Discoteca life

Well so far partying here in Granada has been quite an interesting experience. There's been a few nights of partying at clubs like El Camborio, Campus, and Granada 10 but there's been a lot of bar chilling as well. The culture here is definitely not for everyone, I'm loving it so far but if you're not a late night person, well good luck. If you're going to a normal club around here, there isn't much point going before 2:30am/3am because the discoteca will only be like half full, seriously. It took till about 4-4:30am for Granada 10 to really get crowded, it's pretty insane. Although if it's a university party put on my ERASMUS then it's generally pretty crazy by 2am-3am. So, I definitely haven't been home before 4am on the nights I've partied here, if anything it's been more like 5am-7am, people definitely know how to party hard here, thank god for siestas is all I gotta say aha. Clubs open here at around 1am and close around 6am, it's like 3 or 4 hours behind the North American party time, no joke. The past 3 or 4 days there has been lots of wine drinking, shots, tapas, and great company. Like in North America there's lots of different party scenes, there's definitely some interesting ones over here. There's the really popular discotecas like Granada 10 which played a lot of really popular North American and Spanish music like Call Me Maybe by whatsherfacecanadian and Dance Again by JLO, etc. plus some awesome popular Spanish songs, well I think they're awesome anyways.

Then there's the clubs which are more popular among the international university kids where ERASMUS and whoever are always putting on parties like El Camborio and Campus, those are definitely ones where they play the world wide popular music, such as all the top 40 hits we've been hearing on the radio for the past 2 or 3 years with a mix of some popular Spanish music and some 'older' popular hits from the last 10-20 years. What's kind of awesome too is that at most of the discotecas I've gone to so far, if there is a cover it's only 6-10 euros and usually you get 2 free drink tickets for the night, North America is such a rip off sometimes. Then there's those crazy parking lot parties..they do have an actual name but I can't remember right now what it is that are really popular with the locals around here. Then there's the more bar or bar/club like places which I have just recently started experiencing with my roomie and other locals, it was a bit of an older/mature crowd so there was definitely some really great and in depth talks over bottles of wine this past week (like 7 or 8 bottles of wine..maybe a little too much red wine for me to handle all at once.) If nothing else, the thing they all have in common is how well-dressed everyone around here is, especially at the local discotecas and the parking lot parties which almost creates a stark contrast between the dirty/messy setting and the beauty of the people. Europeans know how to live.

Anyways, all those types of places are very different and interesting to experience, I don't really have a preference towards any, I'm just enjoying the experiences as they come so far. All I can say is, it's going to be a crazy adventure of a year..it already has been a crazy adventure and I've only been here just over a week! I'm so grateful to just have the opportunity to be here and experience life like this, it an amazing chance that many people will never have. I'm just taking everything day by day right now and soaking it all in. As always, I'm excited to see whats to come. Europe just gives me the hope of limitless possibilities.

Granada 10, beautiful crowded venue at 4:30am

Brazil themed night at El Camborio, that pastel/paint stuff does not want to come off my skin.

El Albacín and the Arabic Culture

Thursday I went back to the CLM again to try and get my schedule sorted out. After about 30 minutes of the guy finding forms for me to fill out, asking me for all kinds of things like my passport and pictures for my ID card, etc. I finally got my schedule figured out and a student card (which is literally a piece of paper with my passport-sized photo glue-sticked onto it that is in a little pastic cover) THANK ZEUS. I don't know why that was so bloody hard to get organized. Today I still had to go online and figure out where my classes actually were since it doesn't say anywhere on my schedule either, oh CLM.

 the weather was pretty gray and rainy but we still wanted to continue our exploration of the city all the same. We decided to head up to the Albacín area which is the Arabic influenced zone of the city up on the hill side on the other side of the Alhambra from where I live. We walked up there for a couple hours, found lots of kool little places and things including an outdoor workout area with random pieces of work out equipment which we thought was hilarious but we were having serious problems finding the actual like centre of the Albacín, I'm pretty sure we wandered through a few parts of it but we weren't entirely sure what we were looking for and the weather wasn't great so there wasn't too much going on up there. It was an interesting adventure as always though, we found a spectacular view of the city up there.

