Wandering around Ronda

Hello all!

So, last weekend I had a day trip to Seville. This weekend has been a puente – a sort of bank holiday. Thursday was a day off because it is ‘Andalucía Day’ and when Thursday is a day off in Spain, Friday gets taken off too to make it a four-day weekend!

The idea had been for us (i.e. me, Yann, Tony and Tony’s girlfriend who is visiting us from France) to hire a car and drive down to Gibraltar and across to Cádiz for a couple of days. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a hire car last minute (not in our price range, anyway) and so the plan was scuppered. Fortunately, yours truly came up with a super stroke of inspiration: why not take a day trip to Ronda? After a quick search for the price for return tickets came up with pocket-pleasing results, the decision was unanimously approved.

So yesterday (Friday, or viernes as my blog would have it) saw us waking up early doors to catch the first train to Ronda.

“Situated in the far northwest of the province of Malaga, Ronda sits on an outcrop of rock in a basin surrounded by mountain ranges […] One of the oldest towns in Spain, Ronda has its origins in Prehistory.” I’m quoting here from the Historical Summary section of the free map/guide that I got from the Ronda tourist office.

For those who want to learn more about Ronda, you can read the short Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronda and discover, amongst other fascinating things, that Ronda is one of 5 sister cities for Chefchaouen, Morrocco.

Anyway, the four of us had a very pleasant day wandering around the tourist sites in Ronda, taking photos of the views and generally basking in the lovely sunshine (which, even at the end of February, is already warm enough to be height-of-summer, traffic-jams-to-the-beach, railway-track-melting weather if it were Britain). 

For those who are hoping to see photos, I’m afraid I forgot to bring the cable which connects my camera to my laptop. I’ll upload them when I’m home for Easter!

Not too much else happened this week. I’ve chosen my module choices now and I’m now getting fully stuck into my lectures, which is good fun. I’m taking two literature modules (Literatura Hispanoamericana III and Literatura Española IV) and two linguistic modules (El español de América and El origen del léxico español). That means I’m studying twentieth century Spanish American literature, literature of the Spanish Golden Age, Latin American Spanish and the origin of the Spanish language.

Well, I think it sounds interesting anyway :-P

Next weekend we (that is, me, Yann and Tony) have booked ourselves onto another Erasmus trip: this time to Córdoba. The week after: Fleet!