Garrett in Spain!

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Posted 10-2-03:

the last real email i sent you, i was about to leave for cadiz and ronda. well i will pick up from there. by the way this was three weekends ago. ok. i am going back in time.

it is friday at 4:00 pm and i am off to cadiz which i think is about three hours away. i arrive in cadiz at around nine (5 hours not 3) and i grab for my back pack to get out my guide book so i can find a hostel
for the night. by the way a hostel is a very cheap hotel without the luxuries: tv, ac, bathroom, etc. (and like most college students i was not smart enough to reserve a room in advance).

so i am digging through my massive back pack and sure enough i can not find my guide book...i left it in granada along with the map of the city, so i am left not knowing where i am and i am without a map. well 'dont panic' i tell myself.

i will have no problem finding a hostel in cadiz since cadiz is a very popular city. well, you have no clue how popular cadiz happened to be this weekend.

at 11:30 after the 10th hostel i had visited, i found a room and sure enough it was more expensive than i wanted to spend, but i was tired of looking so i took it. the lady in charge of the hostel was very nice and explained to me that i would have my own room in a empty apartment... (well, that is what i thought she said). when i got to my room it was a disaster area. there were wine bottles everywhere and cigarettes on the floor and happened to have three Spanish girls living there as well. she failed to mention this to me.

so anyways on to the next day...since i had walked the city for 2 and a half hours the night before, i knew the inner city pretty well. i don't know how to explain it other than "precioso". i absolutely loved it. to me it was a big fredericksburg in the inner city. shop after shop after shop. don't worry, i did not buy anything... i was on a mission to find a hostel for the night.

well after walking for about 5 hours throughout the city i gave up on the hostel ordeal. i was out of luck so i did the next best thing: i was going to go to the bus station and begin my voyage to ronda. i do have to say this, my time in cadiz was great--it is a beautiful city with a lot of history.

well when i got to the bus station it happened to be 3:00 pm and the last bus to ronda left at 2:30. just great, i thought. well i had been reading up about cadiz and the surrounding area and i read about a place that christopher columbous met the owner of the santa maria. the city was called "el puerto de santa maria", so i decided to go there for the night.
I left at about 4 and got there a little after 4:15pm.

when i got there i went to hunt down a city map. well after a hour of walking around i gave that up since i could not find one and walked back to the train station to ask them where the bus station was, and from what i got from the man was this
"what bus station?"

After about 45 minutes of waiting at my bus stop, where i was dropped off, i walked to a local vendor and asked him where the bus to cadiz left from and he let me know that i was approximately a block away from where i had been sitting. so i went to
the bus stop and sure enough about 15 minutes later i was on my way back to cadiz.

i was a little worried about what to do next since i was arriving in cadiz around seven and buses usually dont run too late and when i arrived i found out that i missed the 7:00pm bus but there was a 9:00pm bus heading back to granada. thank god.

so i got back to granada and gave my family a call, they happened to be celebrating my stepfathers 50th birthday and the whole family was there. i think i called them at around 8:30pm their time, which was around 3:30am here. yeah that is what time i got back from my bus ride, and that was my adventure to cadiz and (ronda).

the next weekend i decided to stay in town. (this was 2 weekends ago). i went to a play called "un noche de desnudo" which some would translate as "a night of nudity". it was magnifico but boring in the same sense. it was only two people in the
play, in the same room, and no break, but i was amazed that two people could memorize their lines for that length of time.  the next night i went to a flamenco show with one of the best flamenco guitarists in spain---his name is tomantito... it
was great and very long.

The concerts here are different than the concerts in the states: they have the best first and the others afterwards so one does not have to stay the whole evening to see the best artist. The concert started at around 9:15pm and i left around 1:30am. it was a lot of music and very entertaining.

The next school week was a blur...all i did was study and sleep to prepare for my "examen de nivel" (level exam, or placement exam). but i am through with that and i received my classes today (but we will talk about that in a bit).

this past weekend i went to cabo de gato, which is a huge natural park. it consists of a lot of small towns and a couple of cities. for those that know this, i hate the ocean. i love to go to the ocean because it is very pretty and tranquil, but i
hate to swim in salt water, so while everyone went swimming i went backpacking. i probably hiked 5 hours on Saturday and found some absolutely beautiful beaches that were completely empty. i have never seen a completely empty beach before, (in middle of the day) but i think someone would think i was crazy to crawl the bluffs, cliffs, and hills that i climbed to get there. so being all alone i thought it would be nice to sit and read, so Gulliver's Travels kept me company which was good
because i needed to finish it before monday.

we left on sunday to come back to granada. when i got back i ate and headed out for the loved yet hated plaza de toros. it was to be my first experience of a bull fight. to put it bluntly it was the cruelest entertainment i have ever seen.

as i mentioned before i needed to finish gullivers travels...well there was a reason for that: on monday i went to see the play, which i thought was going to be in spanish and i wanted to know what was going on. well, to my surprise it was not in
spanish, yet there was no language...there was no talking at all, only acting and some of the best graffics\special effects i have ever seen. i read in my handout, for gullivers travels, that they had traveled to 44 countries with this play. it was
great.

last night i went to the alhambra which was a small city for the king (i think). it was absolutely the prettiest landscape\monument that i have been to thus far. I will send pictures as soon as i get my software.

Today i got my class schedule. i got all but one classes that i wanted. i wanted literature, grammar, speaking and writing skills, geography, spanish civilization and culture, and if i could not get one of those i wanted to have a business course.
well i did not get into literature but that is okay. i can take that next semester. This weekend i am going to lay low and try to save some money. I don't know of anything important going on.

Oh i am going on a blind date on thursday with Sole, a spanish girl. She is a friend of a friend...hahaha...i hope she is a knockout as well as nice. Well i hope all is well in the states. and keep in contact.

"besos" to all the pretty girls back home
--parker