A Trip to the South of Spain
Starring:
Jess ´´just let it happen / just a little tongue`` Goldin,
Becca ´´drool dries clear`` Waltrip,
Rita ´´tastes like candy`` Kaali,
Heather ´´standing ovation`` Vermeulen, and
Jordan ´´my steak's still mooing`` Rice...
... So this weekend the girlies and I took a trip down to the south of Spain, which is perhaps my favorite place on earth besides good ol' San Sebastian. And yes, I just visited the south of Spain during my week of solitary travels back at the end of August, but nevertheless I was thrilled to return. We found a cheap flight from Bilbao to Malaga via Vueling airlines, and built our trip from there, taking advantage of not having class on Fridays and having a 3pm Monday class. Malaga sounds cool, and some people say it is, but when we heard from a friend that it was ''Myrtle Beach-ish`` we decided to hop on a bus to Granada instead of spending the first night in Malaga. Becca and Jordan had never seen the Alhambra, a huge castle/fortress/garden built by the Moors (and also the setting for Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra), and the rest of us were definitely up for a return visit. I spent three nights in Granada during my week of travels, and it is definitely one of my favorite places in Spain.
After waking up at 6 am, catching an hour-long bus to Bilbao for our flight, and arriving tired and travel-weary in Malaga, we almost decided to just stay there... but I'm really glad we didn't. We found out that the bus ride to Granada was a little longer than our friend who advised us against Malaga initially led us to believe... like an hour and a half longer... and the Alhambra closes at something like 5:30... we decided to go for it anyways, and grabbed the first bus there, arriving just in time to run to our hostel (Funky Backpackers, where I stayed before and had an awesome time), drop off our stuff, and catch a bus up to the Alhambra, which sits up on a hill overlooking Granada. We made it there in time to get a pretty good look at the gardens and everything, but we ran out of time to do the Alhambra itself, which is the fortress part… which, in all honesty, isn’t the best part, so we just admired it from the outside and told Jordan and Becca that they had seen the best part of the Alhambra-complex anyways.
It was beautiful. The weather was crisp and clear, not nearly as cold as in San Sebastian… which apparently warmed up and stopped raining and was beautiful while we were away, but oh well… and the leaves on the trees were bright yellow, which made for some nice pics. The Sierra Nevada mountains were snow-capped and they lit up orange as the sun went down. We were a little too far away to capture it well on camera, but I’ll put up an attempt sometime soon, whenever I catch up with my photo uploads.
After the Alhambra, we headed back to our hostel, Funky Backpackers, for a little rest and relaxation… and a couple rounds of sangria in the bar on the roof. The place is great. The rooftop has a nice covered patio room, that’s glassed in for when it’s cold out, and you can see a lot of the city and the surrounding mountains. There are tables, chairs, and couches, always music playing, and a nice little bar that gives you free tapas with your drinks, which are excellently priced and tasty. The sangria there has a neat cinnamon flavour and was a nice change from our boxed Lidl table wine and sangria mix we try to spice up with peach or lemon liquor. Plus, we never actually put fruit in ours because that would be a bit too much effort, so the cinnamon-flavored apple pieces were de-lish. We had some time until it was late enough for a Spanish-time dinner (9:30 at the earliest), and so we chilled up there for a while and enjoyed the free tapas and such. I was in the mood for hunting up some tasty Moroccan food, nostalgic for the awesome little restaurant I found back in August, so we headed out to see what we could find. We came across a place called Sultan, that was a little more upscale than the place I had eaten at previously, but still very reasonably priced and yummy. As we were sitting at the low table surrounded by chairs and couch-like seating with pillows, Rita sees her professor from Santiago de Compostela two summers ago enter the restaurant! What a small world. We ordered hummus, lentil soup, and various couscous and rice dishes, and it was all really good… except for the fact that two members of our party, Becca and Jordan, couldn’t quite stomach it for some reason, and had to leave early … :o( sorry, chicas! But Jess, Rita, and I had a lovely meal, including a little postre, of course. We had yet another bill fiasco, which took us at least a good 25 minutes to divide up correctly, but we’ve gotten pretty accustomed to that sort of thing anytime we all go out together. We trade money back and forth like crazy, because no one ever has the right change, we split entrees, etc., etc.
When we left the restaurant, we were wiped out and just went to bed back at Funky. We had to get up early to catch the first bus to Sevilla, where we would meet up with Becca’s friend from home, Betsy, who is studying abroad there and living with a madre in a home stay.
In Sevilla, we also stayed at the same hostel I stayed at when I was there, Nuevo Suizo, which is located off of Calle Sierpes, one of the main shopping streets that is pedestrians-only. It’s a great location, but once again, they stuck us on the roof, only this time the room on the roof was converted into a room for 4, with two sets of bunk-beds. The lady at the desk tried to make it seem like an improvement, but 4 people is a lot for a room that has a bigger bathroom (but no toilet) than the size of the room itself… so that was interesting, but just fine for a one-night stay. We definitely took advantage of the all-day free coffee and tea and the good location for shopping as well. Saturday we had lunch at a nice little pizzeria restaurant that was more fine-dining than the name conveyed, and toured the Real Alcazar, which is definitely one of the nicer castles I have seen here… I like it better than the palace at the Alhambra, actually. We didn’t have a lot of time before it closed, but we walked through a good bit of the rooms with their Moorish architecture and tiled walls and floors, and toured the beautiful gardens which surround the palace. Rita and I enjoyed the nostalgic visit; I still took pics, even though I probably already had the place covered from my first visit, and Rita took pictures in the places she remembered visiting with her friends when she went there a few summers ago on a class trip.
