So I haven't written anything in a while: here's some of the stuff I've been doing!

A couple weeks ago I visited the Cathedral of Granada, which is a glorious old Romanesque/Gothic church with lovely soaring ceilings and an excessively ornate altar area and an ambulatory and everything! I walked in and this huge sense of peace just washed over me, and I looked up at the vaulted ceiling, painted white, and was almost overwhelmed by the beauty around me. It's one thing to read about Gothic churches in art history books and see pictures of their beauty, but it's something entirely different to actually be in one. I walked all around the ambulatory, stopping at all the chapel apses dedicated to different saints, and looked at the big sculptures of Saint John I think it was in his different guises: one of him as a pilgrim, very harmless-looking and holy, and another of him as Juan Matamoros--John the Moor-killer. Not so harmless, especially as there was a sculpture depicting him mounted on a white steed in the process of stepping on the neck of a Muslim. Lovely. All in all, though, the church was rather spectacular.

Since then a lot of things have happened, such as the start of an intercambio program, whereby we English speakers learning Spanish get paired up with Spanish speakers learning English for purposes of mutual practicing and learning about cultures and all that good stuff. I've hung out with my intercambios a couple times since then, going out and doing various things around the city. Once we went to a free Swedish movie (in Swedish with Spanish subtitles) at the public library, and the other night my roommate and I and a few Spaniards went out for sushi tapas (talk about mixing cultures!), where Salo demonstrated some rather impressive artistic skills using a napkin, a chopstick, and soy sauce ink. Then we went to an "Irish" pub, getting back to our room, in true Spanish fashion, at about four in the morning. Actually that's pretty early for a Spanish Friday night, but it was pretty good for us.

Today was/is the festival of the Virgin of the Anguishes (it's a lot prettier in Spanish), the patroness of Granada, and they had a big parade. too bad it looked like rain, or I would have gotten to see a giant beautiful statue of the Virgin herself.

I'll write more when my computer's not ab out to die!