Hooray, hooray, it's a holi-holiday!

This week has been pretty uninteresting if I'm honest, since Erin left on Sunday I've not been up to a huge amount.  Classes as usual and an exam on Wednesday mean that I'm now half way though my classes here and just over a third of the way through my total time in Granada.  Time has flown by so fast since arriving here at the start of February, I'm coming to the end of my 7th week here!

The only slightly exciting thing that has happened this week is that the Spanish decided to go on strike on Thursday against a labour reform that is being introduced, I'll be honest and say I know very little about it (I have bought myself a couple of newspapers in the hope of reading up on it at some point though...) but lets just say they aren't happy!  I went out for a wander on Thursday morning to see what was going on and I have to say there were more shops open than I had been expecting, groups of people shouting here and there but I generally didn't see much.  Apparently closer to the centre things were a lot more active, and I could somewhat see the aftermath of that when I went shopping yesterday and there were stickers and posters and things around but not much.  But that is just Granada, things were worse in Madrid and Barcelona etc as I'm sure lots of you have seen on the news in the UK.  Whatever way you look at it the strike gave me an extra day off, I didn't use the time productively though.

My day was made yesterday by a random smiley Spanish man walking past me when I was walking down Gran Via eating my Smooey yoghurt and calling out "que aproveches" which is the Spanish equivalent of bon appetit and then carrying on his way.  This should show you how little I achieved yesterday if that was the highlight of the entire day!  The only other thing I managed was spending money on clothes. 

Today I remembered what is the worst part of going on holiday- packing!  I'm useless at it and am always over the weight limit no matter what I do.  Annoyingly I have no way of telling how much my luggage weighs for my holiday as I have no scales, on the basis that I am using a smaller case and only taking clothes for a week I surely must be under my weight limit, but the thing seems to weigh a tonne!

Tomorrow morning I'm off to Majorca for a week with some of my friends from Lancaster, I've not seen them since January/February so I'm really looking forward to it.  A little bit of research tells me our hotel is just off the strip in Magalluf, so watch out for us in the background of Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents I guess!

Sorry for the really boring post, hopefully by the time I get back on Easter Sunday I'll have plenty to tell you about, I'm hoping to get to see the Maundy Thursday parade in Palma whilst we're there so don't panic, there might be some vaguely cultural content in it!

¡Me encanta Granada!

I know I said it would probably be a few days before my next blog post but sitting here watching the Simpsons dubbed in Spanish (I'm sure I'll never get used to it along with Friends, Two and a Half Men and Sex and the City) with my Spanish flat mate I thought it was maybe time to update you all about how I'm getting on!

I left home yesterday at 3.45am so as you can imagine it was an early start!  All went well, the snow stayed away and we got to the airport without an issue, the bags weren't overweight and there were no delays to the flight, in fact the winds were so favourable that we we 30 minutes early.  When we arrived in Malaga we were early for the bus so went and had a coffee and bought our expensive lunch, but what else do you expect from the only bar/cafe at the arrivals of a busy airport?  The bus ride to Granada is 2.5 hours because it makes a stop at a few little towns on the way there, it was a pretty journey- at least for the portion of it I managed to keep my eyes open for!  I managed my first conversation on the phone in Spanish when we arrived and arranged with my landlady-to-be that we would meet her at the flat when she was ready, this involved more waiting around than intended but luckily it was warm outside so it wasn't really a problem.  By the time I'd got unpacked and sorted everything out there wasn't really much time to do anything else so we headed over to Mums hotel to drop off her stuff and then out to find some food.  As it was a long day I had an early night, at least I'd intended to but by the time I'd actually got in bed I'm not sure it was that early after all.  The nights here are really cold in the flat so layering up is 100% necessary, hopefully now as we're heading out of the winter and into the Spring the weather is going to improve.

Today was my first full day here and what better way to start than by getting up at 6.20, meeting Jack and Aimee and heading off to our first "event" (just a welcome meeting) at the Uni!  It is quite convenient for me with Jack living in the flat literally below mine as it meant I didn't have to struggle with finding the building today as we could go together.  The meeting wasn't exactly life changing but it was nice to actually go to something to do with the Uni and I even got to meet someone that knows a friend of mine from home that goes to her uni, it really is a small world after all!

After the meeting and a trip to Mercadona I met up with Mum and we spent the day food shopping and getting various other bits and pieces that I need to make my room feel a little more like home.  I'm holding off putting up all my photos and things yet though because I might be moving rooms when one becomes available in a week or so and if I put up my photos there is no way I will bother going anywhere, even if it is a better room!

