Tuesday August 29 – El Escorial Tour/ Arriving in Granada/ Lost Home

                We left for El Escorial, which is yet another beautiful city with lots of hills. We visited the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo del Escorial, it was interesting but what blew me away was the church. The church was HUGE and I cannot imagine building that in that time period. They also had a burial area for the kings and other royalty far below the ground made completely from marble and gold. Only the bones are placed in the casket, they wait about forty years for the body to rot so just the bones are left and then put them in there. There were two casket spots left so the guide did not know what the King now was going to do because the two were for his older family.

                On the ride there, which was about six hours, the sights were so pretty I have never seen anything like that before. We watched Monsters Inc. and did a lot of talking and sleeping. We finally arrived to Granada where we waited for our host parents at a bus stop. Kevin and mine’s mom, Christina, arrived and we took a taxi to our apartment. Our mom is very good at English and is from Argentina but we asked her to speak to us in Spanish so we can practice. She spoke it to us and it was very hard to understand but we kept trying. Her two daughters, Maria – 20 and Jazmin – 16, introduced themselves and they talked very fast. Our mom has been having students from all over the world live in her apartment for two years and I believe it is her only job. Our apartment has four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, a balcony, a laundry room, and a living/dining room, but it is the most compact place I have ever seen this many rooms in. Kevin and mine’s room has two beds, a tiny night stand, a closet, and shelves. The hallways in the apartment complex are motion censored and shut off if no one is in the hall for awhile. There was an Italian living there but he was leaving the next day so we did not have a chance to talk to him, also Maria was leaving for Madrid to take tests so we did not get to talk to her either. We had dinner with our mom, some chicken fried chicken.

At midnight Kevin and I went to explore the town, we ran into Parker and Adam so they walked with us and we picked up Allyson, from Kentucky with a super cool y’all accent. We looked for El Correos, the post office and our meeting spot, we found it and then looked for some place to get a beer but could not find one so we decided we should go to bed. We all walked Allyson home safely and then went as far as we could we the other two guys then we split off, this was at about 1:30 in the morning. We started to follow the map that had our house marked on it that API gave us, or so we thought it was the directions to our house. We walked and walked and walked and finally got to a street that was marked close for our house but we did not find that street specifically and we did not recognize anything around us. We even walked to an area with multiple shoes on the telephone wires and much more spray paint than usual. That area was very, very silent and quite spooky because of it, I can only compare it to the quietness of a night in the country even though we were in a large city. Kevin had the idea to go to the bus stop where we were dropped off and try finding it from there because our mom told us that our street crossed the two main streets, one of which is San Anton Street. We found the bus stop and walked in the direction that the taxi was and everything seemed more familiar. We walked up and down many streets and finally found our street, Nuevo San Anton Street; it was now about 3:15 in the morning.