Hey all!  Hope everything’s great back in the good old USA!  I can’t believe how busy we’re getting here in Granada… we’re all planning weekend trips to other cities or countries.  So far, I have a lot of traveling to do!

The program directors organized an overnight trip this weekend (Friday morning to Saturday night) at the Alpujarras, one of the lower peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountain range.  It’s supposedly quite a hike!  We are doing about 6 hours of hiking each of the two days and staying in a hostel in the mountains.  Rumor has it that this trip makes your legs (especially those calves!) incredibly sore a few days afterwards, so we’ll see how I do walking to class early next week!  On Sunday, a big group of us are going to a beach about 2 hours away from Granada called Nerja.  It’s supposed to be gorgeous - hopefully I will get a nice tan and not burn ;)

Next week is a very special week in Spain - it is a week full of festivals and celebrations that happens every summer and everyone has the day off on Thursday the 11th.  Taking advantage of the 4-day weekend, many students are planning trips to other cities and countries - the exciting news is that a few of us are trying to plan a trip to Lagos, Portugal and it costs less than $150 total for the bus round-trip and for the hostel for 2 nights!  I’m really excited but kind of stressed because trying to organize a group to go like this is so hard.  People want to go but then drop out and we have different classes with different people from our group so sometimes the necessary information isn’t passed along like it should be.  Hopefully we can get this all worked out though, because I would LOVE to go to Portugal while I’m here.

The weekend of June 26th, the directors of the program are also organizing a group trip to Morocco - how exciting!  A bunch of people want to go and I definitely need to go so I can get pictures of me riding a camel, haha!  That’s far off though, and no need to plan for it yet.

Other than traveling, I’ve been hanging out with my host family, going out at night with friends here, and checking out the stores in the city.  With all the souvenirs I want to bring back for myself and other people, I am worried about trying to fit it all in my suitcase coming home!  Hopefully I won’t have to pay extra money to the airline for heavy luggage haha.  Also, I am definitely already addicted to the famous bread lady’s bread stand near our school… huge croissants filled with chocolate for 75 cents?  Yeah I’ll take it!  I better be careful or I’ll go broke on just bread.

Tonight I start my salsa dancing class too!  I’m so excited - I’ll keep you posted on how that all goes.

Hope everyone’s doing well at home… more pics to come soon after all the traveling this weekend!!!

XOXO