Finally arrived!

After over a week of traveling to Dublin and through Spain I arrived in Granada Wednesday night. To say I was impressed would be an understatement. The city is amazing, complete with tile streets, colorful apartments and an Arabic fortress, the Alhambra. There are 70,000 students who study here at the University of Granada each year, 10,000 of them international students like me. Making the city full of excitement all hours of the day and night, excluding siesta time, which is from 2-5pm every day. These siestas are taken very seriously in Spain, some city blocks even shut off power for those three hours so that the only thing you can do is rest. Due to the enormous amount of students here my roommates and I have settled in easily and have not had a hard time making many new friends. As far as classes go I am only taking Spanish grammar and language for the first month. It is meant as an intensive month to quickly bring everyone up to speed before the semester. Somehow I tested into the intermediate level even though I have not taken Spanish since my sophomore year of high school. But so far the teacher has been great and the class not impossible so I plan to stick with it and hopefully greatly improve my Spanish. We are required for this class to get a Spanish "buddy" to meet for drinks or coffee and chat. This way we can practice our Spanish and they can practice their English. In terms of traveling we were supposed to go to the beach this weekend but a cold front came in and our senora (house mom) strongly advised us not to go. So we will try to go again next weekend, it is an easy trip, only an hour from Granada by bus. And two weeks from now I will be traveling to Munich with some girlfriends from DU for Oktoberfest and then the weekend after my parents and grandparents will be here for a visit!

                                                    My roommates and I in the Plaza

                                                   Graffiti is always left up in Spain

                                                                      City Hall