August 15, 2004
GRANADA -- "Andalucia," writes my guide book, "is everything you expect Spain to be." It may well be true. The dry heat, the orange trees, the Moorish architecture, the long siestas, and the flamenco music all combine to lend an air of authenticity to what is certainly as heavily touristed a part of the country as any (but somehow you don't notice). I came into the bus station in the morning and almost immediately ran across one of the friendliest tourist-info people I have met. I believe he was working for a start-up organization competing with the more staid and traditional official tourist agency, and therefore trying to send out a "cool youth vibe". He pointed me to a remarkably cheap pensione way up the hill, which is actually a great location, because it is right next to the Alhambra (more on this later, but it is awesome). I tried to take his advice by using the city bus system to go up the hill, but I missed my stop (I was looking for the cathedral, which in my opinion looks nothing like how a cathedral should look), and had to backtrack. I spent a frustrating half hour being very lost, before noticing that both of my maps had "north" rather askew, not to the top of the page like usual. This is normally not crippling in a city, but Granada suffers from an unusually bad case of invisible street signs. I finally made it up to the pensione, where I was asked by an enormous beard to fill in some forms and then wait to be checked in. After a mysteriously long wait I finally got up to the room, and spent about two hours cooling off.
I was coming out of the shower when I met one of my roommates, Guy from Belgium. (His name actually is Guy; I am not being cute here.) Guy and I spent a pleasant night soaking up Granada's central district, which is not all that large, as the population of Granada is only around 200,000. We visited the cathedral, which looks more like a cathedral from the inside, but only barely -- it was expanded from the traditional cross shape into more of a square, supposedly, when all the remaining Muslims in Granada spontaneously "converted", which threatened to leave the cathedral overcrowded. We then went to a small tavern-restaurant, which had an excellent deal on the menú del dia. Most restaurants in Spain seem to have these menú deals, and they are usually quite good for sampling the local fare at a good price -- after all, the restaurant can offer cheaply what it is best at. I ordered homestyle stew for a first course, which turned out to feature potatoes, chickpeas, and chicken and other assorted meats. It was quite tasty. For my second course I ordered "assorted fried fish", which turned out to be exactly that: two kinds of fried fish, complete with tails, scales, and, on one species, heads. I am not used to eating fish this way; I was expecting a fillet. But it wasn't bad (though I didn't clean my plate as thoroughly as normal), and the rice pudding for dessert was quite good.
For a post-dessert dessert, I introduced Guy to Italian Gelato, as there was a high-quality gelateria just down the street. I am still amazed he could live in Europe for this long without ever even hearing of it, but he agreed that it is not like normal ice cream, and certainly worth the price. We then sought out a café that I had seen advertised on posters and stumbled upon earlier in the day. The posters advertised "flamenco" beginning at 11:30, and we decided it might not be a bad idea to get there a little early for seating, as there was no cover charge and we expected it to be crowded. The café, called the Kasbah, had a highly Arabic design style, sold more kinds of tea than you can shake a stick at, and also offered fruit-flavored tobaccos to be smoked out of hookahs. Guy ordered the house wine, I took some green tea with mint (the waitress didn't speak enough English for me to ask for a recommendation), and we shared a plate of olives while we wondered where the flamenco could possibly be, since the café was not large and it was full to capacity. A few minutes later the mystery was solved: "flamenco" meant only the musical component, and for that all you need is one guy on a guitar and another to sing and clap hands. While we had been hoping for a nifty dance show, it was a good use of the evening nonetheless.
