Everything About Spain

Once again, I am sitting in my room with the balcony door open to let in the street music, which is really pretty good. The group tonight has a trumpet, and I am definitely feeling that.

Today was craze-amaze! We took a rental van (driven by Ramiro, of course) out into the country about half an hour south of Granada, where we visited an old olive orchard/olive oil factory (what do you call those? What's the olive oil equivalent of a vineyard?). After checking out the trees and learning a little about the machinery used to make olive oil--and no, Mom, I didn't try to eat the olives off the trees--we got to do a little olive oil tasting.

I had joked earlier about being given a glass of oil and told to swish and spit like you do at snobby wine tastings, but that is pretty much what we ended up doing... It was pretty interesting to figure out the different flavors and what attributes make a good olive oil, but I have zero interest in drinking straight oil ever again. Luckily, there was also a bread basket and a bunch of olives to munch on, so it was pretty sweet. Literally. We tried an orange-flavored one that you pour over bread with a sprinkling of sugar. These Spaniards know their shit.

After that, we headed over to the nearby pueblo where our Spanish teacher, Ana, lives with her husband and sons. It's one of Spain's "white villages," (not a racist thing, which I assumed; the buildings are literally all white stucco) and is nestled in a little valley in the middle of the Sierra Nevadas.

Check out those mountains!

After a MASSIVE lunch (seriously massive, we had 4 courses plus drinks and bread IN ADDITION TO the oil tasting), we went for a little tour around the village with Ana's husband, who had us trek all the way up these tiny, nearly vertical streets, which had us all DYING, but did lead to a pretty sweet view. Plus we walked back down through the groves of fruit trees and snacked all the way down past figs, oranges, almonds, walnuts, corn, grapes, avocados, blackberries, pomegranates, and more. How does all that grow in one place???

We ended the day with an "afternoon snack" (it was 7pm) of local pastries and coffee at Ana's house. Her house (which has a lemon tree and a bunch of grapevines in the backyard where we ate) looks out over the whole pueblo and the surrounding mountains, and it really is absolutely beautiful. Her husband referred to Albunelas as a town that time forgot, and it's easy to see why.

Plus there are a lot of goats just roaming the streets. Hey goats.