That night we went out to dinner with Becca and Betsy at a restaurant she recommended. Rita, Jordan, and I ordered an ensaladilla de melocotón to start off with, thinking that it would just be fresh sliced peaches or something… but we should have known that with their love of tuna and mayonnaise, the Spanish people would manage to turn what sounded like peach fruit salad into a concoction of tuna, caviar, mayonnaise, and diced peaches you could hardly taste because of all the mayo and tuna fish. It was interesting… Jordan refused to try it, Rita took a bite and ate the tomatoes on the sides of the plate, provided they had not come into contact with the mayo-tuna combo, and Jess and I put a little on our salads. I liked it, but it wasn’t exactly the ´´healthy`` fresh fruit starter I was going for. Rita actually never got her food, which was kind of weird… she kept waiting and waiting, and then when she asked about it for the second or third time, they brought her the racion portion, not the meal portion of whatever she had ordered, so she ended up ordering some croquetas (a classic travel meal for our group), which are like hush puppies with cheese and / or meat of some kind inside.
After dinner we went out with Betsy to a tex-mex type bar where the soccer game would be on, and where her roommate would be, as well as a bunch of other Americans. Now, that might seem sad that we didn’t want to go somewhere more ´´authentic,`` but the truth is, we had kind of had our fill of Spanish guys in bars, who are either mullet-sporting or overly… ´´affectionate`` in a vocal manner. No sooner had we entered the bar, than this girl in front of us turns around and it’s CAITLIN TAYLOR, from my high school! She’s not even studying in Sevilla (she’s in Barcelona) and I hadn’t seen her in ages, and there we were, together in one of a million bars in Sevilla, both on a random trip. CRAZY. AND, her best friend at Vanderbilt is one of Becca and Betsy’s best friends from home, so they knew Caitlin too, but never knew that I knew her and went to school with her… crazy, crazy… (Caitlin Taylor, I heart you and that was so much fun! So come to San Sebastian!!) So we talked for probably at least 45 minutes straight, waiting to be served at the bar (we never were, despite having euros-in-hand and low-cut tops…). We played volleyball and basketball… and soccer (?) together back in the day, and rehashed lovely memories, such as the time that ´´Smithette,`` our volleyball coach freshman year, held a practice in the lower school gym (think rubber slippery floor great for tearing up your skin when you dive) where literally all we did was run and hurl ourselves onto the floor after balls we had little hope of reaching in time, but if we didn’t try, she would send us to the line to run sprints… and this was our last practice before the Homecoming dance, which we attended covered in bruises and floor-burns. HOT. Or the time our sophomore year volleyball coach had us run outside in the freezing cold weather… that was fun too… awww good times :o)
So we had fun catching up, and then everyone decided to head to another bar and then to calle Betis, where there were other bars and dance clubs and potentially better bar service. It rained that night, but we were troopers and didn’t let the weather slow is down. Caitlin and her friend didn’t come with us to the bar on calle Betis, but it was still a good time… and the site where a certain chica received a standing ovation for her ´´performance`` in one of those classic make-out sessions which always begins with a little conversation and a drink before moving in for the kill… or the kiss… whichever you want to call it. His name was Dave… funny, huh, Becca?… (Becca had some fun with a Dave of her own from Australia who we met at Mendaur… and later at Molly Malone’s… and later at Casa Sucia…sorry, beccs, but if Jess is going to post pics of my standing ovation, then I can hassle you a bit as well). My Dave was from Texas studying somewhere in Spain… environmental architecture ? or something like that… and unlike Becca, I left him at the bar… and most likely with a cold… oops… Sorry, Dave… thought I was getting healthier, but apparently not… but anyways, courtesy of my amigas who were rooting for me all along, the entire bar gave me a standing ovation… sweet…
OK… so Sunday we toured la Catedral y la Giralda (a big tower that I never climbed on my first trip), so that was cool, and of course I took lots of pics… Then we did the Plaza de España (which I also never visited last time). Then it was time to head back to the hostel, gather our belongings, and head to the bus station to leave for Malaga. We got into Malaga maybe around 9:30 Sunday night and went straight to out hostel, Picasso’s Corner, which turned out to be the sister hostel to Funky Backpackers, and equally as cool. We were exhausted, so it was nice to have a clean, chill place to hang out, have a glass of wine, and chat it up with the super-friendly hostel owners, a guy and a girl from the UK who met studying abroad and then decided to move to Malaga and open a hostel… pretty sweet life, if you ask me.
The hostel had a huge living room area with a flat screen tv, so we watched a movie… ´´Donnie Darko``… heard of it? Well, it might be the most intense movie I have ever watched. I’m not saying I ´´got it``, because I really have no clue whether my interpretations were at all correct, but holy goodness it was like watching something that hits you on so many personal levels and pretty much left me a bawling mess… which freaked my friends out, to say the least, because they just thought it was weird, funny, and didn’t make any sense… which only increased the emotional impact for me, because it’s one thing to cry watching Finding Neverland (fabulous movie), like normal people, and it is another thing indeed to start uncontrollably crying at a movie that your friends, who should be the most like you, are laughing at or just throwing up their hands and saying ´´what was that all about?`` So… three cheers for emotional unravelling… goooood times… Please someone watch the movie… or tell me what you thought if you have already seen it. I think it is a couple years old. I’d never heard of it, but all of Becca’s friends who had seen it loved it… so needless to say, I wasn’t quite prepared for the effect it had on me… but I did get some darn good journal writing out of it… not this journal; MY journal. So yes… intense movie… think I got my tears out for quite a while… that’s good at least.
HMMMMM… I should do some work… and you should update me on your lives… so go get on that, ok? And if you have seen Donnie Darko, let me know… Adios, amigos-
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