Happy Canada Day (tomorrow)!

Tomorrow is Canada Day and I think I will feel a bit lonely over here then as this is the first year I can remember not having fellow Canadians (or at least honourary Canadians) around to celebrate with. Instead, I will be working . . . maybe I will find something red to wear though!

So to all of you out celebrating back home - I wish you a lovely and safe day. Send me a message and let me know what you did!

Happy 143rd Birthday Canada!

Granada, Spain (pop 300,000)

I will now attempt to blog about Granada once more!

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GoogleMap of Granada, Spain

For me, there are two highlights that stick out in my mind from my visit to Granada. The first, the Alhambra – an amazing old fort/palace on top of a hill overlooking the city of Granada. The second, free tapas with every drink you order. Apparently, Granada is one of the few places in Spain that still does this. At first, we weren't sure if the food would be free or not – perhaps they were just bringing us food and if we ate it we would be charged? No! It turns out they just like to make sure you have something delicious to eat while you consume a soothing and refreshingly cold beer. I only have three words to say about this: I like Granada.

Alhambra outside walls

The Alhambra was first built in the 9^th century, when it was a fortress. Since then, several palaces, hotels, beautiful gardens and even bookshops have been added! The first area we visited was the rose garden. It was simply beautiful and we had some pretty spectacular views to the snow capped mountains in the Sierra Nevada as well.

Prettiest rose ever in the rose garden + buildings

Snow capped mountains of the Sierra Nevada

From there, off we went to explore the different buildings and palaces. There were so many different buildings to look at that we ended up spending an easy 4 hours checking out the Alhambra, and we didn't even make it to the other set of gardens at Generalife. It was definitely worth it though! The views over the city and the Sierra Nevada, as well as the detailing of the mosaics and tiles in one of the palaces were simply breathtaking.

Buildings inside the Alhambra

View through archway over Granada

Beautiful archways

Marco?

Polo! Well, Polo was the name of the wee car I hired this past weekend when my friend Brandon came to visit from Edinburgh. Finally, I was able to drive a manual car in the UK completely on my own. In Canada, driving a manual (aka standard) car is pretty uncommon. Most people drive automatics while in the UK pretty much everyone drives a manual car. Apparently, automatics are considered "old people's cars" - who knew???

I successfully drove around in my wee Polo for 3 whole days. Well, "success" is a relative term I suppose. It didn't start off so well - I couldn't figure out how to shift the car into reverse. The "R" for reverse was next to the "1" for Gear 1, but for some reason I couldn't get the gear shift to, um, shift to that position. Brandon didn't know either . . . luckily we had yet to leave the car park of the car hire place, so I went inside and did the dumb blond routine. We then discovered that the only way to get the gear shift into the reverse position was to press down on the gear shift first and then push it to the left. Oh, technology, how you mock me.

Upon finally leaving the car dealership, I managed to stall on the very first roundabout we came to (about 30 m from the dealership). It was the first of many stalls over our weekend together. Poor Brandon was a bit of a guinea pig for my driving abilities! I think he'd get back into a car with me, but maybe not for a while . . .

So, success wise . . . well, the good news is that no one was killed or injured in the driving of this vehicle.