A Day in the Life

First off, I'd like to dedicate my 4th post to my biggest blogging fans; my grandparents! Miss you Mamaw and Papaw, don't have too much fun without me and hopefully I can Skype into Thanksgiving dinner?! XOXO

Anyways, I know a lot of you are probably sitting at home, thinking about me and wondering "Hm, what exactly does Molly do all day? Probably just sit around and drink Sangria," and to that I have two responses: 1. Flattering that you're thinking of me and 2. You are (kind of) right. But I do (some) other stuff too.

But you don't have to wonder any longer! Because today's blog post is going to give you a typical run through of my days here in Granada!

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF MOLLY IN SPAIN
7:45- Alarm goes off, push snooze.
7:54- Alarm goes off again, push snooze.
8:04- Alarm goes off again, contemplate getting up.
8:10- Realize I have 10 minutes to get ready for class throw on clothes (but nice ones because HEAVEN FORBID anyone in Spain look like they may not be wearing the nicest outfit they own) and get ready.
8:20- Tiptoe through the house because Pilar does not wake up until 11 everyday, grab some bread and head out the door.
8:24- Realize I have 6 minutes to get to class and 10 minutes still to walk, panic, and speed walk through town- still holding my bread.
8:25- Remember that my professor doesn't feel the need to get to class until 8:40 anyway and relax a little.
8:26- Wait 10 minutes at a cross walk with me and 50 of my closest Granadino friends. Act like I am also Spanish and try to hide the fact that I am stuffing bread in my mouth.
8:35- Arrive to class slightly sweaty and breathing hard, sit down, and try to stay awake for the next 6 hours.
8:36- Nod off slightly, wake up suddenly and hope no one noticed (repeat every 15 min for the next 6 hours).
8:36-2:30- Suffer through 6 straight hours of class in which I go through a range of emotions; including, but not limited to: exhaustion, appreciation, surprise, apathy, sympathy, intrigue and confusion. Although mostly a lot of hate once I get to Paco's geography class where I spend most of the time contemplating ways to get out of class (best idea I've got so far is pulling the fire alarm so clearly more contemplating needs to be done) .
2:30 - Start the walk home from my school into the center of town (aka the touristy expensive part where I can't buy anything cheap) and soak in the Spanish air (usually about 65 degrees, sunny, and a faint smell of cheese). On my walk home I also pretend I am a native and pretend not to feel bad for all the tourists with their maps out just trying to find the Alhambra.
2:40- Arrive back at Pilar's where she and her brother, Antonio (a hairdresser/makeup artist in Granada) are preparing 'comida' (lunch). Depending on the smell, I either get excited about comida or contemplate my method of suffering through another tasteless lentil soup (I usually go with shove as quickly as possible into mouth and try not to taste/get full).
3:00- Begin eating comida. By 3, Pilar is all got up on her entertainment gossip so we now switch the channel to news. We then proceed to eat and watch news as Pilar commentates with lots of 'Por Dios!' or, 'Pobrecitos!' or 'Que Pena!'. Depending on the mood I also throw in a couple gasps and 'pobrecitos' in too to add to the conversation.
3:30- I am now extremely full, am all caught up (from what I pieced together) on my Spanish/world news, and ready for a siesta. This is when Violeta gets most of her petting time with me in and lays on my lap until I decide I've had enough.
4:00- Depending on how tired I am, I may or may not stay in the living room and watch the Spanish version of 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire'. I actually do learn a lot about Spain from this show and if there's ever any American fact-questions I get to impress Pilar with my abundance of knowledge.
4:20- At this point, I usually can't keep my eyes open any longer and get ready to siesta. There's nothing to do anyway at this time since everything's closed so I never feel guilty about taking at least an hour nap. At home I can only nap if I'm extremely exhausted or really relaxed but I somehow have zero issues with napping all the time in Spain. In fact I'd say I'm some what of a nap pro now.
6:00- By 6, I've usually woken up and decided it's time to do something with the rest of my day. Typically, I'll talk some friends into meeting me at a café where we spend 20-30 minutes doing our extremely rigorous homework (shout out to muh girl Mary McClain who actually has written papers and stuff- you're working hard!), drink coffee (café con leche), and talk about how awesome it is to be in Spain.
8:00- By 8 it's dark and I am sick of doing random stuff on the internet and am satisfied with all the more trips we've decided to plan. *Exception- if it is Thursday, my friends and I usually reward ourselves for finishing another hard week with some delicious gelato.
9:15- Dinner time! My favorite meal of the day because I get things like hamburgers, pizza, and weird Spanish grilled cheeses! I also ALWAYS get a bowl of salty broth-soup, and an Activia yogurt. My favorite flavor of Activia is strawberry but Pilar's favorite to give me is Raisin. I'm actually starting to like it a little bit.
10:00- This is my shower time. Since it's been a little bit chillier recently (45-55 at night) Pilar has been putting my towel and the bath mat next to the space heater so that they're warm for me, and for that I don't care if she serves me lentil soup every day.
10:30 - Depending on the day, I either 1. Go over to the student apartments where a lot of my friends live, to hang out and cook and talk to some hilarious Spanish people who live with them  2. Go to a tapas bar to drink some wine/sangria and hang out, or 3. Get ready to go out to a discoteca.
1AM-6AM- Depending on if it's a weeknight or not I either go to bed at either 1. 1:00 AM, 2. 3 AM  or 3. 6AM if we went to a discoteca. It doesn't matter the day or the time, there are always people out in my alley yelling or coughing or breathing- everything echoes so I can literally hear EVERYTHING. I usually get pretty angry about this, check outside, glare down at people if they're close, and get back into bed where I end up passing out, very satisfied with another day in Granada.
7:45AM or 12PM(Thur-Sun)- Do it all again!

