Alhambra, Las Alpujarras y la Bodega

Since my last post, post Morocco, I've had another visit to the Alhambra, FINALLY got to go hiking, and visited a Spanish vineyard and winery!

Alhambra, this week we visited the Nasrid Palaces.

The first picture is from the first section of the palaces, and was the most public part of the palace, where judges and other records could be found.  The picture shows a mihrab in an oratory off of a room that the catholic monarchs turned into a chapel.  The second picture is where someone would have waited before entering the sultans personal chambers, and the calligraphy on the walls celebrates the ruler and talks a lot about how fair and nice and great he is.  I guess if you read that while you wait you'll be nicer once you get inside.

The Court of the Myrtles- Reflecting pool.

This picture is of the celing of the throne hall, which is much more impressive in person than in this picture.  The picture on the right is the outside of the dome.  Because we are "researchers" we got to go look at the inner workings, and the work that has to be done to keep everything in good condition.  Pretty Neat.

Las Alpujarras!!  We hiked in and had lunch, and hiked some more back to a little town.  First time I've wanted to buy something I couldn't easily transport...they make these really cool rugs that look totally different than they feel.  Oh well, next time.

Snow capped mountain tops.

Horses.

Water

My view eating lunch. :)

On the way home from the hike we stopped a vineyard where we had a tour and did a wine tasting.  

Grapes.

The tour was in spanish, so I'm not sure I got all the technical parts, but I did learn that wines color comes from the skin of the grape?  Maybe this should have been obvious but I'd never thought about it.  After that, the wine goes into the barrels, and that room has to be humid so that the wine doesn't evaporate through it.  She said the wine they make usually stays in a barrel for about a year.

The next step gets the wine in bottle, and they are kept for another year or two.  That room needs to be very dry because if the cork is damp, the wine would have other flavors from the air.  And finally, it is labeled and ready for us to taste!  We had red wine and cheese, delicious.

In other news, I have purchased a ticket to Rome for my December break!  I haven't worked out the particulars, but I know I want to take the train to Florence for part of it too.  I'm excited to eat a lot of pasta! Hopefully I won't have too many problems with the whole, not speaking Italian thing... :)

Only one month and one week left till I'm on a plane home!  Listened to a Christmas song today, too.  And Granada is being decorated. Better get on getting some presents...

Bye for now!

Alhambra #1 and Birthday Adventures

The Alhambra, the greatest last and the greatest Moorish palace, was built in the 13th and 14th centuries by the Nasrid dynasty, and combines the architectural elements of the dynasties that came before them.  My art history teacher likes to say that the Nasrid rulers had a "carpe diem" mentality, where they worked hard and played hard, knowing they would be the last Muslim rulers in Spain.  The result was architecture that was very lavish, but because of the stress of war, the Alhambra is nowhere near as big as Madinat al-Zahra, which blows my mind, because to me the Alhambra seems huge.  They also used cheaper materials, like concrete and plaster, instead of the masonry that the Caliphate was able to use.

This week we had our first of three visits to the Alhambra, and because we are "researchers" we got to go into areas where normally tourists don't get to see.  We focused on the complex as a military building in this first visit, walking in like people would have been made to in the 14th century, through the checkpoints and walls, and we also visited the towers where soldiers and guards would have kept watch over the city.

View from the bottom, clearly if you're down here you have a disadvantage.

You would have been able to see the whole city too.

View of another tower from the top.

The foundations on one side of the wall mark where the soldiers would have lived when they were on duty for a few days.

On the other side, the area where the royals and high government people would have lived.  We're going to tour all of the inside next week.

One of the main doors to a checkpoint.

We walked through part of the palace, and this picture is dark but it is amazingly beautiful.

These paintings are in a tower that is now called the Peinador de la Reina, the Queen's Dressing Room. It was painted to please Queen Isabella after the Catholic Monarchs took Granada, and it has a bunch of French soldiers names carved into it. Part of the palace was also destroyed by the French, and there is a Spanish legend about a man who ran around all night putting out the fires.

Strange Creatures.  They guess the paintings were done between 1539 and 1546, in an Italian style.  Whoever lived there before the Queen was probably powerful, because they have found a secret staircase that goes down to a clearing in the woods.  With all of the security, it would have been a big deal to be able to get in and out undetected.  This also probably means it was a mans room, as nobody would have let a girl have a secret staircase.

This tower, Torre de la Cautiva, the tower of the Captive was my favorite.

The carvings were this detailed around the entire room, with high ceilings and a nice breeze.  There was a poem that ran around the entire room that was from the perspective of the room talking about how pretty she is inside, even when she looks like a military building outside.

