Surprise, Surprise!

This was a week full of surprises! Lots of strange and crazy things as always, sometimes thing just work out, and sometimes they don't but it's always an adventure to say the least.

Monday morning I was awakened by a phone call, I looked at the screen and was totally confused because the caller i.d. said it was Mads but her phone had been stolen on the weekend, so my brain was just like wtf is going on?! I answered it, saying hello? and got a slightly confused '..hola?' on the other end, after realizing it was a spanish girl I attempted to speak in spanish in my half-awake state, turns out the girl had found Mads phone that night at Camborio but hadn't been able to contact me earlier because the phone had died and when she turned it back on she needed the PIN to get into the phone but of course she didn't know it, but luckily Mads had written it on a piece a paper and put it into the phone case because she always forgot the number and the girl had found it and then called the last number dialed aka me once she had access into the phone! Que suerte! We agreed to meet at a central location at 7pm and that was that. I was also lucky that she had called me because I forgotten to turn on my alarm the night before and she had called me at 9:45am which is about the time I need to get up for class so she saved me from missing my morning class too!

Immediately after getting off the phone with the girl I sent Mads facebook messages saying that I had found her phone and not to buy a new one because she had been talking about going to buy a new phone that day, of course she had already gone to class so I had no idea when she would see it, so I also tried texting two of her roomies to see if they knew where she was and to tell her the news if they saw her.

Thanks to the spanish girl I made it to school on time and suffered through my monday morning classes, nothing interesting as usual, until I got to POE... we had just started a new topic which was basically 'mysterious things' this topic lead into many interesting discussions which was great, until we got to religion, our prof asked us what we believe in and no one wanted to say anything so of course she asked me what I thought, I kinda just rambled about souls and past lives and whatever, then CrazyGirl pipes in with the whole god speel and something about how the rapture is coming and how we should all praise the lord.. in very bad, broken spanish. Silence. Then N somewhat aggressively states that she believes that you just die. And that's it. She seemed weirdly offended by CrazyGirl's views, then again CrazyGirl seemed offended by her too. Awkward situation. Then our teacher steps back into the discussion and asks who agrees with those opinions, that made things even weirder because a lot of people sort of agreed with N, and then CrazyGirl decides to ask the whole class.."te sientes seguro?" I'm not really sure whether she was trying to ask the class if we felt sure or if we felt safe but that just brought on more silence. Eventually the prof said that she didn't believe in god either and that was the end of class. What a weird class.

Tuesday morning I headed to Caja Granada bank to pay the tax for my residency card that all residents in Spain have to pay, I got to the bank and the guy at the desk was being pretty unfriendly, I had to fill out a government form which I didn't totally understand since it was all in spanish so I asked the guy a couple questions and he looked rather annoyed with me then kept asking me for a cuenta -check- to pay the fee but I don't have any checks because I can't open a bank in Spain until I have residency card ! I told the guy this and he just looked at me like 'well that's your problem not mine' so I just said gracias and left. Typical spain.Was so pissed off after that I just stormed off towards campus. Of course just after that I discovered that my headphones had ceased working while walking to class. Great. So went to Italian, learned nothing as usual, and then went to CL with Hiccup for our usual tapa touring/day drinking, got a little drunker than intended, of course, mostly because I didn't really have any food in my system. After that just headed home and whatever, then a friend invited me to go to paddy's bar with a few friends around 8:30 so I went to that, chilled with a bunch of scottish/irish people and then went back to CL to meet some american friends for dinner for fish and chips night. Delicious as always.

Wednesday wasn't feeling great, started to feel kinda sick tuesday night, so I ended up sleeping through my 2 morning classes on wednes. Don't think I missed much since my classes were have empty anyways, it was a long weekend so a lot of people left tuesday and wednesday to have more travel time, it's near the end of the semester anyways so whatever. Apparently there was only 6 people in my grammar class. Aha. I did drag my ass out of bed though to go to conversational class at 4pm, it was pretty interesting since we still on the topic of mysterious things, CrazyChristian and N weren't there though so the discussion was a little more calm and open which was kool. After class we headed over to the main plaza where the big christmas tree and christmas markets are to see all the lights be lit up, finally! They've had the tree and all the hanging street lights up since mid november, we've been waiting for them to be lit forever! There was a couple of school choir groups singing and the mayor of the city made a speech, we weren't paying that much attention because we were wandering the markets trying samples of cheeses, jamón, and chorizos. Finally they lit up the lights which were beautiful and cheesy and just made the whole city feel so christmas-y. I love them. It definitely began to feel a lot like Christmas. After that went and had some churros with hot chocolate to warm us up, it was rather cold out that night, they were so greasy and delicious of course.

Then we wandered the city, checking out all the lights and eventually stopped to get some dinner at a cervecería bar then it was time for our wednesday intercambio! We went back to the same bar went to the week before for the wednesday night intercambio, it's a nice little bar run by a lovely little british woman. This week me and my two friends ended up at a table with 2 americans and 4 spaniards, definitely had some interesting convos. Intercambios are definitely great practice, I spoke more spanish there then I probably had all week. When I got my Russian Love -not literally- messaged me on skype, was so happy! We talked and giggled for quite awhile, catching up with friends is so nice!

Thursday was a holiday so there wasn't any classes so I moved into the new apartment. Moving is such a pain in the ass. The girl moving into my room showed up around 11am and my room helped her move a bunch of stuff into my house, around 12 my Finnish friend Saara showed up to help me move, ash showed up a little while later to help too, so finally after about 3 trips I was more or less moved in, thank god the houses are only like 2 minutes away from each other. Once we were both more or less moved into our new places, me and the other girl went to talk to the land lady of my new apartment to sort out the finances and whatnot. She literally lives in the building just behind ours which is pretty convenient since my last landlord didn't even live in the same city. Their house/apartment, not too sure what it is, is really nice, clearly they're pretty well off. We met with the land lady and her husband, they were a really sweet older couple, both in their 60s   . She's definitely a chatty old woman, like most spanish women aha, but her husband seems to be a bit hard of hearing and was kinda confused during some of conversation, he also mumbled a lot to so it was kind of hard for us to understand him sometimes. Eventually we had to politely make our excuses to leave since we still had a couple other house things to sort out like keys and whatnot. They are a really nice old couple though, they even invited me over for Christmas dinner, so sweet!

