First off, a quick update on the furry fridge friend: As of Friday morning, it was gone. I will probably never know what it was, how it was cooked, or how it tasted, but that's OK by me.
On Friday, the Fund offered a guided tour of Madrid for us, which was really short but still interesting. We all loaded up onto the bus, and promptly went into comatose-like sleep. After about an hour, we arrived in Madrid, which is definitely more of a city than Toledo, to state the obvious. Toledo is rustic and pretty laid-back, while Madrid has a hustle and bustle about it, complete with a big city feel. Anyhow, we toured the outside of the Royal Palace before our tour of the interior. Unfortunately, we weren't able to take any pictures of the inside, so I'll just describe it. Every room was completely decked out in red and gold, plush fabrics, intricate sculptures, huge portraits, ceiling murals, and every other decadent European item you could imagine. In all honesty, I had a bit of a headache after the tour, since it was just an hour of being barraged with detail and decadence. It was still really beautiful, as you would expect. I think I could have lived there and been happy.
The exterior of the palace had this gigantic courtyard between the palace and Madrid's cathedral, which are actually connected to form one MONSTRUOUS building. It was all very regal, and provided some good photo ops.
After our tour of the palace, we hopped onto a bus to do a little tour of the city. No one seemed to get very much out of it, since we were all excited to be beginning our weekend plans and travels, so listening to mumbled Spanish on a bus's PA system wasn't high on the priority list. After the bus tour, we stopped for lunch at a relatively well-known Madrid eatery, called "El Museo de Jamón", which literally translates to "The Museum of Ham". There were tons and tons of hams hanging from the ceiling in the restaurant, which explains why we received chicken for lunch. Apparently the ham is so high-quality that it is is really expensive, and not really appropriate for a group of college students. I am not complaining, though, since a lunch of chicken tenders and french fries is always A-OK by me!
At the conclusion of our deliciously fried lunch, a group of 5 of us (me, Hannah, Christie, Sierra, and Flan) hopped on the metro to get to the Madrid bus station. It was amazingly easy, and although we stuck out (as always) with our gigantic backpacks and lack of Spanish, we successfully navigated a few metro stops and made it to the bus station. Unfortunately, the bus station was a little less user-friendly than the metro stations, as it was an explosion of people, cigarette smoke, Spanish, buses, exhaust, and heat. Our bus was supposed to leave at 3:30 and didn't actually arrive at the bus station until 3:35. The boarding process consisted of the bus driver getting off the bus, looking at people's name on a sheet of paper, and then letting them board the bus. He also smoked the entire time, and paused to take a few phone calls. He asked for absolutely no ID, so you could have claimed you were anyone, and boarded the bus lickety-split. Additionally, the concept of "a line" is pretty foreign here. Instead of realizing that we ALL had assigned seats, meaning everyone had a spot on the bus, people charged at the bus driver, pushing in from all directions, leaving us to fend for ourselves. The entire experience was so so SO non-American. Can you imagine no lines, or the pilot hopping off the airplane to start boarding the passengers? Nevertheless, we survived and boarded the bus successfully.
We then began our 5-hour bus ride to Granada. Surprisingly, the ride passed very quickly, as we chit-chatted the entire time there. I am pretty sure we were the nuisances on the bus, but that's not the first, nor the last, time that will probably happen. The bus stopped once at a grungy little rest stop, but it was a good opportunity to get out, stretch, and get a snack. At about 9:00, we got to the Granada bus station, got directions to our hostel, and then hopped on a city bus. We misread the map a teeny bit and ended up on a iffy part of a street, but then quickly got ourselves re-oriented and found our hostel.
After settling in, we decided to forage for dinner, which proved to be more difficult than we imagined, since there were very few casual/cheap eateries. We finally settled on a bar and grabbed some sandwiches before heading back to the hostel for the night. We had a long day planned for Saturday, so no one was terribly inclined to dabble in Granada nightlife on Friday.
