Granada, etc.

For those of you who have been impatiently waiting for a second entry—no, I haven’t disappeared into the heart of Spain. I just didn’t have internet for a few days. I said previously that my future posts would not be as long as the first. I lied. This time, it can’t be helped; I was away for three days and couldn’t blog. So I’m doing it in one go.

Since this is my first visit to Spain, Margaret decided to take me to Granada, which is a two hour train ride from Almería. The scenery along the way was a contrast between the red, rocky mountains and the green hills lined with short olive trees. Some stretches had “green houses”—which are really more like white tarp-like tents—where they grow their produce. Other times, we would see stone houses and caves carved into the sides of the rocks.

Granada is a university town with an eclectic assortment of people: Spanish students, English tourists, Moroccan and African immigrants, backpackers, sightseers, families, and professional businessmen. It has much more of a bustling, city-like atmosphere than Vicar, where Margaret lives. Margaret’s friend in Granada was away for the weekend, so she graciously allowed us to stay in her flat (though without the luxury of a hot shower).

We spent some time just walking leisurely around the city and people-watching near the fountain in one of the many plazas. The people in Spain are very interesting. In some ways, they are “too hard” as our friend Adrianna says. They can be rude, and they smoke and litter too much. But they are also very affectionate with each other, as well as incredibly social. And a LOT of people here have pet dogs (of course, it’d be better if they picked up after them once in a while).

After a short time, we met up with Adrianna, a fellow missionary that Margaret met through her roommate. She is wonderfully sweet and offered to take us around. I mentioned that I really wanted to try churros con chocolate, like I had seen on Travel Channel, so she took me to “the best churreria in all of Granada.” It really was as good as I expected. The chocolate was very, very dark chocolate, and thick, almost like pudding. The chocolate near the surface is more solid than the chocolate underneath, which is actually more liquid and sweet.

Surprisingly, the churros aren’t what I’m used to having at Disneyland or from sidewalk stands, where they’re ridged and covered in cinnamon. They reminded me of the bread that they serve with congee (Chinese rice porridge)—almost exactly like that. It makes a yummy combination with the chocolate though. To top it all off, we got to hear Adrianna’s testimony, which was really neat.

Then we browsed through Little Morocco, which is a basically a web of narrow streets lined with teterias, tapas bars, and shops selling Moroccan gifts. We were particularly drawn to the teterias, which serve an international menu of teas along with Indian dishes. They have a dark, Arabian atmosphere because of the Moroccan draperies and pillowed booths, complete with smoke from the many hookahs.

Adrianna showed us her recommendations for kebabs, teterias, and tapas before leaving us at the bus stop. Finding our way back to the flat was a little nerve-wrecking, since it was late, and we weren’t actually sure where our stop was. We ended up sitting in the front of the bus and yelling last minute for the bus driver to let us off. But we made it back safely.

The next morning, we woke up at six. We took a series of three different busses to make it to our 9 am reservation at the Alhambra. Along the way, we accidently left our debit card in the ATM too long and weren’t able to get any more cash. But since the bank wasn’t open yet and the Alhambra was waiting, we decided to go back later to inquire at the bank.

The Alhambra was beautiful…and huge. We listened to the audio tour as we walked from room to room, taking pictures of the ridiculously intricate architecture. Some of the walls are decorated from floor to ceiling in Arabic—written praises to Allah. It’s really amazing. We also enjoyed the restfulness of the gardens and pools, and walked up the stairs to the battlements.

By the way, I thought from the very beginning at the narration on the audio tour was strangely overly-dramatic and romanticized. Some parts, the narrator even quoted poetry. Toward the end of the tour, it suddenly dawned on me that the voice on the audio tour was none other than Washington Irving, the American writer (think “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”) who stayed at the Alhambra around 1829. I thought he was pretty cheesy, but Margaret told me, “You have to embrace it Lynnette.” Secretly, I suspect she thought it was cheesy too.

