Granada otra vez

Sorry I havent been blogging this week, I got pretty sick after feria and haven't been doing much but this weekend me and 4 other friends went to Granada again this weekend. It was fun we only stayed one night so we went and got tapas and then went to a little reggae concert and then to a night club that was pretty mediocre. Today we walked around and went up to the mirador san nicholas again and took some pictures. It was a pretty laid back weekend. Here's a few pictures...

Feria video

I think this video pretty much sums up what goes on at the feria. My friends camera takes a small video clip before each picture and then it pieces together in the end. Feria Video

cuteness

Kids came to school all dressed up in their gitana/o outfits and then we had a little party. precious!

also I thought this was kinda funny

View from the castle

Feria

This weekend was the kick off to a week long party/fair that takes place at the fairgrounds in Jaen. They have carnival rides and they have big white tents that restaurants, bars and nightclubs set up. During the day families come with their children to participate it the festivities. The women and young girls dress up in gitana outfits

Me and a few friends walked around during the day for a few hours. Then decided to leave to get ready to come back for the night time festivities. At around midnight, the families leave and the young adults dress up and walk towards the fair grounds to start botellon-ing before the night gets going. Botellon-ing is the act of drinking outside in the street with bottles in throngs of people. Then around 2am the night starts to really get going and people go from tent to tent dancing and drinking until about 7am. The rides are also still open throughout the whole night. I took advantage of the bumper cars and some spinny ride which I immediately regretted.   

Just one of those days...

Im taking to my blog to vent my frustration about today.
So, last night I made a flyer that advertises my services as an English tutor. I refuse to use any of the fonts on word so I spent way too long on finding a font online. After I figured out how to make a table and change the orientation of the writing it was done.
 Woke up today, found the printing place, opened up my document and of course the font was all wonky, the picture didn't come out and the words were all over the page. Walked back to my apartment and took a screenshot of my flyer, walked back spent 15 minuets trying to figure out how to get it to fit the page, it prints...aaand the email is all wrong, I've never even had the email address that I put on there.
Go back to the apartment, fix the email, walk back and realize oooof course its 2pm and its closed for siesta. Walk back, crack a beer, feeling a little better. I wait around for 5oclock walk back to the copy place and my hard drive cord is loose so you have to finagle the cord juuust right for it to connect, that takes a good 10 minutes. It opens, it prints, ooo wait the bottom is cut off and you can't read the email that I just fixed. Finally it prints correctly except for one minor issue...

it printed with the red squiggly lines...whatevss its still readable I'm throwing them up anyways cause I'm embarrassing myself at this copy place.

Thanks for listening. Expect better posts after this weekend.

Granada and Salobreña

This weekend me and two friends went to Granada and a small beach town called Salobreña. Granada is about an hour bus ride south of Jaen and Salobreña is about an hour south of Granada. We arrived in Granada at around 2:30 on Saturday, got to the hostel dropped our stuff and headed out. We first grabbed some drinks and lunch at a restaurant nearby and then we decided we would try and see if we could get into the Alhambra. The Alhambra is a Moorish fortress and palace at the top of a large hill that overlooks all of Granada.

 We got there and all the tickets were sold out but we had the option to walk around a small part of the fortess for free and get to see a great view of Granada. So we had a beer and looked out on to this...

After we walked back down and went back to the hostel, to find out where we could watch some flamenco dancing and my roommate had told me about a place called Mirador San Nicholas which has one of the best views in the whole city. The flamenco dancing takes place in these little caves that are built into the hill. So we bought our ticket and then walked alllll the way up to the mirador, got a litre of beer and watched the sunset. 

Then we went back, got changed, smoked hookah with the other people in the hostel and then headed out for some flamenco dancing. For those of you who don't know, this is a hookah and its used to smoked TABACCO (not pot ;) ) Its a common thing to do especially in places like Morocco. Granada is very similar to Morocco in a lot of ways. 

Here is a little vid of the flamenco

I'm definitely going to take classes, I love the dresses! 

Then today we took the bus down to Salobreña and camped out on the beach alllll day. Couldn't have asked for a better day because the locals were having parties in tents on the beach. All of the women and the little girls had on traditional flamenco dresses and they were cooking food in their tents, drinking and dancing flamenco. They were celebrating Feria which is pretty much a week long party. Feria in Jaen is this week, cant wait! 

Then we had a late lunch/early dinner and ate the best paella I have ever had and watched the sunset.

Thats it for now, its back to "reality", I have to work a whole 3 hours tomorrow with some little kids, I'm thinking we'll play some freeze dance for physical education. :)

Yay! People who speak English!

Yesterday was a busy day. We had an orientation with all the other people who are participating in the auxiliares program who live in the Jaen region. There were over 100 of us which I was surprised by. It was good to meet some other Americans and British people. We already started planning where we wanted to go on trips and decided this weekend we should go down to Granada for the weekend. The orientation was suuuper boring and it lasted about 6 hours but it was worth it because after they served us lunch. We had paella, a traditional spanish meal dish, and then we had a huge chicken leg with potatoes and then flan for desert. And unlimited beer. 

Heres a picture of the paella

After the orientation I went with 2 other British girls to check out their apartments. Their apartments are a lot nicer than mine. They both had marble floors and they were higher up so they had a lot more light. We were talking about our experiences with living with other spaniards and venting our frustrations when it came to communicating with them. Anyways, here is a picture of the view from one girls apartment.

so sick!

And then we went back to our apartments showered and changed and then headed back out to meet up with more people and get drinks and tapas. We ended up at a tapas restaurant in the center of the city, it was down this little cobblestone side street. It was right next to this big church. Here are 2 pictures from that.

Then we headed out to a few local bars and I made the irresponsible decision to stay out until 4am. Getting up this morning was no picnic. 

Playground

I took some pictures of the kids playing on my iPhone. As you can see they don't have a jungle gym or anything so they have to amuse themselves with balls, rocks and dirt. Its pretty entertaining watching them. After recess, we split the group of 4 and 5 year olds up and we played red light green light and attempted to play simon says.

School's in session

Today I started working at the school. I only went in for an hour today just to get settled and figure out my schedule. I'm only working 12 hours a week haha. The school is really small and old but the teachers have figured out how to make it work. The whole school only has 15 kids from ages 3-6 and they're all so adorable! I snuck a picture of them doing work on my iphone...

This is a picture of the outside of the school

And these are pictures of the town.

Nom Nom

Coffee and crepes YUM

Also, you can now comment without having to make an account.

Making up for the past 2 days

The past two days have been pretty relaxing. I've been hanging out with my roommates in the apartment and we've gone out for wine and tapas a few times. They have a lot of great tapas places here and with each drink you get free tapas! Its great, so today my roommate and I went out for wine we and we each had 3 glasses of vino de verano (wine with lemon, tastes similar to sangria) and we got three different tapas plates all for 10 euros. The weather has been beautiful and we did a bit of shopping yesterday. We also are planning on going to a concert next Saturday and we bought our tickets today. I'll post a video sometime next week.

Here's a few pictures from the past 2 days.

Street where we went shopping

Tapas and vino de verano, not really sure what the tapas were but they were tasty.

Another view overlooking the city