The outdoor workout park ahaha

Spectacular view of the city we stumbled upon

Later that night we wandered around in another little Arabic-esque area closer to the centro and stopped at this beautiful little restaurant/shisha house and got some Turkish coffee (Café Turco) and some Delicious hummus and naan bread, along with a lamb and rice dish. So Good. There are lots of beautiful little places like this one around the city, I love them.

 The interior décor was beautiful

DELICIOUS Hummus and Bread

There's also a ton of small shops in the same little Arabic area as the restaurant with all kinds of interesting clothing, tapestries, trinkets, scarves, etc. I decided to splurge a little a buy couple things from one of the little shops, there was a little bargaining involved but to be honest I didn't try that hard, I think here, as well as everywhere in market places like this, the original price they give you is a lot higher and then they will easily bargain it down. Anyways, ended up getting a wall tapestry and a skirt for 24 euros in total which isn't too bad since the 'original price' was about 46 euros. 

Skirt I bought

The Tapestry, I'm kind of in love with it

  

Italian Level Test Nonsense

Wednesday morning after going to bed borracha at 4am, I woke up at 20 after 8 to go to the CLM to take my Italian test, I'm not sure whether I was still drunk, hungover, or just really over tired, maybe a mixture of things...Finally get there just before 9 and check the board with the listings of time and place of the level tests, find the Italian one and my name isn't on it...WTF? So have to go and wait to get into the Secretaría office to see what the heck is going on. 20mins later I get into the office, apparently I was signed up for the 4pm level test..thanks for keeping me in the loop, as usual, CLM. They're so helpful there... anyways I was pretty freaking glad I didn't have the test then anyways because Tuve una resaca (I had a hangover) and pretty much came back home and went back to sleep for a couple hours after talking with the CLM people. So since I had until 4pm to chill around, me and my ubc peoples went exploring the centro some more, we found the big mall called El Corta Inglés which is awesome. It's where the movie theatre and all the big shops are. We stopped at a Cervecería (beer house) to grab some coffee (I LOVE how strong the coffee is here) and food, it was a kool place, kind of had a "deutsch-esque" feel/décor. It started pouring rain as we sat there in the cervecería so we chilled in there awhile and then started wandering around again, we came across this crazy deli/food market, I've never seen so much meat in one place. It was intense! The rain here in Granada kind of goes in phases from being nice and light then turning into a down pour and then returning to a nice light rain before stopping (momentarily), it's now been raining for 2 or 3 days on and off but it's suppose to return to its sunny self this weekend, yay!

The Cervecería logo on the table

The Deli...so. much. meat.

Eventually I had to head back to the CLM for the Italian level test, of course just as I was walking back there it started to pour again, needless to say by the time I reached there I was pretty soaked, fun times. It's so slippery where when it's wet here because a lot of the sidewalks and plazas are smooth from years of erosion and some are just tile and marble in the first place. That was fun trying to navigate my way around that...almost fell on my ass once or twice... So then there was the level test. OMG MY BRAIN. I didn't realize how much Italian I had forgotten..yikes. There was about 10 of us waiting outside the room, a couple of us were english speakers, but most of the people taking the test were spanish speakers which was interesting, but that made my brain hurt even more, talking in English and in Spanish right before an Italian level test...my brain was in overload. The level test itself wasn't too bad, it took less than 2 hours to finish, it was just a front and back sheet of short answer questions and another sheet of fill in the blanks and finish the sentences and things like that, I had to think so hard to pull the words out of my brain though, my Italian has definitely gotten rusty, I know all the words when I hear or read them but I could not think of some of the simplest words from the top of my head. Like the word MORNING, all I kept thinking was mañana (spanish), and matin (french) unfortunately I couldn't make the connection that the Italian word was Matina...like duh, how could I forget that?!

