This week was the big Feria de Granada; the Corpus Christi celebration that the Granadians look forward to each year. On Thursday all the schools closed (even the lab), stores, and businesses shut their doors, and people spent the day celebrating together with music, food, flamenco dancing, traditional dresses, and amusement attractions. Oh and did I mention the horses? There were lots and lots of horses.

The arches to the Feria grounds

I think my favorite part of the celebration are the light displays that hang above the streets of Granada. At night, the lights illuminate the city streets below, where people convene to enjoy the city during this festival. It is quite the sight as you look up and down the street and see the displays stretching down as far as you can see…

Bridget and I getting a quickkkkk picture in the street (we looked both ways)

Las luces

Antonio, a member of the lab, invited Bridget and I over to his terraza on Thursday to share tapas with him and other members of the lab. There was a delicious tortilla espanola, eggplant parmesan, croquetas, queso curado, meats, and crusty bread. Despite the hot, southern Spain sun making us sweat more than we would like on the terrace, it was nice to take part in the festivities with some locals, and of course put our spanish to use.

In the lab this week, we continued running participants. Thanks again to Borja, the technological issues have subsided and the experiment has been running smoothly ever since. Now we are ready to start coding the data we have collected. We created excel sheets for the picture naming and verbal fluency tasks that we will use to code the data from the sound files.

Coding with a view

For the week to come, we will be posting more of our recruitment flyers around campus to attract people to the lab. We will continue to schedule participants as we receive more responses (we always get excited when the emails start to come in from people who want to take part in the research). This coming Thursday we have been invited to participate in an outreach opportunity at a local school. The plan is to read a book to the children in three different languages; Spanish, Italian, and English. This comes with the hope that we will instill the importance of bilingualism in these kids at a young age. More to come on this next week!

On another food note: I have stayed true to my original goal of going to Los Italianos everyday for gelato. Well for the most part; one day I was not able to make it there, so to compensate for missing a day, Bridget and I managed to make it there three times the next day…different flavors each time of course. That still counts, right?