The penultimate week of my Year Abroad and my final visitor.

This time next week I will be back in the UK, after having a touristy week of being able to fully enjoy Granada I have realised how much I really like it here.  If I could just relocate my family, friends, Uni and job to Spain I'd love to stay longer, I can see myself coming back to Spain in the future, got to go and finish off that degree first!


On Sunday I headed off to Malaga to meet Henry at the airport, before that though I decided to have a wander round, I'd have liked to have a bit more time as I just about had enough time to get down to the port, have a drink and then walk back to the bus station so I didn't really get to see that much.  We didn't get back to Granada until later in the evening so we went for dinner and then headed back to the flat.  I didn't have any particular plans for Monday so we spent it wandering round, the day was basically a series of moments sat in bars or cafes drinking and eating interspersed with walking round.  It was a lovely day so we walked up towards the Albyzin, on the way up I realised there was a part of Granada that I'd still not taken a lot at myself, the Sacremonte so we had a good wander round there too.  The views out over the Alhambra were brilliant!

After this we continued walking up the hill to Mirador de San Nicolas to enjoy the view and one of the best smoothies I've ever drunk.  The intention was to then walk to another view point but the map reading let us down and we never actually made it there!  

On Tuesday we went to the Alhambra, this was the second time I've been but I missed out a chunk the first time so it was good to get to go again.  Also, the first time I went it was raining and Tuesday was a lovely blue-skied day.

Wednesday was beach day so we headed off to Salobreña in the morning and stayed on the beach all day.  I, the ginger, got a little burnt on my back and on the tops of my legs but otherwise left the beach undamaged.  Someone however left resembling a lobster and has suffered the consequences of it since...  I had an exam on Thursday evening so I took my revision along with me.

We didn't do much on Thursday but I did go along to my penultimate exam and it wasn't too bad.  Very early start on Friday as Henrys bus left Granada at 7am...


Back to reality now and getting on with my revision for my final exam on Tuesday.  I doubt I'm going to have much left to blog about now as I'll just be revising, reading in the sun, cleaning, washing and packing over the next 6 days.  I'll probably write some sort of summary to the year on Thursday once I'm all packed up and ready to go!

An accidental holiday in Magaluf.

This was the week that we had been looking forward to for a long time.  Booked at the end of last year we decided to spend our holiday in Mallorca, it was somewhere we could all get to from 3 different airports, it was a good price and it is a nice place.  We booked a hotel called TRH Palmanova (remember this, it is going to be important...), booked our flights, and all we had to do was wait, so wait we did.  A quick read up on the internet suggested that the hotel wasn't quite in Palmanova like the name would suggest, and on a steep hill, neither of which really caused us a problem.  Easter week rolls around and off we go!  Charlotte and Vicki arrived first having flown together from Manchester, and get told we've been moved hotels as there had been over booking with ours, not a problem, it's just  even further up the hill!  Now I'll take you back to our location, we were basically on the end of the strip in Magaluf!  Not quite what we'd intended, but oh well!  Palmanova itself, when we actually did go there for a wander, is a lot bigger than we had realised and we'd certainly go and stay there again.  The only problem with the location we ended up in was that there was a Spanish festival of some sort on for a few days and there was a huge group of people staying in our hotel, and they weren't the quiet type!  But when this is the view from your balcony, you really can't complain:

The very first time we took a walk down to the beach we realised that we would have to find another route, it is impossible to walk down the main strip without getting stopped at least every 5 or 6 steps (and I'm not even exaggerating) by some promoter or other trying to get you to stop in their bar for a drink.  It doesn't matter how clear you make it to some of them that you're not interested, they'll engage you in conversation, physically block the way, try and split up the group and even try pulling you in by your hair!  It's a bit of a laugh but certainly gets tiresome after a while.  We instead tended to go to places along the beach front or walk over to Palmanova where there are still plenty of lively bars but without the hassle.  We did cave into them once or twice though, the first time was at 4 in the afternoon when we bought beer and sangria and got given free shots of Sambuca, only in Magaluf...

Because we're so cool and so mature we bought a bucket, spade, rake and some little animal shapes, oh and a sive!  We spent quite a while on 2 different days making these creations:



And on a sand related note, the girls buried me in the sand and sculpted me into a mermaid.  I didn't get the best photo of that though!

In general we spent our week wandering, eating, drinking and laying in the sun, so I'm not going to give you a diary entry style blog of what we did for fear of boring you all so much that you never come back!  However, we did go to Palma for the day which was nice, other than paying €4.50 for a Fanta!  We had intended to see one of the Easter parades for Semana Santa but by the time we'd spent the day there we were getting tired and ready to leave so we didn't get to see it.  I just see that as an excuse for me to get back out to Spain another Easter and see it all though!

We also did one of those holiday essentials and played mini golf which was a lot of fun.  Especially with holes like this one where the water gets in the way some what:

I didn't do very well, lets just say that I lost by a long long way and leave it at that shall we?  Whilst we were there Katy and I had our photo taken with a snake, it was pretty scary and we weren't really expecting it to happen, but we had to buy it just to prove we've done it! Apologies for the quality, it really needs to be scanned in at some point.

That  is about it really!  I came back this morning fairly early, I've unpacked, done 2 loads of washing, uploaded my photos, done my photo of the day project and now I've even written this!  Will be an early night for me tonight though, and hoping for my first totally uninterrupted nights sleep in a week! Got a day tomorrow to catch up and maybe do some work before classes start again on Tuesday which feels really odd.  I'm glad though, because I'd quite like the next few weeks to pass, it's been hard knowing so many Erasmus students that have been home and seen their families this week and I haven't.  Oh well, one blank weekend, then Cordoba, then Seville and then my parents are here with my Nana for a whole week which even includes my 21st!  Can't wait!