*Exceptions: Weekends we try to do something fun like A. Hike, B. Travel (Cordoba was amazing!) or C. Bake (last weekend we made delicious nutella cookies from scratch that I am quite proud of) and Tuesdays and Thursdays I go to 3 hours of teaching English instead of class but more on that later!

That has been my life for the past 5 weeks and I can't say I'm displeased with it. Unfortunately it is now 1:37 AM and my 6 hours of classes starts sooner than I would like. Thanks all for reading!

Here's some pics of Cordoba to close this out and add some color to this post:

Life as a Spaniard

Ok so before I go into my normal blogging rant about my ridiculous life here in Spain, I'd like to start off on a more serious note and say that after being here for a month now I know without a doubt that studying abroad is definitely one of the best decisions I have ever made. 

Now the  juicy details on my Spanish life here in Granada. 

First off:

CLASSES! Believe it or not, Iactually have a semi-real life here, where I attend 20 hours of class a week.Yes 20. And once I start my internship teaching English, it will be 26 hours. That's like a full time job! Except it's really easy and requires very little work. For my Produción Oral y Escrita (or POE po-a) class, my semester project is to go to 4 different tapas bars, then present a power point to the class talking about each bar and recommending different dishes, granted in Spanish, but seriously? I do have other real work and will have a couple papers but overall it's kind of ridiculously easy. Something tells me my exams will be a different story but we'll get to that when it comes.. The weirdest part about classes here, besides the fact that they all are almost all in Spanish, is that they're two hours long. At home I absolutely dreaded my 1 hr 20 min classes, but somehow I'm adjusting to this whole two hour thing. 50 minute classes are going to seem like nothing when I get back to Wooster next semester. My one English speaking class is called Sustainability in the Mediterranean, it's pretty interesting but I would probably be able to understand the poor teachers better if they just spoke in Spanish.. My very very least favorite class (aka I really hate it) is called Geografía de España, and it is absolutely horrific. The professor (Paco) talks forever about absolutely nothing, is completely disorganized, and cannot write on a white board to save his life. He seems pretty intelligent and knowledgable, but teaching is just really not his speciality. Which is unfortunate for us. 

Exhibit A of whiteboard skills by Paco:

Besides Paco and his Geography class, my academic part of Spanish life is going pretty well. The most difficult part is getting myself to focus on what my professors are actually saying because trust me it is super easy to tune out another language. Spanishdict.com and GoogleTranslate are becoming some of my best friends these days. 

Besides class I have also been doing some Traveling! Two weekends ago, my friends and I decided to sign up for a daytrip to Sevilla! Sevilla is actually the capital of the region that I live in (Andalusia) and is the third largest city after Madrid and Barcelona. It was definitely a lot bigger and more touristy than Granada, but the Cathedral was quite beautiful and later we sat along side the Guadalqivir River and enjoyed our day in one of the more 'traditional' Spanish cities. The best way I can describe the city is if Los Angeles and Paris got together, Sevilla would be their very cultural little child; lots of palm trees and european architecture. Here are some pictures:

The very next day, we decided to take a spontaneous trip to the beach. We didn't do a whole lot of research but had heard some good things about Nerja, and decided to book the 18 Euro roundtrip bus the night before! Nerja was absolutely BEAUTIFUL. It had a very mediterranean/Greece-ish vibe; lots of white houses with blue doors, cliffs, rocks, and views to die for. We basically just laid on the beach all day which was quite nice. We had had a very stressful first week of classes and the break was well deserved... (ha). I also ate the most delicious ice cream I have ever had there, and now will forever associate Nerja with deliciousness and beauty. For anyone looking to go to Spain, I highly recommend any of the little beach towns along the Costa del Sol! Watch out though, all the old women love being topless. 

