This weekend I continued to explore more outside of Alicante: I went to Granada. It was quite a struggle to get there; every type of transportation I was trying to use was failing (blablacar, train, etc). Finally, on the morning of leaving, my friend and I bought two of the last tickets for a 5 hour bus ride that would take us to Granada. The bus wasn't that bad. I read on my iPad until it died with 2 hours left to go. Luckily there was a TV in the front that I could see, and for the last hour I watched Abducted (with Taylor Lautner) in Spanish. It's not that hard to watch movies that you've already seen in Spanish, because you know what's already going on. On Wednesday I went to the movie theater and saw the new movie with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore where their families go to Africa for vacation. That was a different story, since I'd never seen it before. However, since it was a romantic comedy, and those all have similar endings, it wasn't hard to follow along.
Last night we stayed at a hostel for the night. There were two others staying in the same room with us, a Chinese girl and a Spanish boy. The staff were really nice (a mom and dad), but the dad didn't know how to stop talking after it took him 15 minutes to just show us a map. There was wifi and free breakfast, but of course it wasn't the Hilton's. But that's what you get with 16€ I guess.
Today started out a bit of a disaster when we couldn't find the meeting point of the free tour our hostel offered us. Instead, we made the decision to follow a group of people speaking English, but it turned out we only just followed them to their hotel on the outskirt of the city. Feeling a little silly, we made our way back to the central and walked around until we found the Cathedral (not hard to find, it's pretty big actually). We jumped on with a free walking tour in front of the cathedral, and learned a lot from the girl giving the tour. We followed her for a bit longer until it was time for our tour of the Alhambra - the famous Arabic palace in Granada.
The Alhambra was gorgeous, the architecture was unbelievable. I took so many pictures that Elorri (my friend) told me on our way back that I had already taken a picture of what I was currently taking a picture of. There were gardens and fountains surrounding the palace, and if it wasn't 100 degrees we might've stayed longer.
Unfortunately, that was all we really had time for. Our ride back to Alicante was picking us up at 5pm, so we scarfed down a quick lunch (hamburger and lasagna... Sometimes you don't lose your roots) and met our blablacar driver at the gas station down the street. She was waiting with her girlfriend, and helped us get our stuff in the car and then we were off! Only 3.5 hours by car, so that made it a little better. We listened to Rihanna and Alanis Morisette for most of the ride (I heard "To the left, to the left" three times and "It's like rain on your wedding day" twice) and I finished The Fault in Our Stars (which despite all the hype because there is a movie for it now, it is actually a really good book. I can go see the movie now then). We arrived back home with no complications. It was a nice, sort-of spontaneous trip!