Once all the moving was more or less done we all headed over to café for some lunch and then I started unpacking (which I still haven't finished doing), unfortunately the internet was down in the new apartment because the people we usually steal it from were on vacation for a week and a half apparently. Great. So I ended up going to CL and using their internet to skype mi padre. Found out my step-grandparents are vacationing in the South of Spain for a week and a half, which was a great surprise! And started making some plans to go and visit them.

That night at CL was a Finnish themed dinner because it was Finland's Independence day, Saara brought a bunch of her Finnish friends and then there was a handful of us Canadians/Americans. It was an awesome night! Lots of delicious food and interesting conversations, Finnish sounds so interesting and they have some pretty umm interesting music in Finland. Originally we were planning on going to an intercambio after the dinner but in the end we never did make it, Mads had to take off a bit early and then we just kept rounds of drinks.. around midnight I decided I needed to get home though because I had to get up early the next morning to go deal with the extranjero office again. But of course whenever you plan on having an early night it never happens. I got home around 12:30 and was just catching up on tv shows before going to sleep then some of the people from the Finnish dinner were texting me because a bunch of them went out to a club after the dinner and then J came over to apologize for not helping me move and to check out the new apartment.

Friday morning I had to go back to the extranjero office to finish my residency card process but before I could go there I still had to pay that stupid residency tax so I tried going to a different back near my place, this time it was so easy, just had to go to a machine, select the option I wanted and it gave me a number thing. Then when my number came up I just had to go to the desk, pay my fee with cash and that was it, no problem at all. I don't understand why it was so complicated the first time ! Bloody banks. Then I headed back to the extranjero officina. Luckily last time I had gone they had given me a number and a time so I didn't even have to wait very long when I got there, thank god. Got to a desk with a woman, she processed the last bits of my paperwork, took some finger prints which I found kinda interesting, she found it kinda funny that I was from Canada and was kinda asking me about Canada and the States and why I was so far from home, she was nice at least. Then she gave me some papers and told me to come back in 30 days to get my actual card. So all in all it was as horrible as I thought it would be to get my stupid residency card, although from what I've heard from other people, I was one of the luckier people.

After that I just went café hopping, still didn't have internet at my place so pretty much just went from one place to another using the internet and drinking coffee, was feeling kinda dead, long week and little sleep I guess. At the third café I was at Mads came and joined me and we hung out there for awhile then went to go meet our german friend Jules for coffee, yeah, more coffee, I know. We had made that coffee date a couple days before though.We ended up at this Spanish-version-of-Starbucks coffee shop, it was small and fancy and had lots of slightly over priced fancy drinks. Ended up having a chai tea latte, was the first one I've had in.. I don't even know how long, it was so good. Plus less caffeinated than all the coffee I had been drinking all day. Probably a good thing, I was pretty hyped on caffeine by then. We wandered around the city for a bit then I went home for a siesta and shower, was feeling so out of it all day, was definitely in need of a siesta and hot shower. After that went over to Mads and played some beer pong with boys, they were getting ready to go to camborio or wherever, Mads and I decided to have a chill night in instead. So we got some shwarma and watched How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days aha, awesome night.

Saturday was a lazy ass and spent a good portion of the afternoon in bed, eventually I got up and went to CL for some food and to use the internet. I pretty much did nothing with my day until about 7:30 when I went to meet up with some friends to check out the christmas markets and get some tapas, we wandered around there for a couple hours. Then just as I was heading over to Mads apartment I got a text from Mads saying they couldn't find TinTin which was a problem because they had decided to have a little surprise birthday for him. His birthday was the following week but he was going to Scotland then so they decided to have it the weekend before, etc etc. Luckily I had a pretty good idea of where he was. He's almost always hanging in Paddy's bar which just happens to be on the way to my place so I stopped in there and sure enough he was there having a drink with a couple friends. Then came the tricky part of trying to figure out how to get him back to the apartment at 10:30 (the original plan was for 10 but that was now out the window).. Luckily he came up with an excuse for me, checking his phone he saw that Mads had tried calling him and texting him and since he didn't have data on his phone he couldn't text or call her back and asked me to do it for him, then he mentioned that all the flatmates were planning on watching a movie together that night, so I pretended to text Mads and told TinTin that Mads said he should be home around 10:30 for the movie. Next thing I had to do was talk to P to make sure TinTin left paddy's around 10:30 to back to the apartment, so when P went to the bar to get another round of drinks I went with him and asked if he knew about the whole situation, of course he had no freaking clue. He was added into the fb msg only earlier that day and he can't read spanish very well so that's probably why.. Anyways I informed him of the plan and told him he had to get TinTin to the apartment by 10:30, then I made some excuse about having to go deal with roommate stuff and headed over to the apartment.

Originally the party was just going to be the flatmates plus a few other friends but then a bunch of other people were invited last minute, but if TinTin had come home at 10/10:30 like the original plan it would have just been the roommates and a couple other people but since he didn't actually show up until almost 11 -fail on P's part- there was probably 20-30 people in the apartment so the surprise was a pretty big one! Ahaha, it was great though, he had the most shocked look on his face for about 10 minutes after he came in, so funny. Was definitely a great party, lots of socializing, drinking, eating, etc. etc. I went home and passed out around 3:30am, didn't want to be out partying too late because Mads and I were planning on going to visit my grandparents the next morning.

