Hammam Experience

Daily Drena: Beneath mounds of lather

For Valentine’s Day, Drew treated me to a Hammam experience, which is a traditional Arab bath and massage ritual. Perfect timing after being sore from the weekend hikes! Other students in our class had been going and I was very curious about it.

http://granada.hammamalandalus.com/en/

It was definitely a unique experience. The total session was about 1.5 hours long. There were about 5 other people in the session at the same time as mine. No shoes were allowed beyond the dressing room, and from the front desk to the dressing room I had to wear shoe covers.

The baths were basically fancy pools or big hot tubs. They had large columns and fountains in the baths for ambiance. I dipped in the three baths of different temperatures; cold, medium, and hot, until it was my turn for the massage. In the massage, I got lathered and scrubbed up with a bubble bath mixture and then a 15 min massage. Then it was back to the pools or sauna to relax, and to have tea in the tea room. The entire place was dimly lit and very soothing and surprisingly big. It was pretty cool experience, but I think I’d choose to have more massage next time. 🙂

Images from: Hammam Al Andalus

Las Alpujarras – A Day Trip

Daily Drena: Counting Our Lucky Stars

Today was quite the adventure.

Last week, Drew had found a hiking trail in Las Alpujarras so we decided to go this week. He planned the bus route, a 2+hour each way round trip going to to the town where the trail started and leaving from the town were the trail ended. He planned the 40 min it took to walk to the bus station and practiced how to tell the person at the bus station which tickets we wanted. From there, we relied on good luck because even though we can say some things in Spanish, it doesn’t mean we can understand the response. Apparently there are two different buses (not indicated on their website), and one stops outside of town and the other stops inside of town. Even though the attendant lady rolled her eyes at us (the first time anyone has ever expressed annoyance with us not knowing the language), instead of sending us on our way to fend for ourselves, she took us to an attendant who spoke English and explained our open ticket home situation, which allowed us to choose either return bus.

We somehow managed to get off on the correct stop, take the wonderful hike with hardly anyone else around, and make it to the 2nd town. But there was no indication of where a bus might stop in this town. After walking almost out of town and realizing we weren’t going to find it on our own, we mustered up the nerve to ask some locals. Lucky we did because they pointed us in the opposite direction, said a lot of things for which we nodded yes, and were very friendly. As we tried to decipher the words they said (we actually did pick up a few!), they drove away in the direction we were going, but then stopped in front of us. Apparently, they realized we weren’t going to make it in time and told us to stand right there and flag the bus down. It was perfect timing because two minutes later, the bus came! We made it back home with no problems, realizing how lucky we were because each little event could have turned out drastically different.

Feliz Cumpleaños!

Daily Drena: Much to celebrate

Feliz Cumpleaños to Drew! For his birthday, Alvaro, the teacher for our first session, “treated him” by choosing him to write his homework on the board. We also sang to him in Spanish, and in the second session, the other students brought us all birthday magdalenas (muffins) to celebrate. After class we finally found the hike we’d been trying to do all last week and then cozied up in our nearby crepes place before heading home to work. It’s kind of difficult to work on a Friday evening, but we had a good afternoon of playtime. It’s amazing how crowded the streets are, and wonder if it’s because it’s Valentine’s Day, or just that it’s a Friday night. Or maybe a bit of both. We got excited at the thought that maybe we can get in and do our laundry tonight because everyone else is out on the town, but alas, the single Holland guy snuck in ahead of us.