jueves, 21 de marzo de 2013

Granada. The city of the wonderful Alhambra.

I was the lucky girl whose plain went back to Tenerife only 3 days after the evaluation training ended so I could stay a weekend in Granada. I stayed with a new friend's place, Eva, a wonderful Spanish girl who lives in Granada studying translation. I love to see new cities through the eyes of local people. Right on my arrival day she showed me the university and church area, we had a fantastic bio-organic lunch together and later I walked up to Alhambra. There are sometimes when people expect something huge and they have to be disappointed. Well, this can not happen with your expectations about Alhambra. It is exactly that magical as everybody says!


Upside down or not?

My favourite part is always the one with water...


I took at least a hundred pictures only of the windows here. It was such a beautiful view from everywhere and these Arabic architecture elements made me feel like in the tale, Arabian Nights.

This is the view from the Alhambra with the palm tree and the snowy mountains


And this is the view to the Alhambra from the opposite side, Mirador St. Nicolas


The next and final day of my trip was full of surprises and new really nice experiences. I spend the day more like a local than a tourist. I talked a lot with people on the streets, we went to different tapas bars and we were not rushing through the whole city, but enjoying it from moment to moment.

This was my favourite shopping place in Granada. They are selling different teas everywhere, but when I say different, imagine 30-40 different ones. I finally chose Pina Colada with real pineapple, coconut and other pieces of fruit in it. But there were another type too which should be prepared with milk instead of water. The owner of this place was also a super kind person who explained me the stories behind the different names of the teas and the interesting ways of preparation.

Andalusia is really famous from its tapas bars. Here if you order a drink, it could be a beer, a coke or in my case a pineapple juice, you can choose one tapas for free...or let's say included in the price:) 

All in all there is only one word to describe this weekend: Perfect!


lunes, 18 de marzo de 2013

Málaga. The mid-term evaluation!

Ladies and Gentlemen!

Believe it or not here we are, at the mid-term evaluation which supposes to be at the middle of our projects, but unfortunately in my case it is closer to the end now. Anyway, you have to know that in a long-term EVS project there are two trainings. The first one was in Candelaría, and if I would know how to do references in a blog I could refer to one of my previous entries, but without this knowledge I can only say that you could find a few entries under this one. The second one was last week in Málaga. Okay, to be precise, it was in a small town 65 km away from the city. But we could arrange our flight ticket one day before the training started so we could visit the city and make an EVS volunteers photo shooting:)




La Alcazaba of Málaga

After the one day holiday the serious work has started. We had a lot of lectures and presentations about how to be a better volunteer, how to improve our projects, how to handle conflicts and other quite useful and interesting topics. It was always more like a discussion than a presentation. The European volunteers from all over Spain have shared their experiences and opinions. I enjoyed it very much and I also felt the improvement on my Spanish knowledge as the whole seminar was held in Spanish.
One day we had a special trip to Antequera, where in different teams we participated in a discovery game. We got a map and had to follow a certain way to find things in the city and to fulfill different task such as promoting the Youth in Action Programme among local young people. Here you can see that our team was super effective and we convinced many of the to give it a try:)

Posturing with the leaflet of Youth in Action


After this wonderful 5 days, getting to know a lot of new people and enjoying every steps of our own evaluation we headed to Granada for the weekend, but that is the story of the next entry...