Sunday morning definitely came way too early, we were going to catch a 9am-ish bus to the bus station to catch the 10am bus to Malaga, the plan was to meet at the bus stop at 9/9:15 but Mads ended up being like 2 minutes late to catch the bus we needed to get to the station -to be honest neither of us had no idea the buses actually ran- and the next bus wasn't for another 20+ minutes so that wasn't going to work.. Luckily a minute later 2 girls from my school showed up at the stop, I went over to talk to them and they were also headed to the main bus station to catch a bus up to the Sierra Nevada for the 4 of us decided to split a cab since it'd be about the same price as the bus. Good timing or what!

So we caught our bus to Malaga, once we got there we literally just had to walk across the street from the bus station to a big mall thing where the metro/train station both happened to be..so convenient. Then we caught the metro to this beautiful little seaside town about 45 minutes outside of the main city of Malaga to meet my grandparents. When we got there we had no idea where we were or where we were going, we only had the name of the hotel. We knew it must be near the beach front since thats were most of the big hotels were so we wandered down to the boardwalk area and eventually stopped in a restaurant to ask a guy for directions, he walked outside onto the boardwalk then pointed to a huge orange building about 200ft away with the name of the hotel in gigantic blue letters on the side.. well that couldn't be more obvious if it tried..we kinda fail. So we walked into the lobby, was definitely a very nice hotel and met up with my grandparents. It was soo nice seeing them. The weather was beautiful, so sunny and warm, omg was so happy, it was starting to get really cold in Granada so it was definitely a nice change. We went to a little restaurant on the other side of the boardwalk from the hotel for lunch and sat out on the patio, it was glorious. The whole time we were there we were wearing just our jeans and long sleeve shirts with the sleeves rolled up, no coats or anything, it was amazing!

After that Mads, my grandmother, and I went for a walk down the boardwalk to explore the area, it was a beautiful little town, had a nice harbour with some beautiful boats, lots of little shops and restaurants, awesome sand sculptures, etc etc. Eventually my grandmother got tired from all the walking to headed back to hotel. We went to check out their hotel room on the 15th floor then went down to the pool to meet up with my grandfather. We got some coffe and lounged by the pool for awhile, then Mads and I took off to go adventure around the city on our own for a little while. We walked down the boardwalk the opposite way and passed by a jungle gym and ended up climbing on there for awhile, gotta love childhood nostalgia. There was a bunch of areas on the beach with lounge chairs and umbrellas and things sat up but they costed money to rent -kinda ridiculous- so we ended up just chilling on this little strip of boardwalk down on the beach and lazing in the sun there for awhile. Was such a lovely afternoon. Eventually the sun started to set and it started getting cooler so we headed back to the hotel for dinner.

We had dinner at the hotel restaurant since there was buffet dinner offer there that my grandparents were already paying for. The food was so good, there was an amazing variety of food, it was so hard to decide what to eat, needless to say was sooo full by the time we finished. After that we just hung around in the hotel lounge area for awhile then figured we should get going to catch the metro back to the city. We didn't actually know what time the metro ran but we were planning on catching the 8pm bus back to Granada so we left the hotel about 7 to get to the metro. The metro was only like a 5 minute walk away but when we got there we discovered that the metro ran at 7:02 and the next one wasn't until 7:22 which was cutting it close since it took about 40-45mins to get back to the city. We got the metro back, ran to the bus station and discovered we were too late to catch the 8pm bus so we bought tickets for the 9pm bus and then went back to wander around the mall for an hour.

We eventually did get home, and when I got back I discovered my apartment finally had internet again! Huzzah! So happy. Although since we're actually using the internet from the girl in apartment 14 it's pretty slow and cuts in and out a lot. So we shall be getting our own internet in February. But yes, was quite the exciting week! Sorry this post is so late!


Dec. 3-9

An Eventful Week Indeed

Another long week full of interesting experiences. My memory is getting so bad I swear, it's hard to remember what I did on which days, they all seem to blur together in my memory ohman. Where to begin...

Hmm, well Tuesday after my Italian class I headed over to Tonio's house to work on a presentation for our Flamenco History class, it was a presentation about the traditional music and dance in the region of Murcia, Spain. It was definitely an interesting presentation to say the least... It was Tonio, Bernardo, and I in the group and those two guys are a couple of gooners -there really is no other word to describe them.- Most of the other groups had the generic presentations with slides with all the info on them along with some pictures and then a video of the dance or music. Snore. We decided to make ours more entertaining by just putting hilarious images and jokes on our slides and then having all of our info written down in our own notes to read out to the class, originally we wanted to do an example of the dances ourselves until we discovered how complex the dances were and that we needed castanets for them, so we put videos into our presentation instead. Needless to say the presentation was hilarious, but we had a lot of good information too along with the ridiculous presentation slides, so it was a good mix of both. Our prof loved it but half our class seriously needs to get a sense of humor. Ridiculous people.

Randomly while doing research for our project we stumbled upon a festival in Northern Spain (it showed up because it takes place at the Castle of Murcia somewhere in a city in North Spain) that is called El Colacho aka The Baby-Jumping Festival ahaha I'm not even kidding you, it's a festival where a guy dresses up as a devil and then jumps over a bunch of babies that are lying on mattresses in the middle of the street and this is apparently to protect the children from evil spirits because when the devil jumps over the babies all the evil spirits or whatever latch on to the devil or something.. I don't know, I really wish it had been a tradition in our region because it's definitely one of the weirdest festivals I've ever heard of ahaha crazy spaniards.

 After we finished the presentation I headed down to CL for dinner with a couple friends because we were all feeling lazy and didn't want to cook. It was a really cold day and even being inside our apartments was cold. Cold weather had finally arrived in Granada and it's been pretty cold ever since. During the days it's still been okay, usually about 12-13 degrees and sunny but as soon as the sun goes down it's Freezing! I mean it's still usually between 2-5 degrees so it's not 'That cold' but the problem here is that there is no central heating, the insulation in the apartments is Terrible and the heaters here are all pretty mediocre so it's only like 5-10 degrees INSIDE your apartment. So. Cold.