So after the test we had to wait around forever to talk to the profesora about our results and what time we could have the class and whatnot, that made my brain hurt even more, I was trying so hard to talk to her in Italian but my brain still wasn't fully functioning so sometimes I would revert to English but she doesn't speak English that well so I would have to revert to Spanish, my brain was a mess! But anyways, I survived and got placed into second level or something like that which is good because it should hopefully transfer back as 201 and 202 at UBC then. Then there was still the matter of dealing with my course registration and my schedule but of course the CLM office isn't open past 6:30 so I had to deal with all that fun crap another day.     

The CLM campus #1

How Many Days of Madness?

So this week has already felt ridiculously long and it's only Wednesday (well Thursday now technically because it's 3am) I already wrote about Monday and the level test stuff so I won't mention much about that but Tuesday and Wednesday have been crazy, random days that felt more like week than two days. Maybe I'll split this one into small sections.

So Day 1 (Tuesday Morning)
Started off as a total normal day, got up and went to go meet T for coffee and to get him a phone card, we ended up at this kool little square and grabbed some coffee. Although on the way to the square we passed by something that looked like a protest in a small square, there was a ton of cops and whistles and chanting people, I have no idea what was going on, didn't seem violent though, just...loud. I was going to try and open a bank account after but then I discovered that I need a residency permit before I can do that, what a pain. Then there was the SIM card, T already had a phone and just needed a SIM card but they work kind of different here, you pretty much have a weird pay as you go kind of plan and the SIM cards are like 5-10 euro which is super cheap. Everything in Spain is cheap compared to Canada. Then we found this DELICIOUS sandwich shop at Plaza Nueva, our fav plaza, they were so simple; fresh bun with delicious rich cheese and the excellent thin cured ham they have everywhere here. For entertainment we watched a guy in the plaza trying to teach another guy to ride his segway aha.

Plaza Nueva

Day 2 (Tuesday Afternoon)

Another fun experience was apartment searching in Granada, T was still looking for a place to live and so far has been staying at a hotel and on my couch. It was kind of odd because all he had was numbers and address of these apartments, no idea what they looked like, who the landlords or tenants were, nothing. Just a phone number and a name attached to it. The first one we went to see was at 1pm and it was just off of Plaza Nueva which is an awesome location, it's up the hill from Plaza Nueva which pretty much goes up to Alhambra which is so kool! We were wandering up in the area waiting to check out the apartment and came across a spectacular view as well as a piece of the Alhambra property we think. 

Spectacular view or what!

Eventually we walk back down the hill to where the apartment is, when we got there we had to wait a couple minutes for the landlord, she appeared to vacuuming hardcore before letting us in aha. She was this really kool woman from South America, loud and super chill, the apartment was really nice, 2 person place, a massive living room, nice bathroom, good sized kitchen, it looked great and then...we met the other tenant...a quite Japanese girl who spoke only japanese and a limited amount of spanish, a very odd, timid creature with straight highlighted hair and confused looking eyes beneath Large glasses. So that was a no. After we left there wandered up the street a bit to check out the kool little stores and whatnot. And there, near the entrance to the Alhambra path, I fell in love aha well, there was a man sitting and playing some of the most beautiful Spanish Guitar melodies I have ever heard. I could have honestly sat there and listened to him play all day. Estoy tan enamorada con España. 

  

Day 3 (Tuesday Evening)
So after pulling myself away from that beautiful music, T and I walked back down to the main square to go meet up with K and saw some very interesting things. Looks like it's 'Frosh Week' here in Granada for the locals, we walked into one of the central squares and found this:

Girls on the left, guys on the right, yelling and chanting at each other from across the street, another part of the girls group showed up moments later wearing garbage bags and had drawn on unibrows bahaha.

