M.R. la Exploradora

One of the best things to do when trying to accustom yourself to a new city is just explore.  Yesterday after class I took the long way home, and noticed a really pretty fountain along the way.  There are a lot of fountains here, and if you know how much I love that fountain on Lawrence's campus, it shouldn't surprise you that this makes me very happy.  I plan to create a little "fountain walking tour" for myself at one point. So, anyway, I sat on a bench nearby to read a book on my kindle, because I had a bit of time before lunch. Then I thought: I can read these books on my kindle any time, but while I'm in Spain I should take advantage of all of the Spanish books available to me.  So later in the afternoon I stopped by the ISA office and borrowed "Harry Potter y el prisionero de Azkaban" from their library.  Then I wandered around that neighborhood for a bit until I found a bench to sit and read on.  Every so often, I decided to get up and look for a new place.  At one point, I was climbing a really steep hill, but of course when I got to the top the view made the climb worth it.  I discovered a park in an area I had never been to before, so that was cool.  Later that evening I went out with my roommate Cindy and our friend Jackee.  We enjoyed some tapas and then set out to find a concert in a park that we had heard about.  The park was further away than we had anticipated, and when we got there we realized it wasn't exactly a concert, but more like a carnival that had some tents with music.  It was still pretty cool.

This morning it was raining a bit, and it was pretty chilly the whole day.  My host mom said this was very strange weather.  (The way she was talking about how much rain we got, you would have thought there was a flood.)  Here, it mostly only rains in March and April.  This afternoon we planned to go to a museum, but it was closed for renovations, so we decided to just explore.  We walked to where we could the the Alhambra, and stopped in look into some of the shops that were along the way.  It was a fun afternoon.

Here you can see the tops of the towers of the Alhambra.

I just took this picture because I thought the sky looked cool.
I haven't seen too many clouds since I've been here.  It's very sunny most of the time.

As we were heading home, we noticed a crowd of people looking into one of the side streets in our neighborhood.  There was some sort of procession going on.  When we went to go check it out, we saw musicians, people marching with staffs and crosses, and a whole bunch of people carrying a float with candles and a statue with Our Blessed Mother and the Child Jesus.  There was also lots of incense.  I thought it was pretty interesting that this was happening on a random side street, but it was cool that we bumped into it.