Professor Sharon

It is 23:45 and we are in our Riad in Marakeesh!! 🙂 An exciting taxi ride; and walk through several blocks of the old quarter to our place we’re sleeping for two nights — the sights and sounds were amazing (including the little boy attempting to unzipper our luggage as another boy (who we paid) pulled our luggage to our Riad.

But I wanted to get this posted from our last days in Granada. We are here for two nights and then go out to the desert. Stay tuned!

Thursday and Friday were holidays here in Spain. It is the end of Semana Santa (Holy Week) and so our school was closed.

We very pleased with ourselves that we finished 2 ½ weeks of classes. The last two days we did an extra class to make up for the holidays. We worried that we could sit in class 5 – 6 hours a day; but we did! We were very pleased with our teachers; not so pleased with the school as a whole. We’re interested to see what it will be like in Salamanca in April when we go to another branch of the same school. It was way too much grammar; interesting and useful of course, but not enough conversation.

I think from my experience with curriculum development that they have a certain curriculum that they cover. It involves practice with conversation within the verbs and vocabulary they are teaching, but not any practical skills. We had two different teachers a day, and one of them was fabulous – the practical knowledge and vocabulary we gained was really from her. We understand it is an immersion school; yet an example of the practical nature (or not practical nature) would be that the first hour of school on our first day they took us for an hour’s walk to orient us to the neighborhood, historical sites, etc. They did the entire thing in Spanish – refused to explain anything in English – including where the police and hospital were! And the last week of classes, it is, as I said, Semana Santa; our conversation theme for the day was: Semana Santa? NO! Navidad (Christmas)! And there were other things represented in their literature that was, shall we say loosely interpreted? We tried to see it from the point of view of what we are accustomed to in America; but still we had expected that with a computer room would come a printer – nope☺

But we really enjoyed ourselves; and we can go out to get a meal without our phrase book! So progress!

So, back to the rain…

On Thursday, our day off, we had a bocadillo (ham on baguette) and fruit from our homestay and we set off to have a walk in a beautiful garden with a picnic in mind. Ah, but the clouds quickly came in and it hailed, thundered and poured…..what a mess. We had taken our raincoats and hats, but the downpour was too heavy and we were quickly completely soaked. However – the garden was empty and we had a lovely private picnic in a grotto. Here’s a picture of Rich sitting at the bench side; and of us both – can you see how wet we are?!

That didn’t stop us; we walked onwards! We made our way back to the Alhambra (which was closest and had some old buildings open & free) and sat there a bit trying to dry off. We finally gave up and bought a couple of those tourist rain capes. Fortunately, we had good rain coats on and our chests were dry and warm, but our legs and feet were soaking. The capes worked to keep at least some body warmth in.
We then found a sweet (and expensive) place to have a cup of tea (Spain drinks coffee), and tried to dry off a bit more. But it was about 4 pm so we gave up on the rain letting up (the forecast had been for 40% chance of rain – they must have been at the same weather school as New England forecasters) and made our way home.

We were soaked! A long siesta took care of it though!

On Friday we returned in beautiful weather to the same garden and had a lovely day there. On the way home, we stopped to watch another church procession come out of its church – very interesting. And here, another adventure begins. All week we had been making a point of knowing what streets to use to try to not in stuck in the crowds, but somehow our figuring was off. Since men carry the floats, the timing they publish is only a guide and they can get quite behind. So we had to make our way around 4 processions to get to a restaurant. On the third one, a group of folks wouldn’t give way, and shouting broke out. Rich and I were attempting to make it through when people began to not give way ahead – we were suddenly being crushed. And our limited Spanish did not give us any words to shout back at them – Pardone wasn’t working.

I was behind Rich and had his hand. I grabbed his arm with my other hand, he yelled back to me, let’s go and we began to shove with all our might. We made it through quite a layer of people packed tight between two buildings; but boy I was really shaken up when we made it through. We walked about a block, found an open space, and had a breath. Whoosh.

Tonight we are in Madrid. We took a train here yesterday (another adventure when we used the Madrid Metro to get to our hotel to discover at 11 at night that the connecting line was shut-down – ah, but another time!)

We leave tomorrow for our adventure in Morocco where our son and daughter-in-law will join us for a week’s vacation. I don’t know when I’ll get on again; but keep checking back. We’ll be back in Madrid and I promise some interesting photos of Morocco!

P.S. Here we are on our last night in Granada watching the sunset on the Alhambra!

An extra P.S. for our Avi-do: Here you are keeping us company whenever we open our suitcase☺