We continued on our wanders after watching this go on for a few moments and went wandering down through the plazas, there's so many plazas here it's amazing, each one is unique and different. We were planning on finding food but as usual we just ended up aimlessly wandering and I finally found a place to buy bedsheets! I've been surviving with just a duvet and a kind of bottom under-sheet thing since I got here, I found them at this store called Buenas Aires, it is this Massive fabric store, the first two levels are nothing but fabrics of every shape, colour, texture, etc. Anyways, we end up chilling in Plaza Nueva again and watched a really crazy street performer juggle all kinds of things! It was so kool! 

Juggling like 6 balls, I was impressed, especially because I can't juggle at all. 

So T had a couple more apartments to check out so we went to check out one that was pretty close to my place, the building was looked quite nice from the outside, we stood outside waiting for the guy to show up and let us in, he said he would be there in a couple minutes because he was walking over...20mins later he shows up, this about how time works in Spain, there was 2 guys, one looked like a normal, chilled out, cyclist kind of guy, the other one was ummm...how do I put this...creeepy...he was like a mixture of Michael Jackson and Benecio Del Torro..I don't want to sound too mean but all 3 of us got the 'pedo' kind of vibe from him..so that was bad sign #1. We go up to the apartment and it's the Tiny one 'L' shaped hallway..that was it. The kitchen was just to the left,it was dirty and Tiny, the fridge was literally beside the front door because it wouldn't fit in the kitchen and then there only appeared to be 3 bedrooms but there was already 3 guys living there so not too sure what that was about and a tiny little bathroom. Needless to say we got out of there as fast as humanly possible. 

Day 4 (Tuesday Night) 

Our plans for the night was to go to this Traffic Light party that ERASMUS was putting on but we were all feeling pretty chill so just made dinner at my place and cracked open a bottle of wine. T left during dinner prep to check out another apartment and finally found an awesome one! YAY! Now all 3 of us have places to live! That called for more wine drinking of course. K and my roomie P both showed up and joined us in our wine drinking, K brought over another bottle, we sat on the terrace and drank more, and more wine... 2 bottles later we finally went out to go meet up with some of T's friends. We met up with them at an irish bar and then proceeded to wander through town, stopping at a convenience store to buy another bottle of cheap wine, 3 bottles down. Finally after who-knows-how-long of walking we find this bar called Chupitería 69 (chupito is the word for shot here, so it's essentially a shot house) this place had 1 euro shots! It was ridiculous. A couple shots later...we leave and are apparently going to this place called (english translation) 'the parking lot'.

After walking like a mile or two (and buying another bottle of wine) 4th bottle down, we arrive there, it was one of the craziest things I've seen. It's this huge open space, I'm not too sure if it was actually a parking lot or not but there was probably 1000+ people standing out there drinking and smoking and just socializing -a large number of them were locals which was kool- so we walk over and weave into the crowd and find a group of American/Canadians who all somewhat know each other and hang around them then a group of locals starts talking to K and I. That was pretty interesting, they had fun kind of f*cking with K (perhaps because she's American, they seem to have a thing about that here) aha and this one guy get touching my hair which was weird. It was interesting, by that point we were both pretty borracha (drunk). Finally around 3am we left because I had the stupid Italian level test at 9am that morning, FML right. Got home and passed out around 4am.   

So that was tuesday..the craziness continued on Wednesday

Rules for surviving in Granada

Here's just a short list of things I've sort of learned in my first week here...