The last tower, Torre de las Infantas, or the Tower of the Princesses, gets it's name from a story that Washington Irving wrote about the Alhambra. The princesses were called Zaida, Zoraida and Zorahaida.  We also saw the room where he stayed and wrote.

The artwork is very much like architecture, with mini columns and arches, and of-course a lot of calligraphy.

My birthday lunch, and my host mom.  It was delicious.

Started the night with the end of the sunset and some champagne.  After that we went for Tapas and bar hopped for a while.

This was a bachelor party, their t-shirts say something like "Grab the Sausage," and they picked me up and sung happy birthday.  From there it only got stranger, as we went to a few more places, and then ended up drinking tea at 4 in the morning?  Anyway, made it to 21.

On Thursday, I'm leaving for Morocco.  First we are going to Gibraltar, then to Tarifa to cross to Tangier.  We're visiting a women's center there and meeting with some students.  Later in the afternoon we'll see Assilah, then go to Rabat where we'll be staying with families that host other international students.  We'll spend the entire next day in Rabat, and on Sunday, we're going up to the Riff mountains to see a smaller town.  Then we'll head north again to Chefchaouen where we will spend our last night.  Should be an interesting experience, I'm very excited.   

Halfway done with this blog?  It's odd that I'll be home so soon. Time flies.

Quick Update

Well, here we are. October 1st.  October is my favorite month, and fall my favorite season. However, fall here so far has been more like summer, with highs of 80, sunshine, and 0% chance of rain projected for the next 10 days.  I went to the beach today and got a bit of a sunburn. Ha.  It's certainly not Ohio! But i am hoping the leaves will change around my birthday.

What do I have planned for this most glorious of months?

Trip to LONDON.
Trip to Cordoba.
Trip to MOROCCO.
My second cooking class.
Pilates class (in spanish), twice a week. We'll see how THAT goes.
Running! Tomorrow I'm going to take a picture of where I run. So beautiful.

EDIT: My running trail. It's too hazy to get a good picture of the mountains, but I love it.

And where I'm currently sitting working on my homework. I really did luck out with the setup here. :)

What else, my birthday? Not sure how to celebrate the momentous 21 in a country where I can already legally drink.  Perhaps I'll go to the bar and pretend I can't order anything until after midnight.  However, only in Spain can you tell a bartender, "Hoy es mi cumpleaños!" and he'll just give you a drink.

My midterms? YIKES!  I'm going to be home so soon.

With that in mind, I have decided to turn the whole of my attention to rediscovering my love for learning.  When I was younger, I loved to learn about everything and anything.  College however, had the negative effect where at times, I was preforming simply for a grade, or learning for a test, and nothing more.  From here on out, I will be trying to learn simply for the pleasure of knowing something I didn't before, and in this way, I'm sure my grades will be just fine, too.

What am I learning? I'm taking four classes, Spanish (obviously), Islamic Art and Architecture in Spain, Women in Mediterranean Film, and Arabic 101.  All of my classes have been great, and for my art class we go on a different field trip every week. That definitively beats learning off of a slide. Women in Mediterranean film is my first women's studies class, and I'm loving it as well. We get to watch movies that were influential to Spain, and it's only once a week. Can't beat that.  I only wish I could learn how to spell "Mediterranean."  Gets me every-time... And Arabic I'm really enjoying as well.  I love how organized the language is, and my teacher is awesome.  We started making sentences last week.  Not very exciting ones, as the only verb I know is "to love," but sentences none the less.

To help me on my Spanish language learning quest, I have the BEST intercambio.  He has a PHD in physics, loves movies and travel, and was wearing a star-wars shirt when we met.  Perfect.  We're meeting every week to speak for an hour in Spanish, or in English.  He even laughs at my child-level Spanish jokes.

Getting busy finally, and hoping to return to the states sound of mind, spirit and body.

Well, that's it for now...still hate ending this damn thing.

:-)

Cabo De Gata, Ronda, and Seville.

Alright, so in the time between my last post and now, I got to see a little bit more of Spain.  The first trip our program went on was to the Costa del Sol, to a string of beaches called Cabo de Gata.  We hiked for 2 hours into the first beach, took a swim break, and hiked another hour or so to the next one, then another 2 hours out. Needless to say, it was hot.  The beaches were very pretty there and because they were hard to get too, relatively empty.  The Spaniards that were there however strutted their stuff sin bikinis or swim trunks, I can only assume to have less between themselves and the beauty of the beaches. Pictures? Of the beaches...