Anyways, later that night after dinner I went with Taco to go check out an apartment, she had been looking at apartments for the past couple of weeks because she didn't like the location of her apartment and she was having some major issues with her current roommate. The apartment we went to check out was right near my place, like literally two minutes down the road, which was kind of kool, although to be honest Taco had been getting on my nerves pretty bad the week or two before but whatever. We go to check out the apartment and we discover a few interesting things, first of all that there's a dog there, it's a cute black and white dog that looks like it's a collie and something else. Then we meet the two roommates, one is a kool spanish chica named Kote (ko-tey) and then we meet the other roommate Micha, which was hilarious because I already knew Micha, she's really good friends with my roommate Patri. Small world eh. We go to check out Taco's potential room and to be honest it looks like a prison cell, it's tiny, 4 white walls, a desk and bed with white sheets and a blanket. Not what I would prefer but the room was cheap (150 euros a month) and Taco liked the roommates, plus the living room was a good size and there was a roof top terrace and the location was good. So, she was definitely considering it as a serious option.

Wednesday after my two morning classes I have an hour and a half break, Hiccup's friends who are studying in France were here visiting her for the week so we all went out for tapas together which was fun. We ended up at a little restaurant by the Cathedral which had some good food and also ordered a pitcher of sangria, which was delicious but also gave me a Bit of a wine buzz since I hadn't had anything to eat early in the day. oops aha. So I went to POE -conversational spanish class- kinda buzzed and that was interesting ahaha, plus I think it helped me speak better spanish :P.

Later that night there was a free concert at my campus, it was 'musica antigua' which is basically spanish medieval music, it was really interesting, me and a couple friends went to check it out for a bit but had to leave around 9 to go to an intercambio -language exchange- at a bar down by the river called Totes y Amigos. It's a nice little place that's run by a british woman, very sweet old lady, and tuesday-friday she hosts intercambios, mostly for english-spanish. When we got there it wasn't too busy, it's a pretty casual type of intercambio, the woman asked what language we spoke/wanted to practice and then directed us to tables with spanish speakers. I ended up talking with two guys, they were really nice, both from spain, working in the area, late twenties/early thirties, their english wasn't great but I got to practice lots of spanish which was great. At one point though I had to try and explain the differences between 'break-up' 'break down' break out' and 'to break'..that was pretty interesting and complex to explain to non-native english speakers. I went to the intercambio with Mads and she got to talk to this really good looking guy named Alberto because he wanted to have a french-spanish intercambio and Mads speaks pretty fluent french..dammit. Anyways, over all it was definitely a good intercambio experience.

Thursday I had Italian as always, the class seemed to drag on forever that day, not really sure why. The only thing that kind of saved me was that at the end of class we watched a movie called Happy Family..vey strange movie about a complex Italian family, we only watched like the first 20 minutes of it but it seemed pretty interesting and just..odd. I suggest watching it with subtitles if you can find it and have the time. Italian movies are generally great. Watched a lot of them in my Italian Cinema class last year at UBC. After class I met up with Ash, we went for a walk around the area but eventually just ended up at a café near school and hung out there for awhile. Around 5pm once things had started opening up again we separated ways because I had to go get photos done and get my passport and whatnot photocopied for my stupid residency card application (still haven't gotten that btw, freaking pain in my ass.)

That night there was another intercambio at Dakota, the amazing burger bar near my school, so Mads, Taco, and I went over a bit early to get burgers before the chaos of the intercambio and whatnot started happening. As always the burgers were amazing, and then around 9:30/10 a bunch of people started showing up including our friend from Finland. It was definitely the best intercambio I've been to so far. We started out talking to a group of girls, 2 from Spain, 1 from France and then a couple of polish/american girls joined us and then a polish guy and a spanish guy joined us, our table was getting pretty crowded so I decided to go to the bar and get a couple more drinks, at the bar I started talking to another guy who was from Florence which was awesome because I got to practice my italian and spanish with him and when worse came to worse we defaulted to english because he spoke that too which was pretty kool. Later we ended up talking to another group of guys, a couple from Spain and one from France, so we definitely got a good mix of people that night to talk to and most of them were around 20-26 in age which was nice.

After the intercambio started to wind down a group of us went over to CL to get some late night cheesecake, delicious as always. And while we were hanging out there, our Finnish friend Saara mentioned that it's Finland's independence day the following Thursday so Blondie decided that they would have a Finnish themed dinner on that Thursday because Thursday's were always country themed dinner nights anyways. Then ensued the hilarious conversation about what people eat in Finland, Saara's favourite dish being Smoked Reindeer, which is apparently served with special Reindeer sauce...apparently some people also eat Beaver... yeah. But besides that they also eat a lot of fish and potatoes which is a little more 'normal' and easy to make aha. We were killing ourselves laughing though while we were discussing how this dinner would turn out. Blondie said he'd try and get some venison and whatnot for the dinner, guess we'll see how it goes.

And now the fun begins, Friday morning I finally went to the extranjero officina to apply for my residency card -about time eh- it's pretty much on the other side of Granada aka on the other side of the world. Needless to say I got lost trying to find my way there and ended up calling 2 friends who had both been there before to get directions. After like an hour or something I finally found my way there, thank god. Although I was kind of freaked out because I had no idea what I was doing and Kiki, who I had called for directions, had been freaking out because she had gone earlier in the morning and the woman she had was a major bitch and told her she wouldn't be able to get her residency card because she was missing some docs. and that she would be stuck in Spain for christmas. Ohman, what a mess. So I was kinda nervous going into the office to say the least. And like in all offices, I had to take a number and sit in a room with a bunch of people and wait for what seemed like forever. When the woman at the desk gave me my number it said Z 32, so then I go into the waiting room and see that the board had all A's and E's. OhDearGod. I thought I was going to be there all freaking day. Luckily though, the letters represented different areas of the office so the first Z # that popped up was Z 26 so my wait wasn't actually that long.

