My journey to Granada was pretty uneventful actually. I got to the train station, caught a taxi, and got dropped off a block from the hotel because of the construction being done on our hotel’s street. Checked in no problem and was directed to my room where I would be rooming with my future roommate, Michelina. However, she was not there yet. Some people had arrived already so the front desk gave me a list of the rooms we were in, but I wanted to shower so I just headed for my room to relax a little. However, as I was about to get ready to shower, there was a knock on my door. The man there didn’t seem to understand that I knew Spanish so he kept trying to tell me in his very broken English something about having to change rooms, but then he randomly left. I went down to the front desk and asked what was going on (in Spanish) and was told that I had to switch to a bigger room because they were adding a person. After moving, I waited a little to see if anyone was getting there soon to try to avoid anyone arriving while I was in the shower. I watched BBC a bit to find out what was going on in Egypt, but eventually decided to go ahead and shower. Of course, while I was in the shower the other girl, Meredith, arrived.
After I got dressed, we decided to use the list the front desk had given me to try to find some other students in our program. We ended up finding people in a few more rooms and ended up hanging out talking with maybe half of the group in one of the rooms before going downstairs to stop in our room on the way to our first ISA meeting. Already, the group seemed to get along really well, and so far that feeling has held up (knock on wood). When Meredith and I stopped in our room, we found Michelina there! Unfortunately, the airline had lost her luggage somewhere on the way from Ghana where she had been traveling with a group from her school for a few weeks. It took a few days for her suitcase to be delivered to our hotel, but it got there. Too bad that wasn’t the end of her bad luck with Ghana, but more on that later.
We had ISA meetings almost every day about Granada, as well as about Morocco and the culture and just some general information about our lives for the next few months. We met Daniel, our Resident Director, Laura, the ISA Assistant Director of European Operations who is based in Granada and stayed in Meknes with us for the first three weeks, her husband, Manolo, and Mohammed, the Resident Director of the new ISA program in Jordan. Let me just start out by saying that they (and everyone I have met so far) are all awesome and amazing people. Daniel studied abroad with ISA in Granada while he was in school while Laura was Resident Director there and then started working with ISA in Granada. He worked there for 7 years, I believe, before helping start up the program in Meknes, which is now in its third year. At the rate I am going with studying abroad with ISA, I will probably ask him more about all this at some point since working with ISA seems a probable part of my future. Plus I now know Laura, who told me if I ever need a job, to send in my resume :) Laura is traveling around right now, visiting ISA programs to basically do some quality control, and she said that this program is definitely doing well since the students seem more enthusiastic than at many other sites. It was also fun to learn that she helped set up the program in Buenos Aires that I did almost two years ago, and knows most of the people who work there. Then there is Mohammed, a Jordanian-Palestinian who got his Ph.D. in Arizona and teaches at refugee camps. Given that, it may not come as a surprise that I, along with a lot of other students in the group, had a lot of good conversations with him about life and teaching and politics and culture. He also told me that he is trying to get the ISA volunteer branch, ELAP, set up in Jordan which means I might be able to do some stuff there sometime, even after I am done with school. However, I did ask Laura and she said that I do not have to be a current student to participate in ISA study abroad programs so Morocco may not be the end of them for me just yet :)
As usual with study abroad programs, there are a lot of students here who are majoring in some form of international studies/relations and we are from all over the US. One of the things you don’t think about when studying abroad is how many people you’ll meet from all over your home country. Anyway, we all have been getting along very well and so we had a lot of fun in Granada. We spent most nights out getting drinks and tapas, and had tours 2 of the days. Now let me explain tapas: Granada has this thing going where you can go to a bar and order a drink, and it comes with free tapas, or some sort of small plate of food/snack. I believe just about all of Spain does the tapas thing, but I have heard that Granada is the only place that gives them to you for free with your drink, and the drink can be anything ranging from bottled water (because free food with free tap water would be too cool) to soda to alcoholic beverages. On a different note related to food, Michelina and Meredith discovered this place with these small donuts that reminded me of Trish’s Mini-Donuts at Pier 39 in San Francisco, but these ones were covered in chocolate syrup :)
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| "La Media Luna" |
During the days, we had a couple tours and went adventuring. On our first day, we toured Granada and the neighborhood Albaicin, which is the traditional Moorish neighborhood. One of the most amusing parts of this tour to me was this one door that was very Moorish in deisgn and had what appeared to be Arabic script over it, but as I looked closer I noticed it actually just said “La Media Luna” (“the half moon” in Spanish) but written so that it looked like Arabic. Oh and to backtrack slightly, my alarm clock on my phone plays the introduction to “Circle of Life” so Michelina had started calling me Rafiki because it means “friend” in Swahili and in Arabic. Back to the tour: we were walking and she points up to this balcony where I see a stuffed Rafiki sitting. That is when we decided the nickname was permanent. Anyway, we got our first little taste of Moorish architecture and the Arabic language, and made it up to this church square that had an amazing view of the Alhambra.