I know it's hard to tell, but across all that water, is Africa. I was walking with the director of my program and he said that he has seen boats land on this beach because it is not very populated and not well patrolled.  As I understood it, which could be wrong because my spanish is not really at a level to discus politics, he said that once people make it on land in Spain, they can't be sent back without a passport, so everyone just understands this and is okay with it, "No pasa nada," which is said like "No big deal" but used for everything, as I have yet to find something that is a big deal here.  Everyone is very, very relaxed.  Which is great until I have to go to the bank or the post office, I've been hearing some horror stories.

Next trip: Ronda and Seville

We stopped at Ronda on our way to Seville for a quick tour and to eat our lunches.  My tour guide will also be my art history professor, and she knew everything about anything I asked about.  Ronda is a small city way up on a hill, with houses that hang off cliffs and mountain views from anywhere in town.  It is also a city with a literary history, as For Whom the Bell Tolls was based events in Ronda.  Quick run down of the sights included the Plaza de Toros, the bullfighting arena, banos arabes from the 13th and 14th century, and Ronda's  gorge.

The door in the very middle was apparently used as a jail during the Spanish Civil War, and prisoners were told that if they jumped and survived the fall, they would be let free.  Not sure I'd take my chances.

Andd Seville, we arrived and had some down time to explore before we went to see a flamenco show, which was really good.  Seville is big, and seemed to be much less Spanish than Granada, there was more English, more Americans, bigger streets, and more traffic.  We stayed the night in a very nice hotel, and the next day again toured with my Art History professor.  We toured the palace Alcazar, and the cities Cathedral, which is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world and the third largest cathedral period.  Trying to explain everything I learned about these sights seems like a terribly large job, so i'll summarize, and then explain my favorite/the most interesting things i learned.

So the Alcazar is built in a Moorish style and was later renovated by the Christian monarchs after they captured Seville in the reconquistadores to create some funky looking architecture and some humorous combinations.

This is the oldest part of the palace called the Patio de Yeso, used by Moorish governors.  The outside of many of these buildings was simple, but the detailing inside was incredibly intricate.

Another part of the palace.  Funny part about the Arabic running along the bottom is that it is nonsense, a lot of the characters are perhaps not even letters.  Apparently, it was too much work to actually have someone figure out what it should say, so they just assumed most people couldn't read anyway and it wasn't important if it actually said anything.

An example of strange architecture, the first floor was build by the Muslim rulers in their style, and the second floor was added by the Catholic kings and is done in an Italian style, popular at the time it was built.

My favorite story:  The column with the banner shown here was a Spanish symbol of pride that they had discovered the new world, it has some latin phrase amounting to "much beyond".  Anyway, the interesting part is that this symbol was on Spanish coins used in colonial America.  When people tired to make counterfeit coins, they didn't do it exactly right and the symbol changed and eventually gave us the american dollar sign.

$

Pretty neat.

Moved in with the catholics.

I really like this tapestry because it's "upside down."  This is an account of navel battles fought by Charles V, and at the top is Africa, to the right is Spain.

Andd the Cathedral.  It was very big, and following suit was built on the foundation of the Friday mosque that was there when the city fell.  What is now the bell tower was originally a minaret, built in 1198. Wow, so old. We walked to the top, which wasn't too bad because there is a ramp to the top so that when it was built, horses could be used to take materials up to the workers.

Bell Tower

View from the top.

Patio de Los Naranjos

Bells, our guide told us that while all this mosques becoming churches, churches becoming mosques stuff was going on, it was common for Muslims who took a church to use the bells as lamps in the mosque, and conversely when the Christians took a mosque, they would melt down the lamps to make bells.  Apparently at a mosque we might see in Morocco, they still have bell lamps.  Only think I can think is that I wouldn't have wanted to be the one moving these things around. They're huge. And loud, one rang while we were up there. Scared me half to death.

Gold. Lot's of it.

The disputed Sepulcro de Cristobal Colon, or the tomb of Christopher Columbus, who's remians may have been brought from Cuba in 1898.  Two other places in the world have tombs for him too and no one really knows which if any of them are legitimate.  However we were advised that the people of Seville take this claim very seriously and we shouldn't talk about those other tombs. Haha.

I'm back in Granada now and tomorrow is the first day of classes.  I'm excited to start learning more about the city and practicing my Spanish.  However, I did find one new way to practice.

I mean, this is how I learned English right?  Starting with Aladdin, obviously.  Adios, I need to read my children's books.

PS- Almost forgot, those pictures scrolling up top are now mine, so if this isn't enough stalking of my life (mom)  feel free to click on it and you can see a slideshow. :)