Since we stayed in a hostel, we had 2 rooms, all to ourselves, but we had a communal bathroom. It wasn't too bad, or too good, but it served its purpose. I was the first one to shower, which shouldn't have been too eventful. WRONG. All Spanish showers I have encountered consist of a handheld shower head, and most showers have a little hook of sorts for you to place the shower head, effectively creating a "regular" shower. The hostel's shower did not have that hook, meaning you had to hold onto the shower head at all times. This didn't prove to be a problem until I needed to get some shampoo into my hands. I laid the shower head down, with the water spraying toward the tub so it wouldn't make a mess. Well...the water pressure was so strong that spraying toward the tub consequently flipped the shower head 180 degrees, meaning the water was spraying at this point in time directly into my eyes. In reality, that's not too bad. However, when the water hit my eyes, I moved my foot to try and redirect the spray, and that in turn made the shower head start to snake all over the place, spraying water over literally every square inch of the entire bathroom. Not every square inch of the shower area...of the entire bathroom. By the time I cleared out my eyes and was able to grab the shower head, it was quite the sight. Needless to say, I quickly finished up my shower and apologized to my friends, who all had a hearty laugh at my expense. Live and learn!
After the shower debacle, we all headed to bed. The main sight in Granada is the Alhambra, which is a Muslim palace and fortress. History lesson: Granada was the last city in Spain to be under Muslim control during the rise of the Catholic Spanish Monarchs. It fell to the Catholics in 1492, same year as Columbus's discovery, and these two events cemented Spain as a world power. So, we were dead-set on seeing this huge attraction. It turns out that a whopping 18,000 people visit the site each day, and about 16,000 of the tickets are sold in advance. As luck would have it, we did NOT manage to get advanced tickets, meaning we had to wake up obscenely early to try and buy day-of tickets. The ticket office opens at 8:00, so we got there at 7:15. I don't even remember the last time I was up that early! Fortunately, we got tickets without a problem, and it turned out to be worth the early morning. The gardens were gorgeous, but the palace was really the must-see location. Similar to the palace in Madrid, all of the rooms were intricate to the max, covered in ornate carvings, colorful tiles, and beautiful fountains. We all joked that going to such a lavish place without a tour guide or teacher to make sure we were learning essentially turned it into a fun house for us, as we were able to take all sorts of crazy pictures without feeling terribly uncomfortable.
After spending quite a few hours touring the palace and all of its accompanying grounds, we headed back to the hostel to rest. Along the way, we stopped in a few tourist shops and had some lunch...paella and sangria, how Spanish of me! As we were walking back to the hostel, we saw a gigantic sign for a Hannagan and Sons pub, and the sign had the ND leprechaun on it. We hustled over there only to find out that they do NOT carry ND football games, which was a bit of a let-down, but the bar owner suggested another Irish pub in town that might. We decided to check the place out later that day to see how realistic it would be to watch our very first Notre Dame game in Spain. Ultimately, it didn't work out, but more on that later.
We had a brief siesta back at the hostel and then headed out to do some shopping. We had read that Granada has a large Arabic Marketplace near the Cathedral. I thought I knew were I was going and led the way. Well...about an hour and what seemed like at least 4 miles of walking later, we all agreed that my sense of direction was a bit off. After a bit of brainstorming, we found our way to the cathedral. We went into it, thinking the tombs of Ferdinand and Isabela were there, when in actuality they were not. Another error on my part, whoopsie. Anyhow, the Cathedral still proved to be quite the sight, as you would probably expect. There had to have been at least 20 altars, the organ was gigantic, and everything was gilded to the nth degree. We decided to bail on seeking out the tombs, and instead shopped around a bit in the Arab Quarter, which turned out to be mostly touristy stuff.
(not the best pic, sorry!)For dinner, we headed to a little cafe which had good, and more importantly, cheap sandwiches. We then trekked to Paddy's, the other Irish pub that supposedly would be showing the ND game. We made it there only to discover that the one channel that shows American college football shows only one game per week, and it turned out to be the Tennessee-Florida game. The good news was that we could at least see score updates on the ticker, the bad news is, they weren't good score updates. Although the team didn't pull out a win, we still had a blast at the pub, and the bartender was amazingly nice and both parties seemed happy to be talking English.
On Sunday, we had a pretty relaxed day, consisting of returning to Toledo. All in all, the Granada weekend was amazingly awesome, and it makes me so so so excited to travel more in the future. We all agreed that it's sort of like being on an extended spring break, with an occassional class here or there. I think I could get used to this!
Sorry for the War and Peace-style post, but it shouldn't really surprise anyone reading this that I can run on a bit :)
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