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| Alhambra from the church square |
The next day’s activity was a tour of the Alhambra, an old Moorish palace and probably the largest example of Islamic architecture in Spain. You know, Christians built great churches and cathedrals, but I think the Moors win as my favorite castle architects. When the Moorish reign ended and Spain was ruled by Christians, they built more in the Alhambra and it just does not compare to the original Islamic architecture. Mosaics, woodcarvings, and bright colors definitely win over big, gray stones :)
Anyway, the next day, Kyle, Meredith, Mike, and I decided to go explore the hills where the cave-people live. Now let me explain: there are these cave-homes in the hills of Granada and people can just go find an empty one and move in. As you might be able to guess, they are known as being the hippies of Granada and they have their own little community up in the hills, but come down to the city to get food and other supplies to bring back up in backpacks. I thought they sounded cool, so I asked about going to see them and had some friends who wanted to go, too, so we traipsed up the hill to explore. We were told to be careful about the stuff we had with us because it was not the biggest tourist area, and the people there may not be too fond of us being there so we had to be respectful (not that we were planning on being rude, but ok).
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| Hillside where the caves are |
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| Stairs down to Granada |
We wandered up through the Albaicin, tentatively following a map to keep track of where we were and where we wanted to be while trying not to stand out too much as tourists, before we got to the place where we had been told to go up the stairs. The only place we could see stairs went up along/behind a house, so we decided to try them since there was no “do not pass” sign or anything, figuring if anyone yelled at us, we would know that they were the wrong stairs. Turns out they were the right stairs and took us up to a church on the top of the hill. We saw some cool graffiti on the way, and then proceeded around the back of the church as instructed to find the caves. We ended up spending most of our time just wandering around the hills, enjoying the amazing view into the mountains and over the city, but did find a few caves. The first one we found was one we were on top of. They remind me of hobbit holes from the way the doors are just sitting in the hillsides, and chimneys sit poking out of the ground. We saw this one front yard that was elaborately decorated with recycled materials and had a sign about hours, so I went to ask the man working on the roof what the place was. From what he said to me before he just ignored me, I think it was both his home and a church. I don’t know if it is because we were clearly not from there (even though I was speaking Spanish) or if he was just busy fixing something and didn’t feel like talking, but he did not seem to want to talk to me so I left. More willing to talk were two girls sitting on a bench overlooking the hills and the city of Granada. They did not live in the caves, but one of them lives in Granada for 6 months out of the year. They were very nice, told me I had to go to Chefchaouan while in Morocco, and gave me some good Spanish practice. I told them that it was really easy for me to understand them, and they told me that since they were from Catalunia, they learned Spanish as a second language after Catalan. Since we had made plans to meet up with Michelina for lunch, we started our descent and got yelled at by someone for going the wrong way, but quickly corrected our path and made it down safely. We even managed not to get too lost on the way.
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| Enjoying the view |
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| Hobbit hole :) |
Fun Facts:
-The “Al” in “Alhambra” means “the” in Arabic, so calling it “the Alhambra” is actually redundant, just like the Rio Grande River
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| Granada |
-Granada means “pomegranate” in Spanish and there are pomegranates hidden (and not so hidden) all over Granada
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| Moving |
-Furniture, such as bookshelves, are moved into these tall, narrow houses via ropes and pulleys on the outside of the building, while tourists stand in the street and watch
