Ugh rain! I thought Vancouver had alot of rain. I stand corrected. Spain has ALOT of rain. It doesn’t drizzle either – it comes down in a downpour just out of the blue and then 10 minutes later it stops.
Today I awoke to my first full day in Granada. It started out rain-free – just cloudy and grey – so I went on a walking tour of the city. There were only 3 of us on the tour which kind of sucked but we made the most of it. Nick, our tour guide is a transplant from London for the last 3 years and knew alot about the city.
The stories I’ve heard on walking tours have been great. They will make for great tales to share when I return home. Today we saw churches, an ancient bath house, orange trees and gardens. We learned that ice wasn’t always as easy to get as it is now and people used to hike for 9 hours to bring some down from the mountains. And the color purple was an expensive color to make because the shells were only found seas away until a guy named Mauve came around and changed everything becoming rich in the meantime.
On the walking tour I met Natalie who is herself on an extended vacation – she is currently on month 9 of 12 months. She seemed so carefree and relaxed. No blog. No computer. Just out there. It got me to thinking what I’m doing on my trip. Maybe I am spending too much time on the blog, on photo uploads, on taking videos and facebooking. I’m sure as the time goes by all of that will reduce and the “old” me will slowly transform into the “new” me. It’s hard to change old habits. Let’s face it – my laptop and I are very good friends!
Anyway, back to the day.
As the tour ended it started pouring rain and I was in my shoes and jeans as opposed to the waterproof pants and boots I had bought a couple of weeks in Lisbon. Needless to say I was soaking wet and miserable by the time I reached the hostel.
At this point the day became a “stay in the hostel” kind of day. In the early evening I stopped by the supermarket and picked up some pork chops, veggies and rice and then prepared a meal (and homemade sangria) for myself and my hostelmates. It was fun to cook again after eating out for so many days. The best part about cooking for a group of people – they offer to clean up all the pots and pans later. Nice!
After dinner we all kind of just hung out and chatted. Of course a couple hours later it was time to go out for some tapas because a day is not complete in Spain without sangria and tapas! Myself, Nate (my fellow Canadian I met last night) and Jase (new guy from Maryland) headed down the street. A few tapas and couple sangrias and beers later we went back to the hostel to play… wait for it… POKER!
I haven’t played poker in about 6 months and I kind of missed it. We only had a handful of poker chips someone had left behind so we improvised and used batteries and torn pieces of paper.
Mal, our newlywed from Melbourne, cleaned up. He won the whopping sum of zero dollars! Oh, and the pride of beating two Canadians.
Not bad for an Aussie… eh?
