Wow! It has been awhile since I last wrote in my blog.  My apologies.  The past few weeks have been zooming by, it is beginning to scare me because I still have so much I want to experience in Spain.  Speaking of time flying by ridiculously fast… yesterday, Friday 21^st, was the halfway mark to my program, as come December 21^st I will be leaving my host family.  Over the past ten days I have been really busy with school, training for the half-marathon, traveling and hanging out with friends.

Last Wednesday we had a holiday break from school so a few of my friends and I went up to Lanjaron, which is a hiking area on the southern part of the Sierra Nevadas.  We went for about a 4-hour hike and it was absolutely beautiful.  The majority of the land was very brown.  It was really nice to get out of the city for a few hours and enjoy being in the outdoors since the weather is still so nice here.  We finished the day by drinking blackberry milkshakes while waiting for our bus back to Granada. 

Last weekend a group of ten of us went to a beach in southern Spain called Cadiz.  It was great fun! We left Granada on the night bus at 3 am arriving in Cadiz around 8 in the morning.  We ate some breakfast and then checked into our hostel.  Due to the fact that this trip was a very last minute decision, half of our group was sleeping on the rough of the hostel in hammocks.  The hostel was an actual hostel.  By that I mean that people cooked in the kitchen together and there was a friendly, family ambiance to it.  We really enjoyed the hostel and it only cost us 13.50 each for the night!  We spent the entire first day, from 11 to 8, on a beach name La Caleta swimming, playing a paddle board game, napping, reading and eating tons of junk food. I forgot how good chips are.  We stayed at the beach until sunset and it was incredibly beautiful.  The sky was an amazing orange red color and the way it reflected off the little dingy boats in the water was striking.  I truly felt like I was in my own little paradise.  That night we all worked together and made a big spaghetti dinner, with a salad and bread and it was actually quite tasty.  We played some card games and called it a night.  The next morning we went straight to the beach again and spent the majority of the next day playing and laying in the sun again.  We had to head back to Granada around 3 because we had class the next day but all in all it was a great weekend trip to the beach.

Nothing all too exciting happened this week.  I ran eight miles on Thursday and that was pretty exciting because I was feeling pretty good after, two weeks till the half marathon.  This weekend I am just staying around Granada working on homework and hanging out with friends.  However, next weekend I am going to Madrid with my program and we will be there for five days.  We will be seeing many of the major sites in Madrid but also will be going to Toledo and Segovia for day trips.  Check out my pictures from my beach and mountain trips below.

I learned a very interesting word today… “chalé” it caught my eye in a book because it is my last name (obviously) and it means bungalow.

Lanjaron

 Cádiz