El fin de semana (5) [Video recap to come]

The free weekend!!

Friday I went to work for a few hours, and then went home to meet up with Halle and grab lunch before heading to the bus station. We looked up a sushi place that was close to the station and had sushi for lunch. It was pretty good, nothing special, but since we haven’t had sushi in a long time, it was great. We met a girl there that was from Canada. She had just been to Málaga and Granada and said they were both wonderful, so this made us all the more excited to get on the road. The bus ride was 5 hours, but I mostly slept so it was not so bad. When we arrived in Granada, we drove by a fair. Naturally we asked our taxi driver about it, and he explained to us that there was a festival this weekend, Corpus Christi, honoring the Body of Christ, and it is celebrated throughout Spain. The common element of celebrating Corpus Christi in each city is a procession through the city. Then the other extra elements, like the fair we passed, vary from city to city. We went to the fair after checking into our Airbnb, and it was so cool. They had rides, flamenco dancing, food, clubs, restaurants, games, etc.

Saturday we woke up rather early to make our 8 am bus to Málaga. Only 7 of us went to the beach, because some people made their reservations for Alhambra tickets for Saturday, and some for Sunday. We arrived around 10 am and walked to the beach. The sand was boiling hot while the water was cold, haha, but we made it work. We stopped into one of the few places open for breakfast that early and then chilled on the beach until 3. It was a nice girls day! We headed back to Granada at 9 and then went to grab some food. We had planned to go to this really cool bar/club that many of us had been recommended. It was a cave bar and had large glass windows/walls that face the Alhambra. My friend told me it was one of her favorite memories of her semester abroad. Unfortunately for us, after walking for 20 minutes, we discovered it was closed because of the Corpus Christi festival!! It was so upsetting, but we still managed to have a good time at another place that was recommended to us. It looked more like an old western movie on the inside, which was odd. All in all, a great day.

Sunday we had our tour of the Alhambra. At 12:30 we unexpectedly hiked up to the Alhambra, no joke, and saw such an amazing place. The Alhambra is beautiful, and most of the pictures I will post about it will not do it justice. In addition to the many palaces it has, it also has gardens, and areal views of the city, and more. I recommend everyone go and see it if you find yourself remotely close to Andalucía. Then we got döner kebabs, again (I had three over the weekend because I finally found ones like the ones I remembered), and then headed to the bus station. 5 hours later and we made it back to our apartment in Madrid at 10:40. Halle and I warmed up our frozen pizza that our host mom left us (she had a headache and went to bed early), and then we settled in for the night.

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