Granada

I went to Granada with my lab group this weekend! Granada is another one of the major cities in Andalucía, 2-3 hours from Sevilla by car or train. Saturday was the birthday of one of the girls in the lab, and she wanted to go Granada, so a group of us drove over for the weekend.

Four of the masters students in the group (in Spain - in general - you have to do a masters before a PhD, and at least in the sciences most people do their masters in the same group as for their PhD) are doing an intensive 3-week course for their masters at the University of Granada, and they're renting an apartment during that time. We all stayed with them in their apartment - 10 of us! One bathroom, and I slept with four other people in the bedroom, so nice and cozy!

Some of the group :)

It was a really fun weekend - basically we just spent a lot of time together. We went out both nights - there are plenty of bars and discotecas in Granada since it's definitely a university town, and there are people standing on every corner giving coupons and deals to groups of young people walking around. The night before the girl's birthday we followed one of these people to a salsa/Latin bar/discoteca, and since we were there early (around 11pm) it was basically empty. At midnight the really nice bartender let her go behind the counter and choose whatever bottles she wanted from the shelves and mix her own drink, so that was a round of chupitos (shots)! Some of us went back to the apartment early (like around 3) and played a card game until like 5 when the rest of the group came back. :)

The next day we basically didn't leave the apartment until night since it was raining all day - we ordered in Chinese and played the werewolves version of Mafia, and it was a very loud and involved few rounds! We went out that night and were going to come back early so we could madrugar (wake up early) the next morning and go to the Alhambra (huge 10th-century Arabic palace, and Spain's most visited attraction), but we ended up staying out until a normal hour (5am) so the Alhambra didn't really happen the next day - although we did go to a lookout point that had a great view of the Alhambra, and went up close and got to see a few of the buildings.

The 19th-century author Washington Irving spent time in Spain and Granada and wrote in his journal of the Alhambra: "How unworthy is my scribbling of the place" - I'll just display the pretty photo below and let it suffice to say that I want to go back and see it!

La Alhambra, seen from a lookout point