Tonight Mum and I had a great meal in a restaurant near her hotel, basically it was a huge plate of grilled vegetables and then a bowl of really strong garlic prawns but it was a lot nicer than I am making it sound.  It was all washed down rather nicely with a jug of Sangria between us too.  We even had a dessert that we really didn't need, and I'm not even sure I particularly wanted it, we made a good team though because it was crepes with chocolate sauce, bananas and cream- I ate the banana and Mum dealt with the crepes.

I'm really pleased with how my Spanish is going so far, and it really proves to me how much better my Spanish is when compared with my French, unfortunately for me in Brussels I really didn't have ample opportunity to speak French and in fact here I have probably already spoken more Spanish in less than 48 hours than I did in a week, or possibly a month in Brussels!

That's all for now, the next couple of days I'll spend exploring with Mum before I head off to the Uni again on Friday and classes start on Monday.  There will be another blog from me again soon I'm sure.  Adios!

Now I remember why I prefer Spanish...

Reason number 1- (Yes I know this isn't normal but I'm using it all the same) Walking round on the last weekend of November and not even needing sleeves.

Reason 2- Tapas and Sangria, how much more stereotypical can I make this?  I'm sorry...

Reason 3- The language, it just comes to me sooo much easier than French does.

Reason 4- It's just better and I don't need to justify that.

Now to actually tell you about my trip.  If you've read my other blogs you'll know what an annoyance the airport I flew from is, it calls itself Brussels South (Charleroi), well, for anyone that doesn't know Belgium, Charleroi is a whole different town a 45 minute train ride away.  So it's a bit of a planes, trains and automobiles mission to get there but not as bad as I'd expected it to be if I'm honest.  For once in my life I didn't have a delay, up until this week every flight I have been on alone has had a delay varying from 30 mins to 3 hours.  So "that was *trumpet fanfare* Ryanair flight arriving on time!" love that little announcement just as you land.  Ellie met me at the airport and we went back to her flat, where we just chilled for a bit before realising it was actually quite late and we'd still not eaten.  We went to a tapas bar called El Tigre, for me about a year ago this would have been an utter nightmare, there were loads and loads of people, it was hot and just generally chaotic but I loved it.  With your drink they give you a mountain of tapas (and that would've been why I wouldn't have liked it about a year ago, I didn't know what I was eating), it was brilliant and very yummy.  From there we went onto a market which is full of bars and tapas stalls, again packed and very typically Spanish.  Just to carry on with the being typically Spanish theme we then went and ate churros in the sort of place  you'd only find in Spain, it was about 12.30 at night and the average age in there must've been ...55 I guess.  I said to Ellie that at home at that time it would just be the drunks and the students left out.  I even made friends with a lovely Spanish woman and her friends whilst Ellie left me unattended for just 5 minutes, she offered me some of their churros and everything!

The next day didn't get off to a great start as we didn't set any form of alarm and managed to lose our morning to sleep!  We soon got up and out and about and seeing all the sites of Madrid, or at least about half of them before we headed to meet Dan for a drink.  But that came later, first we had a very important appointment to keep with a Mr Noel Gallagher?  Don't know if you've heard of him, used to be in that band Oasis (Or to the Spanish Oh-wa-siis).  We just happened to pass the hotel he was staying at, asked the people there what they were waiting for and decided to hang around and see for ourselves.

In the evening we decided to go to the Ice Bar, now I've been to one of these before somewhere else in Spain but all I remember from that is that none of us were dressed appropriately but that it didn't really matter because they gave us a fair bit of free drink... (The lack of memory and level of drink are not linked before someone suggests it!)  This one was better than the one I'd been in before that you got a proper coat instead of the furry poncho thing I had before, but it was still just as empty.  We stuck it out for an hour though and amused ourselves so all in all it was still good fun!  After this we decided just to head back to Ellies flat and we made our own churros, some were more successful than others lets just leave it at that!  But the peanut buttercups we'd made earlier, despite looking awful, tasted really good!

Today was my last morning in Madrid so we got up at a decent time and headed off to see the rest of the city, got lots of photos which I'll put on Flickr as and when I remember.

The journey back to Brussels was uneventful and I'm now sitting in my room listening to cheesy music before I go to bed because when I wake up the reality of the washing, food shopping and work I have to do is going to hit me....