Eventually my number came up and I ended up at a desk with this older guy, he seemed fairly nice. He went through all my documents and then eventually said I needed photocopies of a few things..uh-oh. He handed me the documents and told me go make a photocopy and then come back...rightttt. At first I was like shit, does he mean come back another day?? The officina was only open for like another hour and a half and I had no idea where the closest photocopying place was. Luckily the guy saw the mildly panicked look on my face and told me there was a photocopying place like 2 blocks away, phewww. So I went out and found the place, got everything photocopied, which was super cheap, huzzah, and then headed back to the extranjero officina. Luckily they let me go back in to see the same guy as soon as I got there and got everything done, yay! He just said I needed to pay a 15euro residency tax at any bank and gave me a slip of paper that said to come back at 11:45am the following Friday to pick up my residency card! YAY! Finally! Mads also had to do some stuff at the extranjero officina that day so I waited for her to get all her stuff done and then we went to go find some lunch.

We found this really nice little italian place called Pinocchio's. It looked sketchy at first because it was down a little side street but they had signs pointing to it from the main street so we figured we'd go check it out, it turned out to be a cute little restaurant and had Pinocchio themed décor all over. We both ended up getting delicious pizzas but definitely want to try the pasta next time I go back. After that we came back to our side of the world and went to CL, as usual, to meet up with Kiki for coffee. Poor girl was a bit of a mess, not that I blame her, the woman at the officina sounded like a major bitch, just saying. She's going back on Monday though to hopefully get it all dealt with. We somehow ended up all having cosmos at the suggestion of Oscar, and let me tell you, Oscar knows how to make Strong drinks, I left that place way more tipsy than I had planned. Ohman, went to super sol, the super cheap grocery store, afterwards to pick up some stuff and then went home and showered, which definitely didn't help the tipsiness.

Later that night a bunch of us all met up and went to check out the Granada Wine Festival that was in town for the weekend, all the wines were local Granada-made wines which was pretty kool and it wasn't too expensive either, 6 euros for 4 glass or 9 euros for 6 glasses. It was a massive big white tent with booths set up around 4 sides, the room was extremely packed by the time we got there so we ended up standing and drinking for the first half of our wine adventure. We tried a bunch of different wines, mostly at random, starting with 2 reds and then 2 whites..not too sure why we did it that way. Some of them were really good. We all seemed pretty okay while we were there but once we all started heading home that wine hit us so hard. I have no idea why, all of a sudden I was just drunk. Mads and I were walking/running back to her place because it was freezing out and we hadn't used to gross public washrooms at the wine fest.

We got back to Mads and a bunch of her roomies were hanging around in the kitchen/living room area. A couple of guys were playing beer pong on the kitchen table and of course I wanted to play as soon as I saw that. I was playing against TinTin and he beat me 2/3 games we played but I only lost the 2 games by 1 or 2 cups so it wasn't too bad I guess... Our group had all agreed to meet up at CL after the wine fest since we had all gone separate ways when we left the fest but a bunch of Mads roomies wanted to go to Camborio, I wasn't really feeling it so Mads and I decided we'd still go to CL and then TinTin ended up coming with us because he couldn't make up his mind and so the other guys left without him. On our way to CL we ran into my scottish cousin Kat, she was with 2 male co-workers, apparenly they were bar hopping and invited us to go with them so we were like 'sure why not' and ended up going with them instead of going to CL.

We ended up at some random bar, the entrance was pretty sketchy but the bar itself was kinda kool, very red on the inside, kinda skinny hallway bar area where we were but it was cozy and warm so I wasn't really complaining. TinTin and Mads weren't really digging the bar and the weirdness of the situation so they took off and went to Camborio but I stayed with Kat and her friends. At the bar one of the two guys just disappeared, he went into the back of the bar for awhile where there was sitting area or something and then just left sometime after that. So then it was just Kat, E, and I. To be honest, I don't exactly remember what E's full name is, but he seemed like an interesting guy; he was Brazilian ethnically but grew up in Toronto/North York until his family moved to Spain when he was a teenager. He seemed like a pretty chill guy, making lots of jokes and whatnot. As it turned out, it was also his birthday.

Kat seemed kind of upset and angry which made me curious, although I didn't have to wait too long to find out why, once we were in the red bar she started ranting to me.. apparently there was some drama at Paddy's bar between her and an ex-bf and her 2 guy friends had stood up for her and that somehow in turn got them all kicked out of the bar. She was very drunk and angry while telling me the story so I got the just of it but not too sure on the details, anyways, that's why they had left Paddy's and ended up running into me on the street. Sounds like quite a mess, right. Well, to make things even more..odd.. E was drunk and Kat was drunk, and I was still kinda drunk, and E was flirting pretty hard with Kat which was a bit odd because they're co-workers and Kat just figured he was joking. A couple beers later, the flirting became more serious and some drunken kissing ensued, and I got to witness it all, oh lucky me. It was fine though, I was mostly just looking out for Kat and enjoying the bar scene, Kat was Quite drunk by this point in the night.

Eventually we left the red bar (I seriously have no idea what the name of it was) and then wandered our way up to another bar called El Son, it was a pretty kool bar, the music was a random mix of mostly 80's/90's with some spanish music thrown in, the crowd was mostly mid-late twenties just like the red bar, which makes sense since Kat and E are both around late twenties or so. We stayed and drank there for awhile, more flirting and whatnot ensued, by then I was starting to sober up even though we were still drinking beer and whatnot. Around 3am we all decided it was about time to go home, Kat and E walked me about half way home, Kat wanted to walk me all the way home but she was still pretty drunk and I was pretty sober by then, plus my house is far as heck, so I told her to just go home and that I'd be fine one my own, she reluctantly agreed and E said he'd make sure she got home alright, and that was that. What an odd night. Kat was hungover for like 2 days after that, aha poor chica.

