The Alhambra

First and foremost, today is Friday! I Skyped with Casey and he got his newest mini-gift:

Strawberry Jam! Why? Because it's delicious. But mostly because it's cute and small and fit into the little pocket...

Today was also our tour of the Alhambra, finally! After breakfast we waited around in the courtyard for the two monitores who were supposed to accompany us, but they were late. When they did arrive they herded us up the hill to the Alhambra pretty speedily, which I have to say, after wandering around town in heels on Wednesday and taking a walk up to the Albaycín with Felipe yesterday, was kinda rough. We made it early and promptly sat around for a good long second.

Luckily it was shady, and beautiful. The first leg of the trip included a lot of things we'd already seen with Chelo, but it was beautiful nonetheless. Also, there were kitties.

Our group was guided by the same adorable professora that took us the the Cathedral of the Reyes Católicos. She showed us this creepy little staircase that leads to the prisoners' dungeon and the hole where their food was dropped into. She even showed us the latrine and popped a squat to demonstrate it's use, which was pure hilarity.

I wish I could be more expressive about the trip, it was really interesting and there was SO much to see. It's hard to believe that all these old things are real, I'm so used to our big, shiny, infantile country. Some of the views from up on these huge old watch towers were truly breathtaking. I wanted to take a billion photos but at the same time it seemed a little futile to try and photograph the huge panoramas, the huge quantity of water fountains or the intricacies of some of the walls with their Arabic inscriptions and hand-painted titles. I wanted to take pictures that captured the experience more than the building because it seemed kind of redundant after a while; anyone can open up Google and see a billion pictures of the Alhambra, and none of them do it any justice. And of course, my favorite photos are the instant photos that I took, but I have no way of scanning them. Christina and I took a particularly adorable one of us walking hand-in-hand through an archway; legend has it that you'll be married within a year if you walk through the arch holding hands.

After the guided tour portion, which took three or four hours, we were brought into a beautiful garden area, where the tour ended but we were free to roam around. We had some suspicious bagged lunches from the cafeteria and sat on some shady benches to eat. Unfortunately, we'd been given sandwiches of white bread, butter and dirty looking cheese along with a saggy-skinned apple and some juice and water and I ended up getting a pretty gnarly tummy ache (I'm guessing from the questionable cheese...) But the gardens were great; labyrinth like bushes and big sweet roses, morning glories and strange purple flowers that looked like fans. We even spied some areas that were growing food! Squash, eggplant, grapes...

All in all, it was a lovely day that left me feeling exhausted in a contented kind of way. After a siesta and some soup at dinner, my stomach made a nice recovery and I even sat down and spent a good bit of time figuring out my class schedule. I'm still pretty torn, but making progress.

Tomorrow we leave bright and early for Málaga, and I absolutely cannot wait to get into the Mediterranean Sea!