Rule #1 Always stay hydrated
Rule #2 Be prepared to walk a lot on hilly roads
Rule #3 Be prepared or at least accept that all your plans will probably not work out according to plan, and don't freak out when they don't
Rule #4 Don't walk around the Albacín area at night especially by yourself
Rule #5 Be patient and try to just go with the flow; don't expect North American like efficiency
Rule #6 Good shoes are Very important
Rule #7 You need your passport or at least a copy of your passport for almost everything around here
Rule #8 Packing too much stuff, especially in suitcases that are hard to transport is a terrible mistake (lots of stairs here)
Rule #9 A lot of the time everything will be given in vague information, get used to it
Rule #10 Sunglasses are also very important to have with you all the time, so is your CAMERA!
Rule #11 If you don't like meat, don't go into deli's
Rule #12 There's so many vendors everywhere, watch out but be polite
Rule #13 Siestas are amazing and annoying at the same time because A LOT of things are closed for hours in the middle of the day
Rule #14 Spanish coffee is really strong and Spanish Sangria is So good
Rule #15 Eating meals on patios and in plazas is really nice but expensive, better to eat real meals at home and then just get coffee, tapas, and drinks from cafés, restaurants, and bars
Rule #16 be prepared to experience a multitude of different cultures, embrace them
Rule #17 Know that you probably won't be able to understand most of the locals very well at first (or maybe ever)
Rule #18 Be careful how much wine you drink, 8 or 9 classes is quite a lot especially when it's red...

I'll probably add more later...

The Level Test

After the craziness of Friday night and Saturday morning I decided to have a pretty chill weekend, just hung around the apartment and aimlessly wandered around the city and other such things, last night (Sunday night) I met up with another UBC friend (let's call them T) and we explored the city a bit, stopping to get a delicious dinner on the way, we got this 'Pollo Granadina' (Chicken Granada Style) and this ensalada mezcla (mixed salad) it had bits of everything, it was soo good, topped it off with a glass of wine of course. Was planning on coming home and studying for my level test which I was planning on taking at 9am, didn't end up going to bed until like 4am because I was up studying and talking to ppls in Canada <3 So decided that maybe taking the level test at 4pm was a better idea. So this morning I went wandering with T and we found like the perfect hangover breakfast (not that we were) of potatoes, eggs, and thinly sliced ham, with some bits of pepper, all on this one plate, fried and delicious, apparently it's a very typical plate of Granada. I Love the food here. So then there was the level test..seemed like a pretty intense test from what I read on the website...was not excited to say the least. T and I get there around 3:50pm and run into another UBC-er (K). We all hang around and talk and eventually wander up to Aula 9 (class 9) where we're taking the test, this test was so long, it was like 5 parts, started at 4pm-ish and it was about 7:20pm when we left the building. There was a listening section which was just like...what?! And then a reading comprehension, blah blah blah, grammar blah blah blah.. and then once we were done we had to wait around for another 25ish mins and then got called in 1 by 1 to talk to the admin guy who gave us our results, it was surprisingly efficient.

It was a bit nerve-racking waiting to talk to the admin guy, but I got there and we briefly went over my test and he was asking me questions about where I study and where I'm from and whatnot, apparently one of his really good friends is in Toronto and he really liked the city, he even told me that he liked it better than New York :O. Aha. But anyways, the level test scale was 1-9, 1-4 meant you take some your classes in English, 4-6 was the CLCE program meaning you take your classes in Spanish, and then 7-9 means you're taking like Native Speaking Spanish classes. I got level 5 which I think is great, wasn't sure if I'd do that well and didn't really want to take classes in English after coming all the way here so I won't complain! Now I have the week off to explore the city some more, planning on doing lots of site seeing tomorrow and wednes!

After coming back from the mindf*ck that was the level test I just sat on my terrace as my brain began shutting down, that test was exhausting. It was nearing sunset on my terrace, there was a nice breeze, the city was quiet. Perfect. I just collapsed in a chair and just enjoyed the peacefulness of the city.

My Terrace @ 8pm. 24/09/12

My Terrace @ 8:10pm. 24/09/12

My Terrace at @ 8:20pm. 24/09/12

That night me and some of the UBC-ers went out and had dinner at this outdoor place which was nice but so expensive! For 3 entrées which we split and a litre of Sangria the bill was like $70 euro which is a lot in Canadian dollars. So we decided from then on we'd probably just have dinner at home and then go out for drinks and tapas (kind of like appetizers) at night time. 

