My street: San Juan de Dios

Right + parade

Front

Left

Sierra nevada #2

View from the dam of the way we came

This could make a good waterslide

Autumn's not so ugly head

Exhibit B

Bridge maintainance is not a priority in Spain

The dam when we still had a bit to go..

View of the lake standing on the dam

I have not posted in a while and since the last time a lot has happened. Most memorable is the crazy amount of partying going on in this city but those escapades have not been documented unfortunately for the readers of my blog but probably for the best for me. I did feel it safe to take pictures on a more camera friendly past-time, mountainbiking.
It was one of the last days of great weather since autumn has been rearing its ugly head lately so we were very lucky. We rode out to one of the reservoir lakes close to granada which was a nice drive and very much worth it. The drive itself was nice and tricky and the lake stunning.

Spanish gym

All around the city you can find places like this, I'm sure they are a familiar sight in many countries warmer than my own but to me it is amazing. They look like playgrounds at first but really are free workout areas. Equally amazing is the fact that they are actually being used by young and old alike and I think it is a great idea. If only global warming hurries up a bit we will soon be able to introduce the idea to our own wet little corner of the world and can stop paying for gyms altogether.

Botellon

This is where we went next: it is called the "Botellon" which I think simply means "bottle" because it is a place that has been designated as a legal outdoor drinking zone. In the rest of the city drinking on the street is officially forbidden and you can get a steep fine if caught, so many people come to the botellon to hang out and drink on the streets. It is conveniently located at the edge of the city behind a huge supermarket so it does not bother residents too much, but still very close to the main bar street. On this particular night there were more people than ever, I took these pictures standing more or less in the the middle of the crowd and there must have been thousands of students. It was pretty late when I arrived at around 2 o'clock (not late for Spaniards) and in a couple of hours everyone and everything was smashed and the ground covered in a cocktail of all kinds of alcohol known to man mixed with other liquids,

Alien lifeform

When descending the Albaycin hill we came across this ridiculously large aloe. I think it was taller than me but at that time I remember it only mildly surprising me. When I found it on my camera later though I had to sit down for a moment to process this insolent attack on the laws of nature and it still bothers me at night.

Granada by night

My attempt

With some help

Last Wednesday it was Colombus day in Spain. This means they celebrate some Columbus-related occasions and everyone gets the day off. Nationalists use the day as an excuse for military parades and feelings of great patriotism while the other part of the country looks at it all with suspicion because it vaguely reminds one of the days of fascism. Because everyone gets the day off this means everyone goes out the night before. People go out every day anyway but this Tuesday it was nuts. I happened to have my camera with me that night so I managed to take some "pictures" and destroy my camera in the process. Thats why you don't take your camera when you go out. Luckily I probably still have a warranty so I'll see if I can get it fixed and if not, it's not a very big deal. The pictures above were taken during the first part of the night, we went into the old muslim neighbourhood of "Albaycin" with a group of people, high up on the hill it sits on and had a good time hanging out and drinking on a square there. Close to there is the famous viewpoint from which you have a magnificent view of the alhambra. I tried taking pictures but due to a Y-chromosome I happen to possess I did not bother to read the manual of my camera and therefore did not know how to take night pictures. After a couple of weird paranormal looking pictures from my side a girl took over and make a sort of decent one. The alhambra is still sort of shiny but at leat it does not look like a Tesla experiment gone wrong.

Home

Kitchen side

Bedroom

Living room side

This is where I live. With some luck and the help of a local I managed to find a very nice and spacious place just outside the old city centre. Without help it would have been quite tricky, just about anyone I talked to said they had a very difficult time getting a place on their own as most people here do not speak English. The way most people offer rooms (and other services) here is interesting as well, they just tape notes with some basic info and a telephone number to trees, phonebooths or fences, so you just have to roam the streets looking for them. After collecting lots of numbers and selecting the best sounding ones we visited a number of them and I quickly decided on this one. I have started decorating it to my own liking but have to work with some furniture that came with the apartment. On one side this is convenient but on the other it is hard to get rid of unwanted furniture. The piece of furniture that has the tv and plant on it for example was about 1/3 as large as it is now, dominating the wall with useless storage space but luckily I managed to take it apart and stuff a good bit of it into some other useless storage space in my clothing closet. Another good thing about this place is that is has balconies with sun until about 2 in the afternoon because yes, it still is summer over here...

School

One of my classes, this guy talked really fast..

My faculty! The building is boring concrete but the palmtree makes up for that a little

The school is located on a hill so every day I have a healthy 20 minute walk of which 10 uphill.. It's fine for now but if it gets too tedious I can always take the bus

Had my first full week of classes and it was very nice. It was quite hard to follow everything that the teachers were saying sometimes when they spoke quickly or with a thick accent but I soon found out that almost every erasmus student had this problem so I suppose I will be fine. I have also started my six hours a week Spanish course so that will help as well. As always some teachers were better than others but in general I can say that the teaching was very good, teachers seemed enthusiastic and knew what they were talking about. An interesting thing that you notice immediately is the different approach to time, teachers are often late and students join and leave class throughout the lecture. Nobody except for the foreigners seem to mind so I do not either.

