Grenada, Spain Torrential rain this morning. Who said doing this trip in the early months of the year was a good idea? Me? Oh.
Well, mostly it is a good idea, but today the weather stinks. Anyway, enough of Torremolinos, we are on the road after breakfast following our one-eyed friend Hal. He leads us flawlessly, and we follow with equal skill, all the way to Granada and we find the designated Ibis Hotel with hardly any effort at all. That's nice. We're checked in by about 1:00pm and out of the room quickly, heading downtown to get our daily dose of history, Spanish style.
We caught a local bus to the downtown area, then started walking and following the map we had with us from the hotel. Round and around, up and down, the streets splashing wet, puddles here and there, easily the worst weather of the trip. Narrow and old streets, washing hanging out to dry (? Don't they watch the weather channel?), people going about their lives on and in these streets as they have for centuries, screw the weather channel. Finally make it to the Catedral (no, its not a typo, that's how they spell Cathedral here) in the heart of the old town. Having reached our objective, Jan and I celebrate by going into a local bar and ordering another round of Paella, with a glass of wine and a pint of San Miguel. Its good food, we like it. Anyone who knows us will have to get to like Paella, and Sangria too, I am going to prepare this meal often.
Fortified, we launch again into the squares and plazas and monuments and buildings of the 'old city'. We run into a tour of American college students, we don't find out where they are from but we can tell from their accents that it is around the South-West. The tour leader is buying them Cathedral tickets, and they are stooging around in the foyer of the cathedral, chatting, very interested in each other in a boy-girl sense, and no conversation at all about what they are visiting. Surprising? No. I think that history only becomes important when you have enough of your own, have lived enough life to know that things happen for a reason and history repeats, except never in exactly the same way twice. Most of these students, even if they were art history students, wouldn't really know what they were seeing in a real sense, just dates and events in the broad sense. But the human drama that unfolded in these streets, Moors then Christians then Moors then Christians, nah, no chance I think. You got to be old to have a sense of the ebb and flow of dynasties. When we are young we seek the future, what will happen to us on the time scale of our lives. When we are old we understand the past, albeit from the perspective of our own experieces. The future is a bit dim and hard to see, and it is shaded by the past that we have seen or understand. That's why true visionaries and futurists are so hard to find.
Having taken the bus downtown, then walked around, we were a bit unsure as to how to get home. So, at my suggestion, we followed the map and walked as far as a map refernce point that we could recognize, and we found it. I then became overconfidant and talked Jan into following our noses and actually making it home. Nope, you guessed it, I got us lost. Not just lost, but LOST. Finally I stopped a couple, a four-year old walking with them and a very little one in a baby carriage, and said 'help'. They showed us were we were on the map, and how to get back to our original reference point, which we did. Then, both of us a bit tired and wet and whiney, we took a cab home. I knew what I had done wrong as soon as the cab started off, but getting it right will be the job next time we visit.
We decided to stay another day here in Granada to see 'El Alhambra' tomorrow.