The Next Morning...

Continuing on with the strangeness of Friday, this morning I woke up at 10:30am feeling wine-hungover, eugh. So tired and hungover M and I walk back to my place trying to avoid the sunlight as much as possible, felt like a vampire. It was pretty kool though, walking around my area in the morning when the streets are so alive, it was the first time I've seen all the shops open, so far I've only been out during 'siesta' when everything is closed and in the evening when it's mostly just bars and restaurants that are open. So M and I get back to my place, and I remember that I can't get the gate open, so M and I are there fiddling with the gate for like 2 minutes and all of a sudden and old white haired lady sticks her head out the 2nd floor window of my building and starts speaking to us in really fast spanish, and we're both kind of like What ? at first, she didn't exactly seem friendly, then again I think she thought I was trying to break in or something...oops. She was starting to look pretty concerned when finally I got the gate open, took me a long time to figure out that there's 2 parts to the gate lock, one that you move with the key and another that's just like a latch thing that I just needed to pull back to open the gate...duh. She came around later to look at the gate, I think she was still kinda concerned. After all that weirdness I went and got a spanish SIM card for my phone today, was kind of scary at first trying to communicate with the guy at the phone store in Spanish but we got it figured out, luckily there was a 'menu' kind of things with all the different phone services and plans, so anyways, I do have a working phone now with a small data plan as well THANK ZEUS. Going 5 days without a phone has been kind of nice but at the same time it was very hard trying to contact and meet up with people and the only way I ever knew what the time was by the church bells which ring on the hour and by looking at clocks in random bars/cafés, maybe bringing a watch would have been a good idea..

Anyways after I got my phone I went grocery shopping for the first time, there's a bunch of little shops like Fruterias (fruit/veggie store), Carnicerias (meat shop), Pescadores (fish shop), Panarias (bakery kinda thing) but I was lame today and just went into the normal 'super marcado' and bought cereal, yogurt, and some deli meat, all of that in total was under 6 euros, insanelyyy cheap, I Love this place, everything is so cheap. I bought a kitkat bar tonight too and it was 80 euro cents, like wth. Later in the afternoon I was back just hanging in my apartment wearing just a bra and pj shorts because at 2pm it's too hot to wear anything else really and suddenly this old, fragile, white-haired woman in a blue bath robe appears infront of my door, and I'm just like wtf and scramble to throw my tanktop back on... awkwarddd, I mean we always have our door and windows open during the day but have never seen anyone around my terrace before. Apparently her name is Lola and she's the woman who lives upstairs in the building, it's just her and another female tenant that no one ever sees up there on the 2nd floor, guess it's only a 3 apartment building.

We had a hilariously awkward conversation of me trying to understand her Spanish, she spoke really softly and really fast, she was wondering who I was and was asking what had happened to the other girl who lived here and was talking about keeping the gate closed and robbers/disturbances, guess she heard me fiddling with the gate too, oops, and of course she doesn't speak any english so most of the conversation was just me saying 'sí ' and 'vale' (okay) and 'lo siento' (sorry), then she goes and pulls out a little white string bag that looks like it's coming from her bra and I'm really like WTF now, but it was the bag that she kept her keys in, she was talking about the gate lock trying to make sure I understood how it worked and that I should keep my keys safe... it was a very odd day with the two weird conversations with Lola and the landlord. Another random thing I noticed as I was wandering around the city tonight was that shisha is a very common thing, there's actually signs in the streets advertising it and there's a ton of like shisha shops where you can sit inside and outside at tables and just smoke and order drinks and whatever. It seemed pretty weird at first, in North America they try hard to hide it or at least pretend to hide it, here there is literally advertisement signs in the streets with an image of a woman smoking a shisha bong thing on it. Welcome to Europe.