Busy Busy!

Friday night we went out for tapas with our family instead of dinner.  It was SO much fun.  I'm not a big fan of drinking though and the whole concept of tapas is that you go to a bar and order a drink and for each drink you get tapas which are like little appetizers.  Paco ordered tinto verano for me because he knows I don't like beer.  and apparently tinto verano is a little bit of red wine mixed with, soda, lime juice or white wine.  It tastes just like juice! so now I found a way to involve myself in the whole tapas experience :) We talked and joked around the whole time we were there and it was a lot of fun, I'm glad the whole family is comfortable joking with us now.  Paco ordered these black sausages called Morcilla and said that we could put confidence in him that they were really good.  so of course I tried it, and it was absolutely dreadful.  hahah he explained to us after that the whole reason its black is because they cook it with the blood of the pig... gross. I could have gotten over that if it tasted good, but it was rather like liquorice and meat, and the inside was completely mush.  Yuck!

Saturday:
We woke up really early to go hiking because we had to meet our group downtown a little before 8am.  The entire city was still dark and there were a few bars still open from the night before closing up.  We took a bus to a town call Monachil about 20 minutes or so away and we began our climb.  It started off with a completely vertical incline that was entirely pavement and we were all so disappointed and complaining because we couldn't breathe and it was awful.  That went on for about half an hour then we veered off the path a little into what looked like a brier patch and come out the other side with a cliff made of rocks.  It looked like it was meant for mountain goats not people but it was so much fun to climb up! So we made it to the top of that peak and thought we were done, and there was another peak nearby that had sheep all over it!  Turns out we were going to climb that one too!  More rocky terrain that was hands over feet climbing until we made it to the top of that one.  Only one more peak until we were at the highest point, snow around in places and a whole lot of wind.  The view was absolutely incredible. I'll post pictures but they don't even get close to doing justice.   It overlooked all of Monachil, Granada, further towns, and mountains and valleys all around as the sun came up.  The way down was rather more interesting.  Instead of going back the way we came we went down around the back side of the mountain into the canyon below us.  It was a lot of small pathways covered in snow along the edge of the mountain until we made it down to a lower level.  Then we walked along side a river, but the side of the river was less than a foot wide and rocks came out of the sides of the walls so we had to lean around the rocks but walk along the path underneath them.  Some of them had handles so you could lean out and hold on to something, but some of them were far too dangerous and so we had to crawl underneath them, hands and knees.  This brought us to a cave were it was very much the same type of walking because we were still along the river with rocks protruding on either side.  It was so much fun and then we made it out to the other side where we had to cross a few suspension bridges and climb down a lot of stairs until we made it to the end!  We got out at about 1pm and went to a bar that was right outside the trails in Monachil... because apparently the thing to do after you go hiking for about 4 hours is to re-hydrate with a beer?  It was fun though and there was a cat that hung around us, super cute.  Our professor told us that we walked more than 16km which is 10 miles!!  and that was before we walked back to our bus and home from the bus stop!  Lots of walking, my ankle was pretty much killing me by that point (achilles tendonitis isn't good for hiking in case you were wondering) but it was so worth it because I had so much fun I didn't even think about my ankle much.

Casey and I walked home and then had lunch and immediately took a nap for an hour and a half.  We have the most amazing blinds that make the room entirely black, and it was so wonderful.  Then we got ready to go out for our play that night.  Because we had to be at the theater at 8:30 we didn't have time to eat dinner at home (dinner is usually served around 9pm) so we decided to meet some friends for tapas and then go to the theater afterwards.  So we met and found a bar but theres never anyone out at that time (7pm) so the kitchen wasn't even open.  After our very small amount of tapas, we decided to go to a pastry shop I had seen on the way there.  It was so awesome!  It was called Rey Fernado, and they had all sorts of pastries and gelato.  The guy there was really nice and he even gave us free deserts after we had ordered our pastries! We told him we'd definitely come back, and honestly we're thinking about making it a weekly tradition :)

The play we went to see was called "Boda de Sangre" which means Bloody Wedding.  It was written by Federico Garcia Lorca, hes a very famous Spanish writer who was from Granada.  We had gone over it a little in class so we would understand what happened if they talked too fast to understand.  Overall it was scary.  It was an absolutely terrifying play, and very sad.  It was about a girlfriend and a boyfriend who were getting married but the girlfriends ex boyfriend still loved her and they ran away together after her wedding and the boyfriend and the ex boyfriend killed eachother.  There were all sorts of weird ghosts and people that symbolized death and they were always chanting and popping up in the dark, it was interesting but very creepy.   That ended at 11pm and a lot of people wanted to go out, but Casey and I were still just exhausted so we went back home and went to bed :)