Category: Photos

Paseos & More (with pics)

The real semester has started up here, and with it comes the sad reality that I’m not here on a five-month vacation. 😛

Classes in my program (Hispanic Studies) are mostly taught by University of Granada faculty who normally teach Spaniards. The classes happen at full-speed Spanish, and don’t normally stop to cover aspects of Spanish language except for a few obscure vocabulary words. My most interesting class by far is Hispanoamerican Culture & History. I haven’t been able to take history classes since my junior year of high school, so I am happy to be back in one. My class schedule is pretty similar to that of an American university, except that Study Abroad students here never have class on Fridays.

For the last few weeks, I’ve gone out to different districts of the city on my own to explore everything a bit more. The whole city center feels pretty familiar now, and I’ve started to venture a bit into a couple of areas off the tourist map of Granada. This morning I went with my friends Megan and Korie to one part of town that seemed more suburban and modern – it had a big view of the Sierra Nevada, which made me feel almost as  if I were in Colorado!

Other times I’ve explored more of the Albayzin and Sacromonte districts. It’s great how so many neighborhoods here have such distinct personalities in a small area.

I’ll post a few odds-and-ends photos from the last few weeks here – a little bit of everything from different paseos I’ve done, plus a couple of other things that don’t fit anywhere else.

Paseos & More

Photos from the first week in Granada

We’re getting pretty well settled here in Granada… Much easier to blend in a bit and feel more like a local. I’m learning the streets more and have a better sense of direction…

Today we went for a tour of the Albayzin – the historic Muslim quarter of town on a huge hill next to the Alhambra. It’s a beautiful, quieter part of town that has less roads and more footpaths. Very hilly, too. We saw a lot of great stuff and I got my first good look at the Alhambra, too.

Getting home from the tour was a bit difficult… There was a huge Gaza protest going on in the street. We wanted to  check it out, but at the same time I knew that abroad, Americans can be seen as “OMG Israel can totally do whatever the hell they want.” So we tried to lie low walking through the enormous crowd, not wanting to look very American. Hopefully with the new presidency our foreign policy might come out of the sewers so we aren’t seen as supporters of genocide.

OK, I digress. The photos:

Granada, semana primera

Writing last night’s post reminded me why I blog in the first place. Yes, it was long, and probably didn’t make much sense to anyone but myself, but all of the thought and questioning required in transforming my abstract thoughts into written form helps me understand the issue at question better – I feel a lot less “lost in it all” now than before I sat down for an hour and wrote about it.

On a completely different schedule, living in Arizona for 4 years made me forget how much I detest daylight savings time.  My body didn’t adjust to the time change at all, and now that we’ve sprung ahead, being up “late” now means 3 AM instead of 2 AM, and now it’s 6:30 PM and I feel like dinner should still be a long way off.  Stupid northern farmers. DST is useless!

One good thing about it, though, is that it’s one more sign that spring will finally be here in 11 days. That doesn’t mean much in Colorado, and I expect at least 2 more substantial snowstorms, but the sunnier, the better.

Today I saw something I haven’t seen since last summer: a bee.  More specifically, a dying bee.

bee.jpg (yes, this photo is crap. My iPhone is my “carry-around” camera, not my Canon. Just trust me, that speck in the center is a writhing bee.)

At first the bee was running all over the window frames, and had me on the edge – I frickin hate bees. But after a few minutes, it changed to rolling movements, stretching and contracting, curling up, slowly kicking its legs in what seemed like a desire to go out fighting, to never give up. Now, though, it is near motionless, a victim of its own inevitable mortality.

I think it’s weird how we rarely see most living things die. Whenever I’m around wildlife, there usually are plenty of living creatures around me, but I don’t notice a bunch of carcasses. I guess a lot of it can be chalked up to the food chain, but I have to admit that nature is very good at cleaning up after itself. But what about this bee? It died on a coffeeshop windowsill, in the unnatural urban habitat controlled by the humans. Will a scavenging spider claim it? Will it be swept up by a barista at closing time?

Likewise, it reminds me of how insignificant my own life is from a universal perspective. All the time I spend freaking out over relatively little stuff could really be spent doing better things…

Ratdog at Red Rocks

I’m back stateside!

Last night I saw Ratdog at Red Rocks. It was a great show! Their lead guitarist has throat cancer, which is unfortunate, but Steve Kimock is taking his place for a little while on the tour, which is great for a Kimock nerd like myself.

I also got to break in my new(ish) Canon. Part of the reason I got it was to improve my photos at dark concerts, which usually are so bad that I don’t even bother taking a camera along. This one has a lot more manual control, which is helpful since the automatic point-and-shoot stuff tries to take pictures with super-low shutter speeds that don’t work in a low-light venue. I could definitely get better pictures with a DSLR with an expensive lens, but for the money and time put into learning some settings, I’m pretty happy with what I got here – I fired off 455 shots and got 115 or so that I liked.

You can view the Picasa Web Album of the very best ones here. Or, if you want to see all 108 that I like, click here. They’re still noisy and a bit blurry, but I’m happy just to have the ability to take decent photos at a great show!