Sacromonte pics

This past week has been very relaxed. Not a whole lot to report-- I´ve got a hostel booked in Istanbul, Megan and I are approaching a plan of sorts for meeting up in Spain after I get back from Turkey. It really hasn´t hit me yet, but I´ll be in Turkey...practically in Asia...able to straddle two continents...in all of 5 days. More to come on this...I´m guessing that sometime Tuesday afternoon I´ll be freaking out about how cool that is.

We had a soccer game on Wednesday night. Fútsol. Not a typo-- that´s what they call soccer played on a much smaller, much more made-of-stone court with teams of six. It was fun, but frustrating. One consequence of having a group composed of 60-some girls and 18 guys is that the group sports teams can´t really compete with teams with the opposite gender proportions. We´re really a pretty decent team, all things considered, but the Iowa State boys we played were very competitive, very fast, and had far more people who actually play soccer than we do. Still fun, I guess, but we got whipped. Turns out I curse a lot, and at a high volume, when I play sports. Huh.

So that was Wednesday-- last night was pretty tranquilo. Went to one of the bars we frequent, played some pool (which made me miss playing daily), wrapped things up around 3. Eddie went to Camborrio, the club up on Sacromonte, and ended up getting home around 6. He´d be the first to tell you that that´s an early night at Camborrio. That place is wild. I didn´t have the energy.

Today Paula took about 25 of us up through Sacromonte to the Abbey. Long, steep walk that rewarded us with a terrific view.

After sitting around for about a half hour waiting for another group to move through the abbey, we took our tour. There´s a museum with a pretty great collection of paintings, a map of Granada from the 16th century along with the original silver printing plates, a letter from Francisco Pizarro to Charles V, and a whole bunch of other stuff. We toured the museum, the small church, and the caves where it is believed San Cecilio was martyred. Pretty cool stuff all around.

In other news, I finally figured out how to use the manual focus feature on my camera effectively: