Granada Again

I took advantage of my last four day weekend to the fullest by going to Granada! I studied abroad in Granada for four months about three years ago, so it was awesome to return to the place in which I have already created many great memories. Since studying abroad in Granada I have been able to explore more of my own country and quite a bit more of Spain which gave me a little more perspective this time around. Upon returning to Granada I realized that it is not just a great city because it is in the south of Spain, but because it is truly a unique city within Spain. I appreciated even more all the beauty the city has to offer. It really is a gorgeous city. It has my favorite view which is from a plaza in the Albaicin that looks over the Al Hambra (a massive and gorgeous Moorish castle) with the snow-topped Sierra Nevada Mountains in the background.

I met up with two of my friends Brian and Lizzy who I studied abroad with in Granada three years ago. They are now teaching English and enjoying the lifestyle that Granada has to offer. Staying with them was awesome! They have a great living situation; they live with two Italians girls and a Belgian guy. The house speaks four different languages and the common language for them all is Spanish. It was a great experience.

While I was there I enjoyed the hell out of a ton of free tapas!  If I pay two euros for a beer in Malaga I just get a beer, but in Granada you also get a bagel sandwich made of cured ham, olive oil and cured cheese and French fries with aioli sauce on the side.  I love free tapas.

I visited my former host mother from when I studied in Granada. Her name is Feliciana and she is 75 years old. She is pretty dang awesome. I learned a lot from her and really enjoyed the time I spent with here when I studied abroad. We had a great time catching up. We actually talked for four hours straight without a moment of silence (she did most of the talking). I think we both would have liked to talk more but I had to leave to meet up with friends. I plan to return to Granada again and I will have to meet up with her again.

Granada has a great social scene. There are always people out having tapas and getting coffee. I love the vibe of the city, it’s really lively. The night scene is also exceptionally great, which has a lot to do with the fact that there are more international students in Granada than any other European city. It is filled with students. The first night I went to a discoteca until six in the morning, then the second night I did exactly the same but at a different discoteca.  The following morning I was absolutely crushed. Things only worsened from there after I ate a shawarma that certainly had some bad meat because I had massive diarrhea for the next four days. It really was the worst of my life. So my third night I spent trying to recover. The fourth night I watched an American Football game. My buddy Brian actually plays quarterback for Granada’s American Football team, which is awesome. It was great to watch.  That night I went out to celebrate Brian’s victory in the game but took it very easy.  The next day I returned back to Malaga and continued to rest.

It was a tumultuous weekend, but awesome.

Montes de Almeria

            This weekend I joined Eugenio again for a trip to another Andalucian city. We went to Almeria, which is the capital of the province of Almeria and located on the mediterranean in the southeast corner of Spain. Eugenio, Eugenio's friend Raul and I went mountain biking in the hills surrounding the city. The landscape reminded me a lot of estrn Oregon, but with cactuses.

My favorite part was finding a wild pomegranet tree that was filled with pomegranets in the middle of the dry landscape.I have seen a pomegranet tree before, but never in the wild, which was awesome. Most of the pomegranets were split in half with the fruit exposed, much of it eaten by birds. I found a few that had not completely split and stuffed my face. It might have been because they were wild pomegranets that I found in the mediterranean countryside which made them special to me, or that I had been riding a bike for about 2 hours, but they were the most juicy and sweet pomegranets that I have ever tasted. It was a great discovery! Eugenio and all his friends have started to make fun of me because I jokingly tell them that all food in Spain is free. Whenever we find some kind of wild nut or fruit they all say to me "OH MY GOD!  Nick, More gratis!!" which is hilarious because they actually say everything in English except for the word free (gratis). Over the past two weeks these are the following foods that I have found and eaten in the countryside of Spain for gratis: Almonds, Chumbo (cactus fruit), Bellotas (large acorns), mushrooms, asparagus, rosemary, pomegranate, some kind of reed-like-plant root, chestnuts and olives (which you really cannot eat straight off the tree - it didn't taste very good but they are very oily and I could taste the similarity to olive oil).

After the bike ride we went to a tapas bar which was killer! Free tapas!!! Malaga's Achilles heel is that most of the bars do not have free tapas which is really weak, but you can find some, one is right under my apartment. But Almeria has great tapas bars. I ate pork burgers (Spaniards take the word hamburger literally and the hamburgers are made of pork instead of beef - I know, it doesn't make any sense), blood sausage, eggplant and callos (stew of pig intestines and vegetables - mouth watering). After tapas we took a siesta.

At night we went out to some dance clubs, we left the house at 1:45 am and got home around 6 am. It was a pretty fun night. We were a crowd of about 9 when we met up with other friends. The next day we slept in, drove home and then watched a formula 1 race because a Spaniard is number 1 in the world right now.

Another good weekend.

 I am thinking about visiting Granada next weekend and meeting up with some of my old classmates who were in my study abroad program and now live in Granada. Of course I am going to try to meet up with Feli, my host mother when I studied abroad in Granada!

The countryside of Ronda

Last weekend was a 3 day weekend for everyone in Spain because of all saints day. So my roommate who has a small RV planned a trip to meet up with some teachers from my school and their families. We were a group of four in the RV between Eugenio, David, Rocio and I. We met up with the other teachers at the house of Maripaz, the PE teacher who I work with, in Montejaque, a small town in the country. It was an awesome trip! The weather was practically unbearable compared to what I am accustomed to in Malaga, it was overcast, somewhat windy and even rained sometimes. This nice weather is making me weak.

The first day we did a few hikes and checked out both openings to a massive cave that tunnels through the mountains. At night we all ate together and drank wine out of wineskins! It was pretty classic Spain -eating bread with olive oil, olives, aged cheese, ham serrano, sausage and lentil soup. Everyone shares multiple plates of different finger foods which is called "picking" in Spanish. Do enough of this and it is considered dinner. Drinking from wineskins is a great way to bring people together. I learned the technique: blow up the wine skin with the wine in it, then start squeezing a stream of wine in your throat from the lips and gradually pull the bag away from your face while continually maintaining a stream of wine flowing in your mouth. If you are good enough you squeeze the wineskin as long as you want and swallow the wine with your mouth open as the stream of wine continues.

The second day we went hiking again and picked wild mushrooms. Mushroom picking is really popular in Spain and the weekend we were in the mountains was a great weekend to pick because had rained. David knew how to pick the mushrooms and taught the rest of us what to look for. Really there was only one kind of mushroom in the area so it wasn't difficult or questionable. Apparently the mushrooms we picked sell for around 20 dollars a pound in the stores.  Later that day we cooked the mushrooms in garlic, olive oil, white wine and pork loin. It was bomb.

The next day Eugenio and I went on a 5 hour mountain biking ride that was pretty intense and included an hour and a half of carrying bikes over a rocky area of the mountain. I was dead by the end of the day. The landscape was worth it though. It was very different from anything I had seen before - very rocky, red dirt and acorn trees. It was really pretty.  We stayed the night in Montejaque the night before we had to go back to work so that Eugenio could just drive straight to Marbella where he works, which was pretty close to where we were, rather than go home and then drive to Marbella in the morning. As we entered Marbella from the mountains I could see mountains in Morocco across the Mediterranean and I could see the rock of Gibraltar. It was pretty incredible. A great weekend overall!

Arrival

I’ve been in Spain for a little over 3 weeks now and I am finally starting to feel settled in. Getting here was crazy. I had an interview for medical school at OHSU the day before I left, slept for about 4 hours that evening and then took off the following morning for Spain. I didn’t really sleep for the following two days. When I arrived in Madrid I met up with my friend Paloma who I met about 7 years ago when she was an exchange student at my high school.  In high school she did track and attended my Spanish class. It was crazy to meet up with her again after so much time. I was planning on having a low key day with Paloma until she invited me to go to a bullfight. She was a little worried about what I might think of her asking me to go to a bullfight because in Spain there are many people that oppose bullfights. But I was super excited to go. So Paloma and her brother Alfonso showed me a “very typical” (as Spanish people always say when describing a regional food or activity) Spanish day. We went to bullfighting aficionado bars and had tapas, rations of bull tail, croquetas and patatas bravas and many cañas of beer. I was really lucky to have attended a bullfight with two Spaniards who are fans of bullfights otherwise I would have been missing out on what was really going on. The crowd participates in the fight by clapping in different rhythms and whistling to encourage the bullfighter to change what he is doing and to call for a new bull if the bull is not attacking with enough energy (rarely when a bull attacks ferociously and is very “brave” the fight is stopped and the bull is saved and then used for breeding). Whistling is bad, a clap with synchronized rhythm is bad and a regular clap by the entire crowd is good. The crowd will chastise the fighters for making mistakes and also for playing with the bull for too long. The fans of bullfighting have great respect for the bulls and want them to have a respectable death.  When a bull has to endure more suffering than it should, the crowd becomes upset and whistles and claps with rhythm. When a bullfighter has trouble placing the sword through the chest and the bull has suffered too long, the crowd encourages the bullfighter to kill it by easier means, which is by stabbing the bull between the vertebrae in the neck and severing its spinal cord.  Although the whole of bullfighting is bloody and shocking to the average person, it is not a blood sport as much as it is a form of traditional art. Everything is about style, technique and effectiveness. At the end of the day all of the meat is bought by bars and eaten (like the bull tail I ate).

            After the fight we went to another aficionado bar and had more food and beer. It sounds like I was drinking a lot of alcohol, but I was never drunk once throughout the day. As we drank we were constantly eating and cañas of beer are only about 5oz. Beers are served that way because Spain is warm and no one wants to drink warm beer, so you order a bunch of small ice cold beers instead of having one large beer that warms up. 

            At 11:00 PM I took a night bus down to Fuengirola and didn’t sleep at all. At 9:00 AM the next day I went to my school and attended classes all day as my orientation. I had plans to stay at a hostel but all the teachers were trying to find me a place to stay where I wouldn’t have to pay. I ended up staying with the father of one of the teachers, who is 73 years old. I slept for 14 hours that night. Two days later the man who I was staying with had a diverticulitis flare-up and had to go to the hospital. I then moved to Malaga with a teacher, Eugenio, who teaches in Marbella and is friends with many of the teachers at my school.

I have been living with Eugenio since then and it has been awesome. Eugenio and his friends are all into mountain biking and Eugenio has been lending me one of his mountain bikes to go with him and his friends. He has also introduced me to his friends and his family and I have been having a great time hanging out with them. I have become a temporary member of two clubs that Eugenio and his friends have: the biking club and the gourmet gastronomic club. The biking club is self explanatory, but the food club is unique. It is really just an excuse for them to all get together and hang out. Every other week Eugenio and his friends meet up and one person makes a surprise dinner and cooks for everyone. Whoever is not cooking makes fun of what the cook is preparing and makes a mess of the kitchen. They are constantly giving each other crap, it’s hilarious.  At the end of the night the cook is rated on the food, drink and ambiance – but the scoring is akin to the scoring system on Whose Line is It Anyway.

Malaga is great. The weather, like nothing I have experienced in my life and the food is awesome. Seafood is number one here. I will keep posting my adventures on this blog and try to attach some photos from my first week.

Tuesdays

I finished my work load for the day which included two hours of science and one hour of PE class. I am about to go to a restaurant on the beach with some of the teachers. They always go out to lunch on Tuesdays because they have to stay longer for student-teacher meetings. Today I have to attend a meeting so I am going to get some lunch with the other teachers. I am pretty excited, last time we went it was all fried fish, molluscs and octupus. Damn good food! Weather is not bad either, its october 26th and I am sweating from standing in the hot sun.