Hotel Abades Nevada Palace

After touring the Alhambra, we hung out at our hostel all afternoon, but then we had to head over to the hotel where orientation will be held tomorrow. All together, there were 660 language assistants that were scheduled to attend the Andalucian orientation in Granada. Language assistants placed in other regions of Spain had their orientation elsewhere. Most of the European language assistants, as well as those from China stayed at the Hotel Meliá Granada, but the rest of us (North Americans, New Zealanders, and Australians) stayed at the Hotel Abades Nevada Palace.

I should have realized from the name of the hotel that we were staying at a pretty fancy place, but I had no idea that it would be like this! The hotel really is like a palace, with a beautiful swimming pool, fancy rooms, and modern bathrooms. They also fed us extremely well tonight. The first course was a cream soup of some kind, and then we had some sort of poultry (partridge maybe?), rice with a caramel sauce, and mousse for desert. Everything was delicious!


Since dinner wasn’t scheduled until 10:00 pm (a normal Spanish dinner time) and we didn’t actually eat until 10:30 pm, by the time we got through all the courses and were done socializing, it was already 1:00 am!

Tonight during dinner I also met my future roommate Rachael for the first time, who will be teaching with me in Rota. She actually moved into the apartment on Saturday, while I was in Granada. I also met some fellow Canadians, which was nice as we could commiserate together about the horrible woman from the Spanish consulate in Toronto! One of the girls that I met is here for her third year as a language assistant, which makes me hopeful that this will be a good year!