Book

This is the book I've decided to read: Tales of the alhambra by Washington Irving. Although I was looking for a Spanish writer at first, I quickly discovered that Granada's most well-known writer, Garcia Lorca, wrote mostly poetry and plays and I felt more like reading stories and essays. Irving actually lived inside the Alhambra for a while where he no doubt got the inspiration for writing this book. He is a famous figure in the city of Granada and you can see references to his stay here in many places. It is not a book that I would have picked myself probably as the title seems a little cheesy, but it is supposed to be good so I'm confident that it will be an enjoyable read.

To round off my mountainbiking post, I passed this piece of graffiti on my way back on the other bank. It has probably been done by the same artist as the one I passed on the other bank and marked my return into civilisation. I think they make great border-markers for Granada, graffiti may usually be a nuisance but on occasion it can be pretty sweet.

I did a couple of kilometres uphill and was exhausted but it was worth it: beautiful views and that all-important feeling of accomplishment. I finally came to a highway at the top of the mountain and decided that was probably not for mountainbiking but when I told the guys at the bike rental about it they said you can actually use a small path that runs next to the highway so I'll do that next time. Although I have no pictures of it, I can assure you that the way back after all that climbing was really nice and fast..

Later on I arrived at this rickety bridge...it was the only way through but it really looked like it might collapse. A little further on planks were missing everywhere but I figured it wasnt that high, so if I went through so be it, and went across it at high speed anyway.
I then came to this cool piece of graffiti on a bridge pillar, I imagined it marked the end of civilisation and the beginning of the mountains and this proved to be true, sort of.

Mountainbiking

After the parties and intro weekend I decided to do something healthy while figuring out my classes and other school stuff. It was a real puzzle since everything is in Spanish and it is not a very user friendly system but with some help from other students and reading a huge amount of PDF's I figured it out. I guess this was a Spanish practical assignment in itself so that's good. I went mountainbiking in the Sierra Nevada and needless to say it was great and very beautiful. After leaving the city while biking along the Genil river the trail I was taking soon got kind of creepy. The growth to the left and right started getting thicker and thicker until it even went overhead.. It looked awesome though and soon enough the path became clearer again.

Rooftop bar

After the monastery we had beers and tapas for dinner in a very nice rooftop bar across the street. Granada is the tapa capital of Spain, you get a free tapa with every drink you order and they often are small meals. For those of you who have never heard of tapas, they are small snacks that can be anything from slices of  regional ham or sausages to a piece of pizza or a hamburger. I even got a small happy meal when we went on the tapa tour, some chicken nuggets and fries. The tapas we had in this bar were awesome but unfortunately I forgot to take pictures of them.. I did get a picture of the view over the city though.

This is the end of my report on the time spent with my brother & family, school is going to start after this weekend so things are about to get serious... everything will be in Spanish and most people hardly speak any English so I'll really have to put in some serious effort in this first week to figure out how to tackle all my subjects in Spanish. While my brother was here I also did a fair amount of partying and had an intro-weekend at some remote countryside destination but there are no pictures of that yet. Once I get any I'll add them to the blog and I think there'll be some pictures of my holiday in Greece soon as well.

¡ ¡ Hasta Luego!!

Monasterio de San Jeronimo

This is the monastery of saint Jerome. It is located in my street and part of it still functions so I often see nuns walking by my balcony. I visited it on my own before my brother was here and later we went back together because it is really something. From the outside it did not look that impressive (ok it was a pretty big old building) but from the inside it blew me away. The living quarters and courtyard of the monastery are quite simple as one would expect from a monastery but the main church building it completely decorated with the most beautiful stuccos, paintings, statues and wood carving. The altarpiece is several layers all done by different famous painters and sculptors and again, HUGE.

La Santa Iglesia Catedral Metropolitana de la Encarnación de Granada

Apart from the alhambra there are many other impressive monuments in Granada. One of the most impressive, certainly sizewise, is the great cathedral. I have seen quite a few impressive churches and cathedrals in my time but the Spanish certainly know how to go about these types of things. It's incredible how much money and effort much have gone into the making of these things and I guess the discovery of America around the time these things were being built and elaborated on certainly did not hurt. There are many references to Columbus in the city and its monuments. Apparently the king and queen of Spain were busy besieging Granada when  they denied his requests for the second time. He then set off to petition to the king of France and they quickly changed their minds..

I'll finish the alhambra section with a picture of me with my nephew which we took in Charles the fifth's palace also located within the alhambra walls. We forgot to take any proper pictures of it but if you look closely you can see part of it in my ridiculous sunglasses.

Later on we saw this nice little pomegranate tree. Granada means pomegranate in spanish but supposedly this is not the origin of the city's name...I suppose the pomegranate must have gotten its name from the city then. The pomegranate is a symbol of Granada however, and can be seen througout the city.

Apart from the gardens the outside of muslim buildings are often inconspicuous while the insides are abundantly decorated. The Alhambra is probably one of the finest examples of that, some rooms have every inch of space decorated with incredibly intricate stone and plasterwork. The pictures give some idea of the level of detail but to be in the alhambra and see room after room of it really blows you away. There used to be a lot more even but much got destroyed over the years by wars and christian rulers that seemed not to care too much for this Moorish legacy.

The gardens are really nice, someone has obviously put some thought into them but they aren't as manicured as some of the European 17th century gardens. As with these gardens they have a lot of fountains and other water elements in them as well which my nephew thought was awesome but slowed us down a lot because he wanted to look at each one in detail and then do it again.