Returning to the hostel, we met our other roommate, a Dutch girl named Petra, who was in the process of traveling back home from Mali, where she had been working for about a year. Following Petra's advice, Guy went to the Alhambra ticket office early the next day, anticipating a long line. When I rolled out of bed and walked the 100 feet to the ticket office two and a half hours later, Guy had just gotten his ticket and was heading inside -- having bought a "morning ticket" his visit was limited to before 2:00. I only stood in line for one and a half hours before I got mine, and since I had an "afternoon ticket" I had some time to go to lunch with Petra. We tried to find a good hole-in-the-wall eatery in the Albaicin, the old Muslim neighborhood, but were foiled by it's being not only Sunday, which causes Spain to close down as much as it does Italy, but also the much-anticipated Feast of the Assumption, which is a national holiday in both countries. (The feast is in fact the reason I high-tailed it out of Italy when I did -- all the Italians simultaneously take their vacations around this time, making it inconvenient for any tourists clueless enough to be in the country at this time. But see my next entry in this regard as well.) So we eventually got completely lost, appealing to a friendly and extraordinarily chatty local for directions (the language barrier didn't stop him from talking to us for a good five minutes), and settled for sandwiches. Cultural note here: most countries have some sandwich equivalent, but it is rarely called a "sandwich". For example, in Italy and France they are known as panini, and in Spain as bocadillas. There is usually also some form of "American-style" sandwich, or at least I imagine this must be the intent: these beasts are made of pre-sliced white bread (think Wonderbread here), and as often as not toasted, even when this seems to me like a bad idea. In France these things are called by the curious name "toasts", but in Spain they are what you get if you order a "sandwich". They are as characterless as they sound, and should be avoided.
Following lunch, I went back up to the Alhambra. This is a castle/palace complex begun by the Muslim rulers of Andalucia at the beginning of the Moorish occupation, and added onto for the next several hundred years by the local sultans, and also the Christian kings who followed them after the reconquista. Its name derives from the Arabic word for "red", after the red bricks used to construct the outer defensive wall. It's very old, very big, and very impressive. The Nasrid palace, representing the height of Muslim architecture in Spain, manages somehow to be luxurious without quite giving way to ostentation, focusing on harmony between the stone, plaster, and tile of the building itself, the many gardens in the courtyards, and the quietly bubbling fountains that are found in every room. The palace of Charles V, on the other hand, shows the height of the Spanish renaissance, complete with circular courtyards (the Moors went in more for square ones), imposing marble columns, and the hubris necessary to demolish part of the Nasrid palace to make room for the new one. Try to guess which one I prefer. Some of Charles V's additions are quite nice, however, particularly those in the mudejar style that fused Spanish Muslim techniques with the Gothic sensibilities of the Christian rulers.
The real high point of the Alhambra, however, is the Generalife, the sultan's private palace (meaning no official business was carried out there) and the gardens that surround it. Privacy meant that there was no need to overawe visitors, so the Generalife is somewhat simpler, and in my opinion more elegant, than the main palace. The garden is large and multifaceted, and pushes the Muslim water-architecture to its limits; perhaps my favorite thing in the whole Alhambra is the "water-stairs" at the top of the Generalife gardens, in which the handrails have been hollowed out to be filled with a rushing stream.
Following the Alhambra tour, which took me a very pleasant four hours, I rejoined Petra and we searched for dinner. Being pressed for time (she had a bus to catch to Barcelona that evening), we again found ourselves in short order in the same plaza where we had had lunch. Not wanting to repeat ourselves, we chose the resaurant next door to the one we had visited in the afternoon, which turned out to be a step down. We had two waiters, one of whom offered us a menú that included a beverage, bread, main course, and flan; the other spoke less English, rescinded part of the first waiter's offer, produced prepackaged pudding for our dessert, and overcharged us.
Having run out of energy for the day with all my walking around (the Alhambra is big), I returned to the hostel "early" again (meaning around 10 p.m.), giving me time to make one of the few lodging reservations of this trip. Getting so far into August, I figured it might be a good idea, and at this point my route is pretty well set in stone: two days in Seville, two in Cordoba, three in Madrid, two in London, and then back to the States. It seems like things are moving faster now that the end is in sight, and while I have had a good time, I am looking forward to getting back home.