Tomorrow (Friday October 19th) we will take our first group 'field-trip' as a program to Madrid and Toledo for the weekend. I'm excited to see both cities because I really know nothing about either of them besides that Madrid is huge. Pilar, my host mom, says she absolutely loves Madrid, but she also says she loves a lot of things. Including these fish things: 

So, her word is a bit compromised. Speaking of Pilar, she is still fantastic and makes me laugh all the time. She's just always making jokes and playing with Violeta (who is desperate need of a bath) and gasping/yelling at the TV. We have had some good times together. Sometimes she calls me 'hija' which means daughter, which is very cute. (Don't worry Mom, she could never replace you- although she does do my laundry for me once a week..) Last night when I was walking home, some skateboarding kids hit me in the ankle with their skateboard - which was extremely painful - and when I told her I seriously thought she was going to go down there and try to find them and hit them with their own skateboards. Overall I couldn't have asked for a better host mom. Whenever I get dressed up to go out she says "Que guapisima!!" or "Ayy que bonita!" which basically just means how pretty/beautiful! Which is a great confidence boost so thanks Pilar. Here is the dynamic duo in person:

I have also officially booked my first two international trips, one to Copenhagen November 1-4 (yay Molly Recka! I'm coming for ya!!) and one to London the last weekend of November. I'm SUPER excited for both trips, and feel like it will actually be pretty interesting to compare Mediterranean European life with Scandinavian European life and Western European life. 

There are ton of other things I want to say so I think I'm just going to combine them into a little section I'd like to call -

Molly's Important Observations about Spain:

1. Babies. Everyone has a baby. If you are between the ages of 20-50, and are not single, you have a baby or are pregnant. There are so many babies everywhere. Walking around Granada is a constant struggle to dodge the strollers. Luckily, all of these little Spanish babies are adorable. I have never seen such cute attractive babies wearing such beautiful clothing. I am extremely jealous. I am also jealous of their strollers. My life quality would improve drastically if I got to be pushed around Granada while simultaneously sitting and eating. 

2. Shoe stores. They are EVERYWHERE. I'd say on any given block in Spain there is a least 2 shoe stores. I don't really get it but I hate it because it's so tempting to just walk in there all the time.. Have to fight the urge.

3. Dreadlocks. I was warned of the hippiness of Granada but didn't fully grasp how true it was until living here for awhile. I have never EVER seen so many dreadlocks. Yesterday I saw a guy who was completely bald but the little hair that he did have was dreaded. WHAT. I don't know exactly what it is about Granada that attracts all the hippies, besides it maybe being a very student-populous city, but they are everywhere and because of that there are a ton of vegetarian cafes and bars which is pretty cool. I live in a pretty cool city.

4. Smoking. Everyone smokes. They do not care about their lungs. Smoking is just what you do. I've gotten used to smoke being blown in my face all the time. I don't even get mad anymore.

5. Dogs. Everyone has a dog. This is not a blanket statement. There are dogs everywhere. Currently there is a little dog wandering around the cafe I'm in just hanging out. I don't think it is even with someone it's just hanging out. This also means that there is dog poop everywhere. You have to watch your every step. It only took one unfortunate misstep to make me EXTREMELY cautious of where I walk. I don't know what these dogs are eating but they need some digestive help. Also baths. They could all use baths. ESPECIALLY VIOLETA. She is very cute but she smells like she just hangs out in a sewer all day. Which is unfortunate for me mostly because she sits next to me while I eat so I sort of have to only breath through my mouth which is really difficult when you're trying to put food in your mouth. Rough times. 

Okay that's all I got for now, more extremely important/accurate observations to be added next blog post.

So far what I've learned most about blogging is that I'm very bad at blogging. I have all these ideas to write about but I never know where to start! Word vomit is usually the result (aka currently). 

Thanks for reading! Adios! 

Me hiking around Granada. Although I look calm and happy I really wanted to lay down and die because to get to that point you literally have to hike up at a 70 degree angle. Needless to say I was sore for days after that.