Andalucía and all that it brings

A great part of the program here in Spain is the built-in excursions. Though traveling is great, it can be quite stressful when you have to plan everything. That is why I really enjoyed having certain excursions to major cities in Spain that were already planned out for us. Our last big trip of this semester was to Andalucía and included several towns such as: Cordoba, Sevilla, and Granada. We were really lucky because throughout the whole trip we were blessed with great weather, and though I really enjoyed the opportunity to see such amazing cites, I must confess that the trip was somewhat ruined by the group. It just seemed to be that time in the trip where everyone was sick of each other and all respect for anybody or anything just went out the window. That's why I am going to keep the text short here and just give a little picture preview of the trip.

It was quite a long bus ride to our first destination of Cordoba so needless to say I got a little bored. The drive wasn't too bad though because I got to see some of the spanish countryside. These were some really cool windmills that I saw on our drive.

When we were in Cordoba I was able to see the sunset and the sunrise--such a wonderful thing. This is a shot of the sun setting over the big cathedral.

This is a snapshot of the inside of the very large cathedral in the center of Cordoba. Not your typical cathedral, but that is because it was initially a mosque. When the catholics took it over, they decided to build the cathedral inside of the mosque instead of destroying it. It made for quite an interesting contrast and every corner you turned it changed from looking like a mosque to then looking like a cathedral again. I should know this cathedral from front to back now because I didn't know that we had a group trip planned to enter, so the day before a friend and I bought tickets and entered and then got to go back the next day with the group!

Me feeding some pigeons in the courtyard of the cathedral.

The day after Cordoba, we packed up and headed to Sevilla--a rather large city in southern Spain. This is a picture from the mezquite that is connected to the cathedral in Sevilla.

Us girls had quite the time playing with the typical Spanish fans!

Though this is not a great picture, I wanted to try to give an idea of how large the cathedral in Sevilla was. I am not sure on what number it is, but I know it is in the top five in the world in terms of size.

One of the places I was looking forward to going to all semester was the Alhambra in Granada. Here is a shot of some of the detail in the main palace.

A shot of some of the flowers inside the city of the Alhambra.

This gives another idea of how detailed the main palace was. Literally the entire building was covered in decorations like this.