Hola!
Sorry it’s been so long since I last wrote! Time goes by really quickly here! I feel like I just flew in yesterday and I truly can’t believe it’s been a whole month. I just finished taking finals for ILP, the courses I’ve been taking the last 4 weeks, so the last week or so has been super busy with studying for finals and getting ready to move into our apartments. I have three cool events that I want to tell you about though!

El Catedral
-Granada has a super beautiful GIANT cathedral that we got a really cool tour of.
-I was most impressed with the number of rooms/parts of the cathedral there were, it seemed like I kept getting to the entrance where we came in but instead we just went into another room!
-The cathedral was really beautiful but there was some history behind it that was mildly discomforting
-All throughout the cathedral there were Capillos which were basically giant shrines to different saints, and one of them was a shrine to San Matamoros. The name is the scary part because mata means kills and moros means Arabs, so basically his name means “kills Arabs.” Our tour guide told us that the church made him a saint because he did kill so many arabs in the reconquest of Granada from the Arabic caliphs, and that in making him a saint they made the reconquest a religious act, sanctifying and condoning the killings of non-christians
-there was a room where we weren’t allowed to take pictures that was a museum of sorts and there was a replica of a severed head on a platter! Our guide said that that was because the story of that particular saint was that they sent his head on a platter to the Christian kings...but I don’t accept that as an excuse for such a gruesome sight
-at one point we were sitting listening to our guide talk about the history behind the cathedral when a choir started to sing! and i was super excited because it was super pretty so i ended up listening to the singing instead of the speech. then we walked on a little farther and i couldn’t hear the choir anymore and i got really confused because if there was really a choir singing i would have been able to hear it all over the cathedral so i walked back really quick and found out there were speakers camoflauged on the pillars and i was really horribly disappointed

The Alhambra
-On Friday the 11th (Happy Birthday Mom!) we went to see Granada’s biggest tourist attraction--the giant fortress built by the Moors that the Christian conquerers liked so much they left it almost fully intact as it was in the height of the Arabic rule.
-If the Cathedral was big, the Alhambra was giant! We walked around for five hours and still didn’t see everything!
-Every wall was covered in intricate sculpture of Arabic writings from the Qu’ran and flowers and stars and all sorts of geometric shapes
-the palace walls are almost all white now but you can see remnants of color that hints at the past when every inch was covered in bright yellows, blues, reds, and greens
-I feel like I can’t even describe how pretty everything was! Words aren’t good enough. I really can’t imagine what it would have been like to live in such a huge ornate palace

The Concert at el Zaidin
-The same night as the Alhambra (after a long siesta) we all hopped on a bus and went to the Zaidin district on the outskirts of Granada for a festival
-Every year in September during exams (in Spain if you fail finals at the end of the semester you are allowed to retake them in the fall) there is a huge festival in el Zaidin that reminded me of our county fairs. The streets were full of booths of random things and fair foods for sale, there were rides and jumphouses for kids, and there was really loud music playing everywhere
-There was a booth with really awesome five euro fedoras and we all fell in love and bought them and looked super super cool walking around all wearing our new hats
-At the end of the streets of fair-ness there was a giant soccer field with floodlights and a stage for a rock concert. The main headliners were “Los Delinquintes” and we got to see them play but they didn’t get onstage until 1am! And we were really tired from traipsing all over the Alhambra so my friends and I left earlier than the rest of the group


Overall things are going amazing here and I’m having a great time! Tomorrow I will move into my new piso so I will tell you more about that and about my roommates and location etc in my next post.
Hasta Luego!
Hanna