I Like My Skin Medium Rare

Hey all! Sorry for the long absence--I just found out that we don't have access to the internet on the weekends! How sad :( Anywho I have been a busy beaver since we talked last. Busy relaxing and not doing a whole lot that is :P
Thursday was the religious procession for Corpus Christi, which was long and extremely repetitive, so we gave up on that after about 20 minutes. Then we went to one of the plazas (that's the nice part about Granada--there are plazas everywhere with big fountains and benches and stuff. Absolutely gorgeous and helps me keep my bearings in the city as to where I am)to get gelato and there just happened to be this big open-air artisan market, so we wandered around for a bit. The art here is different from the US but I love it. It's very clay and ceramic-based and VERY colorful. Beautiful. After that my friend MJ and I wandered down to the river and then to Garcia Lorca Park, which is absolutely beautiful.
Something strange I've noticed about parks in Spain: a lot of them have this...what looks like playground equipment, except it's really workout equipment. Like a grown-up playground, with work-out machines modified into metal park equipment. For example, there is on that you sit on and then you push up on these handle bar things, but instead of being connected to weights, it is connected to the seat, so you have to push your own weight up. It's pretty cool (and pretty funny) except the genius who invented these park work-out mechanisms didn't realize that METAL would be a bad idea in Spain. I'm pretty sure I legitimately burned my flesh.
Also on Thursday was the fair. Let me tell you, I kind of felt like a spoiled American after going to that fair. It was like a state fair, lots of games and rides and food and drink tents, but it wasn't anything super special, only to them, it's a HUGE deal. The feria comes once a year for one week and everybody goes. Not gonna lie, it was pretty expensive, and we went on one roller coaster and almost broke our necks from the whiplash. Needless to say the safety regulations are not the same here. We got bored pretty quick and headed home for some drinks and tapas instead.
Anywho, Friday was the Alhambra.
Ugh.
I was excited, because this is a big deal thing to visit, right? Except we had to walk the whole way there, and if you didn't know, the Alhambra is on top of a hill. A big hill. And it was HOT. Plus our tour guide had absolutely no personality, and this is a 3+hour long tour, so that made it kind of miserable. By the end we were all just really hot, tired, hungry, and cranky, but I did get some pretty cool pics :)
This weekend was a lot of fun though. Saturday we all got on a bus at 10am and drove down (about 1 hour) to Almunecar, a little beach town. The group had till 6 on the beach, but me and 5 other girls got a hotel and stayed over. We spent the day on the beach and then found a really awesome paella place for dinner and sat up and chilled in the hotel. Then we got up and hit the beach again on Sunday. It was so nice--the breeze off the ocean made tanning perfect, and when you got too hot, the water was PLENTY cold to cool you off ;)Plus there were some really cool rocks and stuff that we collected. Mainly, there were all these pieces of tile that were smoothed over from the waves that were absolutely gorgeous. I'm bringing about a suitcase-load home and I'm gonna try and make jewelry out of it.
Now I'm finally home and showered and am going to go to sleep early because I have 5 hours straight of classes tomorrow. Yikes!
Abrazos y besos,
Meredith