A weekend in Granada

There is a national holiday in Spain two weekends before Christmas break starts and everyone has that Monday and Tuesday off of school or work (if your an English teacher you have off school AND work heh-heh). Spanards call these long weekends "puentes" which translates to "bridges"...I dunno. Anyways, some friends and I decided to make the trek to Granada for this weekend. Granada is a city in the mountains of Andalusia. Granada is well-known for being a young city because of its university and many people who study abroad in Spain end up here. Also, fun fact: Granada means pomegranate in Spanish. There is some mythical story that goes along with this about a princess that may or may not be true but I can't remember it sooooooooo, sorry! Either way, there is a lot of pomegranate decor around town and in a different season there would have been ripe pomegranates on a lot of the trees.

Granada is also a hippy-ish city. There are a lot of Rastas and alternative-looking folks. This probably has something to do with the liberal-student population. There are a lot of cool little hippy clothing and jewelry shops. Also, the Moroccan influence is strong here and there are a lot of food and souvenir shops of the like. This all contributes to the city's cool eccentric feel.



I really enjoyed Granada for all of the reasons above and because it seemed familiar in some ways.  It is a bigger, more crowded city than Huelva, which reminded me of auxiliary neighborhoods of NYC. Also, all the Christmas lights were up in the streets which gave me the warm-and-fuzzies of course. Spain likes the decorative light fixtures that hang above the streets. As far as I can tell there aren't so many string lights. Also, because of Granada's location, there are a lot of trees around and throughout the city. I didn't realize I missed seeing trees that weren't palm trees until this. It was great to see trees whose leaves had changed colors like in PA, since in Huelva there really is no fall. Also, the narrow cobblestone streets with the building walls closely crowded along reminded of Cuzco, Peru. Which I guess is no surprise since most of that architecture got there from the Spanish.



We walked around the city doing some shopping at the holiday booths and went out to some bars for tapas and beers at night. (In Granada, you get a free tapa with every drink!) We had to bundle because in Granada, it gets really freakin' cold at night! Most Spanish houses don't have heating so when we stayed with a friend in Granada in her big Spanish house, we were sleeping under many layers--it was frigid. In general, the city is beautiful but I definitely need to explore it more since we actually spent a lot of time outside of the city at the Alhambra and hiking (to be explained in another post).