Saturday morning we all came to CL for hangover breakfast, on the first saturday of every month CL has a English Breakfast special and it just happened to be the first saturday of december which was perfect. We all got an english breakfast which consisted of eggs, bacon, sausages, beans, toast, hash-browns  and mushrooms, plus black pudding but well ordered ours without that. So much food but it was the perfect hangover breakfast ever. After that we ran some errands and then I told Taco I'd help her pack up and move into her new apartment, she ened up choosing that apartment near my place that we checked out a couple days before. On the way there we walked through a few of the kool shopping areas, her apartment was pretty central in the centre of town, good and bad I guess eh. And of course, couldn't resist but do some shopping, it happens :P had to buy some warmer stuff for the winter you know?...Anyways, eventually we got her place and got all her stuff together and ended up getting a taxi to transfer all her stuff to the new place.. originally we were just gunna walk it all over but that would have been SO much work. Eventually we get all her stuff into the apartment and talk with her roomies a bit, then we headed out to go shopping with Kiki, yea yea, more shopping, I know. They were shopping for boots and winter coats and things. After spending more money we all headed back to Kiki's and had some Turkey soup which was left over from Thanksgiving, Delicious. Then we decided to just have a girls night and curled up in her room with tea and watched The Holiday ehe. So great.

Sunday I spent most of the day being lazy in bed, Patri texted me saying she needed to talk to me about something to with the apartment when she got home from work which kinda freaked me out, so I just chilled around at home most of the day wondering what the heck it could be. So, here's where things get kind of odd, her friend Micha who was now roommates with Taco and been texting Patri and wondered if I wanted to switch rooms with her... at first I was kind of like what? But I mean, it does kind of make sense, Micha and Patri are friends and Taco and I are friends so that way we'd all be living with our friends. I said I'd think about and Patri said Micha was coming over later so we could talk about it if I wanted to. So we talked about and decided it was a good idea, to be honest I think I'm getting a better end of the deal for the most part. Micha's room is bigger than mine, it's cheaper than mine, it has a radiator in it which is Amazing, there's a dog at the house which I'm not sure if I'm happy about yet or not, and it has a decent sized living room. Only minor downsides, the bathroom isn't that great, the kitchen is kinda small, there is a roof top terrace which is pretty nice but not quite as good as mine, and there's now 3 roommates instead of just 2 of us, plus a couple others in the basement but they have a separate entrance. Ahwell, the deal was done, we agreed we'd move on the following Thursday and that was that.

After that I had dinner plans with a bunch of the girls to go try out the new Mexican restaurant that had just re-opened really close to our school, it had been under construction since we had arrived but it had apparently been quite good before it had closed down for renovations so we decided to try it out. The food was quite good, not that spicy though, plus they had placemats that you could colour! Ahaha gotta love crayons, we were such children, it was great. After that we of course went to CL to get some dessert, as always. Perfect way to end the week I'd say.

Definitely a week of strange events, the following week has more strangeness to come. C'est la vie!

Nov. 26-Dec. 2

Madrid Tripping

Another week of adventures! This past Monday night I finally went to the pub quiz night at Hannigan's. They have it every monday there and I keep meaning to go but just never got around to it. A few of my friends started going so that finally motivated me to go. It was fun for sure, ran into a couple of friends from the CLM and made a group with them, teams are usually 3-4 people. It's 6 rounds of trivia questions, always different categories although the first one is always news and gossip from the past week or so and the last one is always music. I didn't exactly rock at the categories this week but ohwell aha. One of them was the Kennedy's...like I know anything about them, besides that JFK was assassinated of course. It was good times though, the music round was pretty hilarious, they definitely played a very wide variety of music.

Tuesdays have been declared Tapa Touring Tuesdays by me and Hiccup. We both finish class at 2:30pm and nothing to do for the rest of day so what better thing to do with a free day than go tapa bar hopping and be buzzed in the middle of the afternoon ejeje. We always try new tapas places and this week we found some pretty good ones, we went to one that was pretty far away down by the river, the service there wasn't great but I got a delicious bailey's coffee with a tostada and Hiccup got some really good white wine so no complaints there. Then went to another bar up by the Catedral and both got delicious sangria and a free tapa of mushrooms with garlic and olive oil, it was pretty good and the guy who worked there was hilarious and super nice..kinda creepy too though. That night Claudia the crazy italian who works at CL came into work and saw us in the red room, she didn't look very good at all. She told us in the morning she had some kind of anxiety attack and asked if she could stay at Hiccup's that night because she didn't want to be alone. So we decided to have a girls night sleepover, made some delicious pasta for dinner, had a girly night talking about everything and anything and then we ended up watching Inglorious Basterds at like 2am because Hiccup had never seen it.  Was definitely an interesting night aha. Claudia is crazyy.

The next morning Claudia went out and bought coffee and muffins for all of us which was really nice of her. That was the discovery of the delicious red velvet cupcake from a bakery right near my school, dammit. They were so delicious but I've resisted from buying them, well I've boughten 1 since. After that had a full day of classes as usual. Later that night I popped by Hiccup's afterwards to grab my stuff, when I got there her roommate had already started drinking because she was going out later that night, she had discovered this almond flavoured liquor and had mixed with some vodka, it actually tasted really good, then I mentioned that it would probably taste good on ice cream. Dead silence and awe in the room ahaha a minute later there was a bowl of ice cream with almond liquor on it, must say it was freaking delicious. After that I headed over to Mads' to watch Moulin Rouge, we decided to have a movie night with some of her roommates and a couple Italian friends, Vinci and Fabio.