From the top of the Alcazaba (the fort) you can see all of Granada. It’s an awesome view of the city. There are two or three different levels to the Alcazaba, and at one point, I stood at the very top, and Margaret ran down to the middle level. I started taking pictures of her once she reached the center. When I was done, I gave her the thumbs up sign, and I expected her to start heading back towards the stairs.

Instead, Margaret, who absolutely loves heights, decided to walk to the wall of the battlement, sit on the wall, and put her feet over the ledge. It wasn’t really dangerous at all, but I could hear people behind me gasp in horror. When she came back up, she told me that she could hear voices behind her say “¡Está loca!”

We decided to be economical and walk down the mountain instead of spending money on another bus fare. Margaret and I went to have doner kababs, which is basically a kebab pita sandwich. We talked for quite awhile, but since we were surrounded by tables of smokers, my asthma began getting a little agitated. Unfortunately, we had a difficult time the check from our waiter. Margaret said that that is pretty typical of Spanish customer service.

We rested awhile at the plaza fountain again and talked about “Must Haves and Can’t Stands” (yes, that’s what girls do when we get together) before heading off to do some window shopping. I always have to buy a keychain to commemorate every place I travel to. But because of our lost debit card—the bank told us that the card was destroyed already—we had to search for a shop that took credit card.

Once that was taken care of, we went to a nice little café and had some cold treats—coffee ice cream and blackberry sorbetto. The weather in Spain so far has been very warm and sunny, which made us thirsty after walking around so much. For dinner, we wanted to go to a teteria, but we couldn’t find one that took credit cards, so the two of us finally settled on a nice tapas restaurant.

I was really excited to try tapas for the first time ever. The way it worked was that for every drink you ordered, you got a house special tapa to go with it. Or something like that. We also ordered a few a la carte. The bus ride back to the flat was the same as before, hoping that we’d recognize our stop in time to alert the driver.

The next day, we packed up, cleaned the flat, and made both breakfast and lunch. Then we waited at the bus station and ate the hot potato-egg pancake that we had bought from the supermarket earlier. For lunch, we packed sandwiches of French bread, jamón cerrano (cured ham, a specialty in Spain), and cheese.

Unfortunately, the bus came really late, and we hardly had any cash left. As soon as we disembarked, we hailed a taxi. Margaret told the taxi driver, “I ONLY have seven euros. Nothing more.” The fare ended up being €6.67. We barely made it to the train station by 10 am, and slept on the train for two hours. By the time arrived and took the bus back to Almería, we were pretty worn out (we had stayed up late the night before, too). I actually slept through until this morning.

Around 8:30 am, Margaret woke me up and we walked with her roommate Gloria down the main boulevard to the Sunday open air market. We set up a table of Christian materials and handed out tracts for the next several hours. I’m not used to standing that long, but Margaret and Gloria have practice. It’s pretty amazing. They can tell—for the most part—the difference between Spanish, Romanian, Moroccan, African (okay, so that one is more obvious than the others), English, so on and so forth. The thing is, each require their own language (i.e. Moroccans read Arabic, most of the Africans speak French), their own tracts, and their own cultural sensitivities.

The cool part of handing out literature in Spain is that most of the passersby actually take them, something completely unheard of in the States. Given, some of the tracts end up on the ground a few meters away, but in general, most people take them pretty willingly. Some even say “Gracias” as they walk away, and you can even hear them reading aloud as they walk.

To be honest, the most difficult part of standing there handing out literature was the smell of the spit-fire chicken roasting only a few yards away from our table. It was actually my very first time passing out tracts, and at first, I was pretty intimidated. But after I tried it, I was glad that I did. I really pray that some of those people have their lives changed by reading them.

Overall, these last few days have been both fun and tiring. It was nice this afternoon having an evening to just relax and recuperate. Plus, these blog entries take me a lot longer than I had anticipated when I left home. I also want to stay out of Margaret’s way so she can get work done. I can’t be a complete nuisance. Anyways, I’m trying to multi-task now, downloading and uploading photos, checking emails, and blogging all at once. What would I do without technology?