Granada!

Hey everyone! So last week at the Rueda de Prensa, some of the Rotarians mentioned something about a meeting in Granada in a few weeks. Of course I was excited and wanted to go, but I didn't hear much else about it for awhile. As I mentioned, last weekend was a holiday weekend so I didn't communicate with any Rotary people. Well, on Thursday evening I get a message from Ignacio saying to call Alfredo (my host counselor) about when we were leaving for Granada. Mixed emotions: Yes! I get to go to Granada; combined with wow, this came out of nowhere. I talked to Alfredo and it turns out we were going to leave early Saturday morning and get back later Saturday evening, so just a day trip.

Ignacio and Alfredo came to pick me up bright and early on Saturday morning (7:00 am) and we made the trek to Granada. Now, google maps told me that the trip should take about 3 hours. Wrong, not with Ignacio driving. We made it in less than 2.5 hours. Ignacio was asking me if I drove in the U.S. and I said yes, and then he asked if there were speed limits, and I said yes, and then he asked if people obeyed them, and I said for the most part, but with a certain margin of error. We have police officers out there on the highways making sure people don't go too fast. Not so in Spain. The speed limit isn't even a guideline. It's more, go as fast as you want without killing yourself or anyone else. There were occasional sensors called speed controllers, but Ignacio's GPS beeped when one was coming up and he slowed down. It was crazy. I can say with almost 100% certainty that I will not be driving a car in this country.

Crazy driving aside, the drive was beautiful. We left when it was dark so I got to see the sun rise over the mountains and it was beautiful. In the Andalucian countryside there is nothing buy olive trees for as far as the eye can see. It is pretty impressive. We got to Granada at about 9:30 and the meeting was set to start at 10. Now, I didn't really know what this meeting was about, but Alfredo and Ignacio explained it to me on the way. It was a meeting for Rotary clubs in Andalucia where each club presents a community project that they are working on, then all of the clubs vote for their favorite of the projects. The winner gets 4,000 euro to go toward their project. In the morning were all of the presentations. There were six presentations that covered a range of themes. Two of the projects dealt with helping women and children who have been victims of domestic violence (including my club's), one dealt with distribution of food, another was working to build a school, one aimed to help the homeless population, and the winning project (Club of Granada-Alhambra) sought to help people suffering from neuro-degenerative diseases.

After the presentations we went on a tour of the city. It is a beautiful city whose claim to fame is the ancient moorish castle, La Alhambra. It is also much smaller than Sevilla. I am posting some pictures that I took on the tour, but I'm homing to get to go back to Granada again for more than 7 hours! After the tour we headed back to the Facultad de Derecho (the law school at the University of Granada) for lunch. I met a woman from a club near Málaga knew all about Cincinnati because her ex-husband worked at Procter and Gamble for 30 some years. She was an incredibly interesting person who has lived all over the world and speaks several different languages. I'm hoping to visit her club in Málaga someday.

On the drive home we added one more to our numbers. The District Governor Pedro Valenzuela had spent the night in Granada so we gave him a ride home. On the way back, we stopped in a small town to buy some little pastry typical of Granada called Piononos. Marta explained to me that they are called Piononos because some pope (Pio plus some roman numeral) visited Granada and they were his favorite pastry. Funny. And yes, they are quite tasty.

I slept for most of the ride back, but I woke up when we got to Sevilla. Now driving to a city in Spain is not like in the U.S. where you see the skyline with all the huge skyscrapers, because there are no skyscrapers here. We could see the Giralda and Plaza de España, but that was about it. But it was the first time were I was really able to see how big Sevilla is! It's quite expansive. Wikipedia tells me the population is about 703,000 with a population density of about 5,000 habitants per kilometer squared (Cincinnati has a population density of about 1,600). Everyone just lives in much closer proximity here!

Here are some of the pictures I took!

José Luis, the Sevilla Club's president, is presenting our clubs project.

The Cathedral of Granada.

More Cathedral.

This is me in front of a statue of Christopher Columbus at the feet of Queen Isabel of Spain. He is asking her for the money to travel to the New World (and we all know how that story ends!).

Pretty church on the main drag in Granada.

While in Granda, I met Yuri, a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar from Japan who is studying Spanish Linguistics in Granada. She was really cool and spoke incredibly for only having had studied Spanish for 3 years (and in Japan none the less!). The guy on the right is Alfredo, my host counselor.

This is the motto of Granada (sorry it got caught off, the sun made it a bit tricky to take the picture). It translates to "Give him money, woman, because there is nothing in life like the pain of being blind in Granada."