Thursday was American Thanksgiving so all the Americans were all excited and a bunch of them had big thanksgiving lunches/dinners planned with their programs and whatnot. This in a weird way worked out for my because my Italian class of 6 people is 3 Americans, 2 girls from Granada, and me. So, since the 3 Americans had thanksgiving lunches to go to at 2pm, we only had class for the first hour (12:30-1:30) I definitely wasn't complaining. Aha. Also, because it was American Thanksgiving and the majority of the people at my campus are American, the school decided to be nice and make the coffee machines free for the day, woot woot! Definitely had 3 coffees that day. After getting my free-coffee fill I went out for lunch with a friend and ran some errands before heading home to pack for Madrid. When I was home packing up I decided to check out tickets to Glasgow for new years, ended up finding really cheap round trip tickets (58 euros in total + taxes) and booked them right then and there. Then I got all my stuff together and headed out to go meet my friends and begin our trip to Madrid!

There was 6 of us going to Madrid although 2 of the guys weren't coming up until Saturday morning because they had class on Friday. So it was Mads, TinTin, BBD, and me leaving on thursday. We caught a 5pm bus from Granada to Madrid, the bus is about 5 hours, the only stop was about 1.5 hours in, it was nice to have a small stop and that there was only 1 of them, but at the same time, 3 more hours of straight driving after the stop made us all a little restless. Ohwell, we made it, once we got there, we had the fun of navigating our way through the Madrid metro system, eventually we ended up at our stop though, but was the easy part, finding our hostel was a whole different story. Of course the first thing we saw when we came out of the metro was a huge McDonald's for some reason that made BBD rather happy, maybe because the only McDonald's in Granada is down by the bus station which is pretty much the other side of the world in Granada. So our hostel turned out to be on this somewhat sketchy street not too far from one of the main roads, it was..interesting area. Lots of umm 'adult stores' 'burlesque shops' and things like that ahaha. Anyways, we got to the hostel and dealt with all the room stuff and finally got to our room, it was a pretty decent room, 6 beds, weird victorian-like architecture, 2 small balcony's, nothing too fancy. It was only like 11pm by the time we got there but we were all pretty tired and decided to just have a chill night in playing cards and watching movies.

Friday the 4 of us had a pretty chill day, we wandered around the city for awhile and then went to check the Prado Museum, I love museums, we probably spent a good 2 hours in there or so, saw lots of amazing paintings, etc. My favourite was definitely seeing 'Las Meninas' by Velázquez. After that we wandered over to the Puerta del Sol which was a big shopping area, super crowded but really kool area. We explored around there for awhile and then wandered the downtown awhile longer but eventually we were tired from walking all day and just headed back to hostel to chill and whatever. Mads and I ended up playing cards for awhile in the hostel while we were all taking turns showering and whatever else. Haven't played cards that much in a long time, t'was fun. Eventually we started pre-drinking and then one of TinTin's friends who is studying in Madrid (Steve) came to join us and show us around the city. We stayed in the hostel drinking and playing random drinking games until about 11pm (I was killing them all at poker), when we heard a knock at the door, oh shit. It was the dude from the front desk but he didn't come in to tell us to be quiet or anything, he just came to tell us that a 40 yr old Argentinian guy would be staying in the room with us that night, great. The guy seemed nice enough and whatever but still, weird. Plus we felt kinda bad for him, having to stay in a hostel room with 4 drunken/'rowdy' university students. And of course he decided to sleep on the side the room that Mads and I were sleeping on.

Anyways, we went out shortly after that, Steve took us out to see the city, warning us before hand to be prepared. One of the streets we took down to the main city centre was a very popular area for prostitues apparently, since we were in a pretty big group none of them bothered us but um, we definitely saw a few things going down around there, TinTin got hissed at a couple times ahaha. We went over to one of the streets where a lot of bars were, some of them were extremely full so we ended up just going into one that was half-empty, we were looking for food and drinks but apparently they had stopped serving food, so we just ended up ordering drinks and they have us these weird hickory-stick-like things to eat. I'm sure we looked like that obnoxious group of university kids at the bar since most of the other cliental was older but ohwell, it was fun, for some reason BBD and me got into a slap fight, not too sure how that happened but it was entertaining, I'd like to think that I won. For some reason after that the bartender gave us a round of free shots, they tasted something like sex on the beach, so I definitely wasn't complaining. Eventually we paid our bill and then were trying to decide what to do, we were still hungry and Steve told us about this awesome 24h pizza place by the main square, needless to say, that's where we headed next. The pizza was really good so we stayed there for awhile aha and then we were gunna go out but couldn't decide where so after wandering around the city for awhile we decided to just stumble back the hostel instead since we all wanted to get up early in the morning.

When we got back to the room the old Argentinian guy was there, it was like 3am and he was just about to go to bed so we had awesome awkward times talking to him and getting ready for bed in our drunken states. The morning just brought with it more awkwardness as TinTin and BBD got up early and left and so it was just Mads and I in the room with the Argentinian guy, and of course as soon as Mads and I get up and start getting ready the Argentinian guy wakes up too. Awkwardnessssss.

