A short stop in Granada

To leave Alicante we had to get up early and make our way to Plaza del Toro where we were getting picked up by a local Spanish guy named Cesar and his mother. This was our first experience of using blablacar, which is a car sharing website, this allowed us to save 30 euros on our trip to Granada. Along the way Carmen had a nice little chat with Cesar's mum in her broken Spanish, which seemed to be well received.

As we were driving past the Sierra Nevada mountain national park we were treated to some lovely views of the high snowy peaks, unfortunately we never got to climb to the top due to the snow and not having the right equipment. We also passed by the cathedral town of Gaudix where a lot of the population live in houses underground or inside the mountains, we even saw a few of them from the car.

We stopped briefly at a service station for a coffee and a little chat with Cesar in my extremely limited Spanish and his slightly better English about his travels. (He had travelled quite a lot). The really pleasing thing to hear from him though was that Granada, our final destination, was his favourite city in Spain and was one of the top things in Spain I wanted to see as well!

Church in Granada with the Sierra Nevada mountains in the background

We arrived in Granada about 2pm and had a few km walk to our hostel where we checked in, we were pleased to note there was a kitchen at the hostel meaning we could cook some food for ourselves! The only negative about our hostel was that the toilet cubicles were extremely small, so small in fact that you could not sit straight on the toilet as your knees would hit the door!

The next day we went for a walk around Granada and entered what must have been one of the popular student districts (later learned it was the Albayzin and Sacromonte districts). It was really crowded with students and lots of hippies selling handmade trinkets and playing music, it was a really cool place to be. Whilst there we also bought some amazing ice cream. We got two different flavours, Ferrero Rocher and Kinder flavours! Best ice cream we had ever had!

Street musicians in Granada

Carmen with the amazing ice cream

 Along this section of the city it allowed us to additionally see the outside of the Alhambra (which we did not get to see this time around as we did not have enough time, plus you have to book well in advance).

Once out of the Albayzin district we saw the arrival of a bride for her wedding and got a few shots of her before she went inside and they shut the doors so we could not see anymore. A bit further along our walk we saw the courtyard of a Muslim Medersa, which naturally had some similarities to the ones in Morocco, but also some differences.

Bride and her father

Another highlight we saw on our walk was a group of men who were carrying a big metal framework contraption on their shoulders and necks. They were all marching in time together and had a man in front of them guiding them as they walked along. We thought this was something very odd. Little did we know at the time that this was in fact men from one the brotherhoods practising for the Semana Santa festival (Easter celebrations).

Locals practising for Semana Santa

This unfortunately was where we had to leave Granada for now as we were due in the small village of Yegen in the Alpujarras the next day to begin our workaway experience, which I shall tell you more about in our next post.