¡Hola, chicos y chicas!

Estoy ahora en Granada!

So I got up at four AM this morning and lugged my huge, lumpy and awkward Army Surplus duffel bag full of fifty pounds of clothes and other essentials to the hotel lobby and got on a bus to the London Heathrow airport where we flew to Malaga Spain.
Flying over Western Europe is curiously like flying over a giant Atlas. Unlike America there is little topography or geology to speak of, it´s all flat with every coast line clearly drawn and every farm bordered neatly by rows of trees. Except for the golden glow of the sun on the Bay of Biscay, everything looked the same as I imagine it would in a full-scale map.
In Malaga we waited in the most crowded, poorly designed bagage claim I´ve ever seen and finally loaded into a few big white vans and drove to Granada.
Spain is browner than I thought it would be. It´s not particuarly glamorous -- it has more in common with pictures I´ve seen of South American than the kilometers closer UK -- a few palm trees, lots of broken down buildings and tan countrysides freckled with orchards of trees spaced with pixel-precision.
(The radio station in this Internet cafe is now playing "Take on Me." I don´t know why I feel compeled to mention that.)
But Granada the city is a little different. It´s all stone streets and storefronts y paques y catédrals. Once we arrived we were paired up with our host families. I´m staying in a fourth floor appartment with a widow and her adult daughter, rooming with a kid from North Carolina named Luke. The food so far is great. My Spanish is not. The city is cool. I´ll have more soon.