Andalucia: Part 1 -- Granada

We spent this past weekend in Andalucia, and I have so much to say, that I´m going to break it up into sections, so I can work on one at a time.

The most important thing to know about this weekend trip is that it was our last group excursion. ¡Gracias a Dios! We have a great group, and they get along amazingly well, but traveling with 52 people is a real pain in the ass. So during this whole excursion, my mantra was, "Just get through this weekend, just get through this weekend, just get through this weekend." Plus I was getting sick, although I didn´t know how sick until I got back (I ended up having pink eye, but more on that at a later post about the amazingness of Spain´s drug policy), so a lot of what happened is kind of hazy.

We landed at Granada´s Lorca airport (you´ve got to love a city that names its airport after a writer), and the two most obvious things that I completely didn´t suspect were the amazing Sierra Nevadas and the cold. I didn´t get a good picture of the Sierra Nevadas, but they are these huge mountains that tower over the city with a perfectly white glacier on top. Al Gore might be getting us all worried about melting glaciers, but the one on the Sierra Nevadas looks pretty intact. For those people who live in Southern California, it´s like looking at the San Bernadino mountains after a snow fall, except that the sky was perfectly blue, so you could see the mountains perfectly, the mountain top is perfectly white, and they really seemed like they were right on top of the city.

These mountains also make Granada pretty cold in winter, much colder than I expected because I´d heard how hot Andalucia was. Most people hadn´t packed correctly because we were spending most of our time in Sevilla, so there were a lot of cold people.

I really liked Granada as a city. It´s really compact (at least the center is), and it´s hilly, so when you walk around, you can turn a corner and get a great view. We went to the Alhambra, of course, which I have some pictures of to the right, but my camera´s battery ran out in the middle of the visit. Here is where my memory gets hazy. The Alhambra is a Muslim Medieval palace that was built towards the end of their rule in Spain. Much of it was looted during various time periods, the final one of which was during Napoleon´s invasion of Spain (and, by the way, I never knew he had gotten that far south). But because most of the walls are made of cheap plaster, much of the intricate wall design has been left intact. I wish I had had more time to stroll around (a big problem with group excursions), so I may have to go back so I can get a better sense of the place. The thing that struck me the most, actually, was not the building, but the gardens, and weirdly, not the gardens that were designed for modern visitors, but the space between the building and the gardens. It was peaceful and beautiful.

The Alhambra is built on a hill overlooking Granada´s hills, with a valley between. Alhambra was actually a separate city for most of its history, and it has amazing views of Granada. When we were done with our tour, a few students and I decided to walk back to the city, which was only 30 minutes away. Basically, you walk down, and it was great. It´s starts out as a beautiful park, which I think is just the lower part of the Alhambra hill, and then it turns into a street filled with artesanías, most of which are cheap crap, but Bianca bought a fan, and one of the boys bought a hackysack. Yes, a hackysack. All the way to Granada, so you can do what you can do in SoCal. Sigh. But it was a fun walk.

That night after dinner, we went to a flamenco show. I have a picture of some of the artists to the right. The woman on the far right is a really famous flamenco dancer. There are posters of her when she was younger on the walls of the place. She was amazing. I don´t know who she was because I was so out of it that I didn´t think to ask. So I´m going to look through the web and see what I can find. She may be older than the others, but she had complete body control. She did this amazing dance with castanets, which was incredibly expressive and slow. Then she did just a little of the footwork, but she while doing that she did this thing with her body which seems pretty impossible. She would jump up, but also move both her legs and arms and upper body to one side in a complete asymmetric pattern. It would seem to me, you´d just fall if you did that, but she was great.

The man in the picture did an amazing dance in which he almost beheaded Marcus a few times. He also did these asymmetrical jumps and flung his feet impossibly high. According to one of the students who speaks Spanish and spoke to him, he´s from Tarragona, which I thought was pretty interesting.

The thing about flamenco is that if you don´t know anything about it, which I don´t, the things they do with their feet seem physically impossible, so I just sat there mesmerized.

After, we went to yet another hill to look at the Alhambra at night. I have a really bad picture to the right. All in all, it was an amazing day. I liked Granada an awful lot, and a lot of the students said that they could live there. I think I could too, but I´m not sure if that was my haze talking.