Hey All!

Hello from Granada, Spain! It´s been too, too crazy to try to find a place to journal every day. But I promise to do a catch up when I get back. Right now I´m in Granada, where i went (caps are too hard to try to achieve with a spanish keyboard ... sorry) to alhambra. only it was closed. i got some groovy stuff though for family and friends ... wait til you see yours jarin! ... totally negligent to how much everythingmight weigh. it´s a different world when your whole world is being carrieed on your back ...

right now i´m in a cybercafe listening to depeche mode ... i discovered whenever i got lonely for english i only had to make my way into a cafe ... voila! immediate ingles immersion!

NO ONE spoke english for the first 3 days. in fact i was the only american for that long as well. and despite how friendly i´d heard everyone in northern spain was, more often than not my attempts at communication were met with blank stares, as if i were a babbling, drooling 3 year old. let me tell you, i started feeling like a leper ... who´d lost her colony!

i pulled off the camino after day 12, for reasons i´ll share later ... not a good fit, short story, long story is better, but it was the right decision for me. heading to avila (think st. theresa of avila - i got to see where she was born!) and then more trains (which i LOVE) until i hit granada, where for the first time this whole trip i spent more than one night in the same bed. only, oddly THAT was the night i woke up without any idea where i was. I HATE THAT FEELING! and the bunk bed i was in suddenly felt like a forest house, and i felt far, far, FAR too far from the ground. luckily the german girl in the bunk across and below mine started to snore, and then i remembered!

that´s all i can write for now. off to grab my pack and grab the train to madrid!
more when i get home ...

light and love to all!
Dante.