 or 6 times. i was scared it would land in my precious gelato. so i covered it to save it ;)
we sat there and were looking around and noticed that there were these big light up features hanging in the square. but, they were not lit up. hmmmmmm. what are those for? we were asking each other. about 3 minutes later, TA DA. they lit up and illuminated the square and made it that much more "romantico." we laughed about how romantic it was and how cool we were for hanging out, us 3 chicas, in a romantic foreign city :)
we finished and walked home and saw that down almost every side street, there were more light up fixtures in the streets above our heads. sooooo pretty. havent seen anything like it. its just the cherry on top of a beautiful city.
we walked home and realized that we weren't really that tired. how could that be? we had been up for about 34 hours now and had only had about 4 hours of sleep. gosh we were thrown off. but eventually, we got into bed and i said "nighties!!!" (manettes- you know what im talking about ;) and she said, "night....." a little confused. haha.
our room is RIGHT next to the street in the middle of downtown, so of course it has to be loud, right? not only was the jetlag throwing me off, but the spaniards finishing their final exams and partying in the streets along with the dog next door barking didnt exactly help me fall asleep. i laid there for a while, put my pillow over my head and finally drifted into a light sleep at about 1 a.m.
day one, check.