Granada!!

Granada was absolutely amazing and definitely my favorite city of the trip.  That may have been partially due to the fact that it was our last city and everyone on the trip had gotten to know each other, but I also found it to be the most beautiful and fun city that we went to.

We arrived in Granada at around 6:00pm on Friday and checked into our hotel called Hotel Axilares.  The bus ride was actually a lot longer than expected because Granada is in a mountain region so we had to take a lot of winding roads to get there.  Our hotel was basically on a giant mountain right next the La Alhambra (the main historical sight of Granada).  La Alhambra is on a giant hill overlooking the city too, so we had a great view of everything from out hotel also.  The hotel was really nice and had a great pool which everyone was excited about!  We had a few hours to kill before dinner, so a group of us walked around the hillside for a while.  It was gorgeous as we were walking along the outer walls of La Alhambra and the gardens were amazing.  We walked for a while and it was completely downhill then we realized we should probably not go any further because we would have to make the walk back up the hill.  So we turned around and went back to the hotel, stopping in a few shops along the way.  A few of us (including me) had forgotten our swimsuits so we ended up going back to the pool and just sticking our feet in the water.  After all the walking we had been doing the past 2 days it felt so refreshing.

Dinner was at the hotel at 8:30pm again.  It was another buffet style but the food was much better than at the last hotel because there was a variety so I was able to eat the Spanish food that I wanted.  After dinner we walked down the mountain using another path and actually ended up all the way at the bottom in the city center.  It was a really fun walk to take because it was all downhill and there was great scenery along the way.  We all knew we wanted to go out later though but everyone needed to shower and change so we took taxis back up the hill because we didn’t think we would really have time to make the walk.

I left with 2 other girls around midnight to go into the city and we walked down the same mountain path as before so it was really pretty.  We wandered around the city for a while just looking at how it was beautifully decorated – they have decorative Christmas lights up all the time so it was really lit up and energetic.  Apparently the University of Granada is one of the largest universities in Spain so there were a lot of college-age people there, which made it a lot of fun.  We ended up going to a club/bar called Babylon and it was so much fun!  They had really delicious drinks and we met some really great people from Barcelona and Granada.  I was the best in our group at speaking Spanish so I did most of the talking, but they also spoke some English.  They told me my Spanish was really good (even though I know that it wasn’t) so that made me feel like at least my 4 years of Spanish wasn’t for nothing!  They party pretty late in Spain, so we took a taxi back to the hotel around 4:00am.

We were very lucky that our tour on Saturday didn’t start until 10:00am (which is why we knew we could stay out a little later Friday night).  We had another buffet style breakfast at the hotel which was really good – they had tortilla hispañola which is my favorite!  Then we met new tour guides outside our hotel and walked across the street to visit La Alhambra.  La Alhambra was amazing and beautiful and it is pretty much the only place to visit in Granada but it is so huge (200 acres of palace, not including the gardens) that you could easily spend a whole day there.  First we walked around the gardens which were so pretty and gave amazing views of the city below.  In the gardens was a summer palace that was beautiful and had amazingly elaborate fountains that all worked by gravity of the water coming down from the surrounding mountains.  Then we walked through some more gardens on our way to another palace.  The area we walked through though used to be an entire city of people who lived inside the walls.  IT was lots of people in the military or who worked for the king, etc.  The second palace we went to is mainly La Alhambra museum because it was never finished on the inside.  I don’t remember which king started to build it, but he just had the outside done and then decided to leave so they use the interior for some concerts and events.  Finally we went to the grand finale palace which is the huge one and main attraction inside La Alhambra.  When you buy tickets for La Alhambra they assign you a time that you can enter the giant palace so that it doesn’t get too crowded (our guide told us tickets are sold out every day and that you have to get them 3 months in advance).  The palace was just HUGE!  There were 3 mini-palaces (I didn’t really think they were very mini) inside of the palace.  We kept walking through room after room and it was so beautiful and elaborately decorated with mosaics and carvings.  It was so cool to see it all – I can’t even really describe it.

After La Alhambra tour we went back to the hotel for lunch where there was another buffet, including a giant dish of paella.  It was so delicious that I had to have 2 helpings!  I was so glad that I got to have a final meal of delicious Spanish food before boarding the buses.  The ride back took about 4 hours so we got back to the ship at 6:30pm which was technically a half hour late but since we were on a SAS sponsored trip we don’t get in any trouble.  I really had such an amazing time in Spain that I know I am going to come back someday to see even more!