Still in Granada, still on the balcony

One week ago today, I turned 31. To celebrate, I invited everyone that I know in Granada. This means that two people, other than my two housemates, came over for dinner.

This is what I made:
stuffed mushrooms
spinach, mushroom, and onion quiche
caramelized onion tarte
carrot cake
brownies

Good times were had by all!

Today, somebody put a dresser out on the curb across the street from my balcony. Apparently, one of the drawers is broken. I've been sitting out here for about half an hour, and every couple of minutes, someone stops to try the drawers and lifts up one end of it to see how heavy it is.

In Granada, On the Balcony

So, I've been in Granada for a month now, and I've spent the last two days sitting on my balcony. I live in a house that, much like the school building in Sideways Stories from Wayside School, has one room on each floor. The house is on one of the busier streets in the Albaycín (on second thought: most likely the busiest), and my room faces the front. This makes for excellent people watching. The first night here, I got woken up several times by all of the street noise. Since then, either people have been fairly quiet, or I've slept through the noise.

My first night in Cairo nine years ago, I woke up to the dawn call to prayer. After the first night, nothing. I'm hoping that this works the same way.

This is the third place that I have lived within the past month. The first was a room in a rooming house run by an 82-year-old lady. That was for a week while I found another place.

The second was in the penultimate building in Granada. The other two housemates were never going to be around, though (one got a job excavating in Guadalajara, the other goes to Portugal three days a week), and I was going to be lonely and depressed, so I left. Also, the building was ugly, the apartment was ugly, and the neighborhood was ugly (there wasn't really anything in the way of neighborhood). Gangs of sixteen year olds on motor scooters terrorized me there (more or less.) And so I left.

And the place where I live now is awesome.

I have two housemates, one girl and one guy, one American and one Spanish. Oscar, the Spaniard, does things like make pressurecookersful of lentils and leaves them on the stove with notes that he is taking a nap, but that the lentils should be eaten. Also, he leaves coffee on the stove for us (the Americans) in the morning. Neither one of us is really a coffee drinker, though.

Did I mention that there is a roof terrace?
And that I live across the street from an early-sixteenth-century mudejar church?