Anyways, Mads and I were gunna have a nice chill morning to ourselves since the other two went off to see the soccer stadium or whatever. We wandered down into the main area of town and stopped at a Starbucks to get some coffee, it was all cute and christmas themed and had awesome christmas drinks so obviously we had to try them. They're different than the ones in Canada, kinda odd but whatever, they had Toffee Nut latte, Apple Crumble latte, and Cranberry White Chocolate Mocha. I tried the apple crumble latte, it was so good. I love seasonal Starbucks drinks, sue me. Then we found this awesome little restaurant where we got a pretty legit english breakfast, so great. First time I'd had bacon and fried eggs in a long time. Eventually the other two finished up at the stadium and Vinci and Fabio had finally arrived so we all met up in the beautiful park since it was a pretty central location and whatnot. It was a beautiful park, kind of reminded me of alice in wonderland, there was a nice little lake in the middle of it where you could rent little rowboats for an hour, so of course we did. Walking around the boardwalk area around the little lake towards the boat rentals there was a ton of entertainers, mostly aimed towards children, like the guys making the massive bubbles and the magicians -who were making really inappropriate jokes btw- it was entertaining to watch. We rented 2 boats, Mads, TinTin and I were in one and the 3 italians were in the other. It was a gorgeous sunny day so being on the lake was perfect, Mads was rowing the whole time which was pretty hilarious as me and TinTin just lazed about on the boat, it was great. Definitely glad the italians were in their own boat, they were spinning around in circles and splashing and rocking the boats and doing all kinds of ridiculous things aha. Fun to watch but not as fun to part-take in. After we returned the boats we explored the park awhile longer and then wandered back into the city, we stumbled upon a wedding at a church near the Prado and decided it would be fun to walk by 'accidentally' be in photos and things like that aha, it was a beautiful wedding and a lot of the women were wearing hilariously fancy hats just like at the Royal Wedding.

We continued wandering through the city and found our way to Plaza Mayor where the Christmas Markets were starting to be set up, it was so christmas-y ahh it was awesome! Fabio was shopping around for who-knows-what and all of a sudden he was following some guy who worked in one of the stores in the plaza out onto the street so we all had to follow him of course. We were just like where the hell are we going?! As it turns out, he was looking at clothing or whatever in the store and the owner of that store also owned a 4 story floor just outside of the plaza so he was going there to check out more stuff. It was a pretty kool store actually, pretty small and very vertical and very hippy. After that weird excursion we went to go check Palacio Real which is a big palace type thing in Madrid. It was a really beautiful building, I'm sure the inside is stunning but we were too late to do tours that day plus it costed money, maybe next time.

After that we just headed back to hostel to shower, play cards, and pre-drink as usual. The Argentinian guy was gone by the time we got back, he was only staying the one night, but shortly after we got back we found out that we had a 30-ish yr old russian/italian woman and a 20-something french girl staying with us that night. Fun times. It was fine though, they were going out that night so we wouldn't be annoying them with our drinking and whatnot, we would just had to be really quiet later when we came in from partying. So we headed out trying to figure out what to do with our night, or original plan was to go to Kapital which is a 5 story club in Madrid, but ended up just wandering around the city for quite awhile until we found an 'italian' restaurant, we hadn't really had dinner so we stopped in there. The waiter looked thoroughly annoyed that he had another table to serve since it was kinda late, but whatever, it's business, some of the guys ordered drinks but most of us just had water and then we all ordered pizzas. Fabio had a minor hissy fit because the waiter hadn't given him a coltello (knife) when he brought us cutlery. After quite a wait we eventually got our pizza and surprise, surprise the Italians weren't overly impressed. Fabio was upset that his pizza seemed to be lacking tomatoes/tomato sauce and again went to our waiter to complain and have it taken back to the kitchen. It came back a few minutes later with some tomato sauce and whatnot on top of it, probably some spanish spit too.

Eventually we got out of their and continued wandering the city, we're such indecisive people. We couldn't decide what we wanted to do so we just wandered aimlessly for a long time until that clubbing was too expensive and that we were just going to into the next bar we came across. We found a kool little bar called 1978 it had a deal on for 2 mojitos for 6 euros so we're like, why not?! Mads and I got some mojitos and some the guys got beer, we ended up chilling in there for awhile, it was a kool little spot, kinda modern interior decor. Slowly the place started to empty out and shut down, TinTin was still drinking his beer so we decided to leave and to just sneak his beer out, it was in a nice glass too. We stumbled back to the hostel and crashed for the night, being super quiet of course so we didn't wake up the two people in our room.

Sunday morning we all got up together and went out for breakfast, originally we were considering going to do the tour of Palacio Real or going shopping at Puerta del Sol before catching the bus back to Granada but instead we went to check out these crazy outdoor markets that are one or two streets and just go on for miles, they're also on a huge hill -lucky for us we started at the top- it was quite a challenge trying to get through those markets in a group of 6. Needless to say we got separated about every 5 minutes and would have to stop about every 100 metres or so to re-group. Most of the time we were waiting on Fabio since he seemed to stop and check out half the booths in the market. It was really kool tho, lots of interesting things to buy, it was major chaos though. After like an hour or something we eventually made it to the bottom of the hill, we wandered around the area a bit more, got some food, and wandered over to one of the big plazas in that area and came across the Madrid University. Looked like a pretty nice campus but I still love Granada the best. Then we just headed for the bus station because we were watching a 4pm bus back to Granada, we still had homework and things to do after all.

OMG the bus home was brutal. It was suffocatingly hot in there and the first leg of the trip was 2.5 hours long. I just about ran out of the bus when it stopped at the rest station and wanted to jump for joy.  The rest of the ride wasn't too bad, but was definitely happy to get home, we ended up takin a cab back to Mads instead of taking the bus or walking, too much of a hassle. Finally walked home around 10:30 and finished up my homework, was planning on watching a movie and then going to bed at a decent hour but of course that didn't happen...

I guess it's about time I mention J. J is a local and we've been 'seeing' each other for about a month and a half now, I use the word 'seeing' pretty loosely. Anyways, I got a message from him sunday night and he ended up showing up around 3am so needless to say I didn't go to bed at a decent hour like I had planned. Ahwell. Monday morning was pretty burtal though, had class at 10:30am. Blargh.

What a week, was pretty interesting to say the least. Most of the weekend I ended up speaking more Italian and English than Spanish but ohwell, still good practice!

Nov. 19-25