Tonight I felt very much a part of the beat of the city. I was a student, a teacher, a Zumba participant, and an American girl in an Irish bar. I love my Mondays here, which is strange to ever like Mondays, but here my Mondays are chocked full of different scenes in Granada. First my IES Spanish class in the beautiful IES ‘school’, which has tiling that resembles the Alhambra and white marble floors. I was so excited to place into my Spanish class because in the past my years of Spanish have not translated in placement tests but this time I delivered. I feel like my Spanish has made several breakthroughs over the past three months. I love speaking in Spanish and I can ramble on almost as quickly as I can in English. It is really exciting. After Spanish class I usually grab a quick para llevar coffee and then walk to my internship at Maristas school. I work in four different classrooms and help the teachers with their English. When I started out I felt like an imposter in my teachers classrooms and I could barely understand a word of what the kids would say to me. Now I know that they usually just want to tell me that they lost a tooth or they need their shoe tied so I can use a process of elimination and logic. Today I taught my first graders the hokey pokey. It was very entertaining because of course they don’t know which is their right and left anything really not even in their native language.

After my internship I went grocery shopping, which, is actually surprisingly tricky. We aren’t really supposed to use the stove in our homestays as an IES rule so my options for dinner, if I don’t go out for tapas, are usually bread with nutella or cereal. I was determined this grocery store trip to find alternatives. No peanut butter so PBJ was out and no microwavable meals, just a lot of prawns, tuna, and olives. Ew. I settled on some rice cakes, some quick pasta, and a lot of jamón serrano (my absolute favorite. In the U.S. it is called prosciutto and I eat it almost as often there). I think I might be destined to be a Spaniard solely due to my love of jamón.

My roommate Savannah preparing to eat our delicious lunch.

Mario and I eating American Halloween candy

I returned home to my casita with my groceries and sat down to a fantastic lunch as perusual. We had some sort of soup pasta cross over with vegetables, a salad with lettuce, raisins, apples, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and chopped tomatoes, fruit, coffee, and bread pudding.         

           One thing I have continuously failed to do here is exercise. I went running once and was forced to go on a hike with IES at the beginning which resulted in being unable to move for several days, however, this was not sufficient. There is a gym exactly thirty seconds from my door. I decided today I would go with my housemate, Alba, she is a few years older than me and is from Barcelona. We have two spare rooms in the house that Josefina, my host mom, rents out. It is pretty cool to live with so many different people. I bought a month long gym membership (exactly the amount of time I had before I returned home) and went to a Zumba class with Alba It was so much fun and I though it was so cool that i could understand the instructors instructions and follow along so easily. I don’t think I would’ve been able to do that two months ago.

We finished off the night by going to Hannigans and Sons Irish Pub for monday night trivia night. My friends and I heard about this a few weeks ago and tried it out last week. It is an absolute blast! Even though we ended up with 12th place out of 13 we had so much fun just talking with other competitors between rounds.

Hannigans and Sons Irish Pub

            This was probably one of my favorite days in Granada because I got to experience so many different sides of the city.

View of Granada from the Alhambra