What a birthday!
The night of the 23rd started the birthday festivities. As soon as one person found out that I would be turning 20 everyone was excited to celebrate. My birthday coincided perfectly with the calendar as I turned 20 between Saturday and Sunday. All dressed up with so many places to potentially go, we met up with one of the monitores who took us to a great local tapas bar. I think I may have mentioned this custom before (its certainly worth saying it again) but in Granada whenever you order a drink, alcoholic or not, you receive a free plate of tapas (I have found that tapas can be anything, from bowls of olives and chips to full sized sandwiches or plates of rice). It was a lot of fun and it was great going with someone who knew right where the best places were. From there we went to a "chupitos" shot bar where at 12:00am we rang in my birthday with a toast. There was a group of Spanish kids in the bar who were also celebrating a birthday. I went up and introduced myself to the birthday boy and he invited me to help blow out the candles on his cake and then proceeded in joining our two separate groups together to help finish his large birthday cake.
Saying goodbye to the Spanish group, we headed to toward one of Granada's most popular clubs, Mae West, a two-story American black and white movie themed dance club with 4 rooms playing different music: house, salsa, regaton, and pop. Even though we arrived a little early (before 2:00am) it was already starting to get very crowded. We found a spot on the dance floor and started rocking out to techno-remixed American pop songs that were about 6 years old. The popular Spanish music seemed to alternate between these older American pop songs and contemporary Spanish ones.
By 3:00am the club was so packed that I could barely move (apparently this was a slow night). We left at 5:00am and people were still arriving. The Spanish night life is on a whole different level.
As if it wasn't to late/early already, none of us were really tired, so we extended the birthday celebrations with a couple games of fuse ball which is apparently only second to soccer and bull fighting in Spanish national sport (I'm kidding but in the bars the Spaniards take their fuse ball very seriously). We finally went to bed at about 6:30am.
Overall, it was a fun, exciting, grown-up birthday that I will never forget. We crammed a lot into one night and I know it still would have been memorable even if I had done absolutely nothing. The fact that I'm Spain with other kids my age is an incredible experience in and of itself.
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