Hi all!
Just got back from Granada, Spain on an excursion with my program. Granada is a town in southern Spain, in the mountains, about 6 hours from Madrid. Its a cool town...about 250,000 residents and a quarter of them are students...its not far from the Sierra Nevada Ski Resort and also close to the beach. Yesterday, we arrived in Granada around 1pm and ate lunch at our hotel. We all loooove going on trips with our program because they get us really nice hotels and always feed us well...wahoo. After lunch we went to the Cathedral and Royal Chapel. It was nice..but...I'm kinda getting cathedraled out. We are also getting a little snobby because after seeing the Vatican and the Duomo...it's hard to compare..you know? Anyway...it's still cool to see them. After that we had free time...we shopped and got icecream. We had dinner at our hotel and then we all went out to a couple of bars in the area. I love going out with our whole program...there were about 60 of us there and it's just nice to have everyone in the same place! This morning we went to the Alhambra. It's what Granada is known for and it was really amazing. Throughout history it's been "a palace, a citadel, a fortress, the home of the Nasrid sultans, high government officials, servants of the court, and elite soldiers"...today, it's divided into four areas-- The Palaces, the Military Zone (the alcazaba), the city of Medina, and the agricultural estate of the Generalife. We seriously couldn't have picked a better day for this tour...it was gorgeous outside and all the flowers were beautiful...it took us about 3 hours to walk around everything, but it was really relaxxxxing and fun. We also had a funny tour guide so he made it interesting. We had lunch back at our hotel and then headed home to Madrid.

-There were so many times on this trip when I just stopped and thought about how thankful I am for these people in my life...these girls are just so solid...it's amazing how quickly we've all bonded...it's been 3 months and feels like we have known eachother for years...its great. We all came into this experience by ourselves, not knowing what to expect or who we were going to meet...I know we've all been pleasantly surprised about how well we all get along...and we all realize that these friendships will for sure continue in the states. i'm thankful.

-random...but another fact from my women's roles class... did you know that women in sweden get 96 weeks off of paid maternity leave? can you beliiiiieve that? man oh man.

hope you all had a great weekend :)
pictures will be up soon!