Granada and Salamanca

First of all, last week I posted my pictures from Valencia and Granada on my picture site (http://picasaweb.google.com/clairemusica/). Go check them out!

Secondly, I have to tell you about Granada and this weekend’s trip, Salamanca. Tim, who is from Chicago and is a Poli Sci and Music major, wanted to go to Granada because he had friends who are studying there, so in the middle of the week we decided that the two of us would go down to meet them. We didn’t make any hostel arrangements because Tim had had trouble booking hostels online before, so we just decided to get a hostel when we arrived in Granada, like true backpackers. On Friday the Fund had a sponsored trip to El Escorial, which is a monastery and summer palace built by Charles V and lived in the most by Philip II. We had a very long tour of El Escorial, but we couldn’t go into the most famous part, the library, because they were filming a Spanish period film that Friday. After El Escorial, the bus dropped Tim and me off in Madrid before going back to Toledo. We got to the bus station and bought bus tickets for the 5.5 hour ride to Granada and then had dinner. On the bus ride, we called all the hostels listed for Granada in my guidebook and none of them had room for two people for Friday night. We arrived in Granada around midnight and walked into the center of town from the bus station, which is about a 5 mile walk. We walked into 13 hostels, hotels, and pension houses before we finally found one that had a room at 2 in the morning. That was our 19th hostel. After that adventure we were exhausted, so we went right to bed and then got up at 7 to get tickets to Granada’s main attraction, the Moorish palace complex called the Alhambra. We spent much of Saturday touring the Alhambra and then met Tim’s friends and spent the evening with them. Sunday we went to mass at the cathedral and then met up with Tim’s friends again before hopping on the 4pm bus back to Madrid.
This week the only two really exciting things that happened were that I got my first grade back of the semester and I met the love of my life. The grade was an A, from an oral presentation in my Cultural Heritage class. Out of the whole class the professor only gave out two As, and I was awesome enough to earn one of them. The love of my life is a soccer player on Toledo’s local team. His name is Pedro. I met him at my job at the tv station because he was there to film an interview on Monday. He told me my Spanish was very good and that I should come see him play sometime. I tried not to swoon.
This weekend the Fund sponsored a trip to Avila and Salamanca. We left early Friday morning and toured Avila, made famous by St. Teresa of Avila. Most of our tour centered around a very old church and the city walls. After Avila we went to Salamanca, where we stayed in a 4 star hotel and got guided tours of the city’s monuments and the university complex.
All of these trips are really fun, and I love the opportunity to get to know my way around cities all over Spain, but I have to say I’m really glad I get to call Toledo home. It’s small enough and has so much character that it really feels more personal than the cities, even small ones like Salamanca. Next weekend I’m going to Barcelona with Tim and some other kids from the Toledo program and meeting up with Rebeca, Eileen, and Jessica, three of my best friends from Notre Dame who are studying in London, London, and Rome, respectively. As I’m writing this, I’m trying to avoid the fact that I have a 1000 essay due Monday (tomorrow) morning to work on. I should really switch over to writing that.