The very first day that I went to the city of Malaga to look for an apartment I was devastatingly disappointed. I stayed around the area of the train station the entire time and perceived the city to be an ugly and polluted port town. I thought it was one of those places that had never been the destination but the rerouting station to head somewhere else. I was pleasantly surprised the next time I went back to the city to dig deeper for its charms. I couldn’t believe that the city where Pablo Picasso so proudly came from could be such a dumping ground. As soon as I crossed the Rio Guadalmedina, which cuts the city in two, and headed north into the center, the city took on a new face.
The city center had a briskly modern yet historic feel to it and it pulsed with colorful and vibrating life. The historic center is full of little winding alleys that shelter quaint tapas bars and cafes. The streets don’t go predictably straight, but weave around in an interesting pattern, leaving a newcomer slightly lost. But I was thinking just how amazing it is to let yourself get lost in a city in order to learn it. When I started walking the streets at the beginning of the day, I had no sense of direction or orientation but by the end of several long hours of wandering and looking, I felt like I knew the city.
I went into a few ancient cathedrals in the historic center and wandered through many plazas and gardens, watching people in their chatter and their cerveza drinking. I soon found Malaga’s big outdoor food market Mercado Atarazanas and weaved all around its crowds and noise – people buying fish, meat, eggs, vegetables, and all the most colorful fruits. I bought a kilogram of little avocadoes and a large, ripe pomegranate, which to my splendor is native to this part of the country. Pomegranate trees line the steep walk I take every day back up to my village from the train station. I’ve often picked the fruits, but they never seem to be the perfect ripeness in the trees.
After a loop in the market I headed to the Plaza de la Merced, Malaga’s haven for counterculture residents. Here I felt quite at home, surrounded by vegetarian restaurants, little art shops and a multitude of little stores selling incense, colorful dresses and purses. Hippies with dreadlocks and long, flowing skirts hung out in the park at the center of the plaza. For a moment I thought I was back in Carrboro. There was a theater (Teatro Cervantes) just down the street At the back end of the plaza in a white corner sat the home of Pablo Picasso, which has been turned into a museum and just down the street the Museo Picasso, where a huge collection of his work can be found.
My walk naturally took me towards the Roman Theater, an ancient ruin, above which an old palace-fortress towered. The Alcazaba was the home of the city’s Muslim governors in the 11th century. The huge structure has meandering waterways, beautiful terraces full of leafy plants that rise into the heights of the mountain that it was built on. After the palace, I walked along the Paseo del Parque, a beautiful walkway shaded by tall palm trees with benches and fountains lining the path. Green parrots flew from tree to tree and the colors of the purple, pink and red flowers stood out from the greenery of the trees and bushes that lined it. Walking down the path felt like walking through a completely tree surrounded tunnel. Even above my head the trees knit together to create a shelter. The ocean sparkled in the distance; I was on my way to the beach.
La Malagueta is Malaga’s beach district and it unfolded before me as I walked out of the Paseo del Parque. The land of Malagueta juts out into the sea and the coast is lined with sandy, public beaches. I walked down the beach for a while, letting the grainy sand fill my shoes, and then took a looping path back towards the city center, passing Malaga’s Plaza de Toros, where the annual bullfights are held. One thing that I have absolutely no desire to see while I’m here in Spain is most certainly a bullfight.
I walked all the way back to the river that cuts the city into two and headed in the other direction to see the more residential area. I was pleased to find the University of Malaga here. I could tell I was in a university area because the people walked faster, holding books to their chests, and blocking out the city noise with their Ipods. I found the Center for Foreigners at which they have a great institute for learning Spanish. On the bulletin board here I found a lot of announcements of Spanish-speakers seeking English conversation partners to exchange language practice. My loop took me back to the centrally located train station and I jumped on my Renfe to return to Alora, happy now to know the city of Malaga as well. After having a month of isolation and village life here in Alora, I will be happy to move to the city for a more upbeat and exciting life. But to experience both is certainly fulfilling and irreplaceable.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Dipping into the Spanish Life, One Toe at a Time
The village of Alora continues to give me a special warmth upon coming back to it, no matter where it is that I’ve been. My daily routine has brought me into a special familiarity with the village people and the daily greetings and small conversations are always a pleasure to have. I go each evening to the Arab fortress to watch the sun set over the valley and it has yet to fail to astonish me. I’ve been visiting the town’s library often, on the second floor of the Casa de Cultura, and reading newspapers and checking out books in Spanish. Most of the time when I’m there, the noise from above, where the music school is, pours in to the library giving it a casual and open feeling. Each evening I go on an intoxicating run over the mountain that overlooks the town and the valley below. I’m happy to say, I’m not the only one that runs in this town, although most of the others seem to be old men. The coming of dusk seems to correspond well with the finishing stretch of my run and as the evening lights of the town flicker on I head out to buy ingredients to make dinner. My evenings have often been quiet, consisting of a meal for one, a glass of red wine, a Joni Mitchell soundtrack and the reading of Hemingway. I’m savoring the book like a piece of dark chocolate because its content is so alive here in this country. I’m almost finished with it and wish Hemingway had written it as a thousand-page novel instead.
It has now been exactly a month since I set foot in this country of Spain, that for so long was just an abstract idea in my mind. For so many months preceding my arrival here, I fantasized about a place and a life I knew nothing about and created worlds in my head about what my life here would be like. Former participants in this program bestowed advice on me about what it’d be like to live in an Andalucían village, friends encouraged me to embrace the solitude that would come with living alone in a small town, and my family told me it’d be good for me to try something foreign on my own. Here seems the appropriate time to insert a “but,” where reality actually cracks the foundation of the fantasy. But in this particular instance, everything I’d imagined about living in a sleepy, southern village actually holds true. And all of the advice I received about making a life from scratch on my own has been guiding me and making it all just a little bit easier.
There’s still a small element of impermanence in my mind when it comes to this village because I’m moving out of my current apartment and taking the leap to live in the city of Malaga, so I’ve had trouble creating a space to call home here in Alora, as in I haven’t yet actually cooked a meal nor bought permanent things like sugar, flour and laundry detergent. A home that lacks such articles of life, often doesn’t feel lived in at all, and that’s a good way of describing my place in Alora – kind of like a keeping ground for my things and a place to take a hot shower and sleep in a warm bed, but not much more.
Monday, September 21, 2009
A villager on horseback in Alora. Boys ride horses, old men ride donkeys, there are wild dogs in the hills of the mountains, stray cats, etc.
View of the village down below from teh terrace of my apartment
The world unfolding beneath Alora by sunset
As the darkness creeps over the village, the lights flicker on
Sunday, September 20, 2009
First Impressions of Alora
As I boarded the Renfe train at the central train station of Malaga, weighed down by all of my possessions, heading 50 kilometers northwest to Alora, my stomach started doing flips and turns for the first time since I’d arrived to Spain. I hadn’t the slightest idea of what to expect and the farther and farther the train went into the intestines of the countryside the deeper I fell into disbelief. Here I was on the other wide of the world, alone, with a big black suitcase, a backpack and a guitar. All I had left of home were the photographs in my wallet and the remnants of its odor on my clothes.
As the train chugged away like a lazy caterpillar, leaving me standing alone on the train tracks, I looked around myself at the endless voluptuous mountains, the immaculately blue sky, and the velvety green hills and valleys. Were it not for the noise of the airplane passing above me, I’d have felt like I was dropped into another time.
I got on yet another bus and headed up the steep and winding streets that led up to the village of Alora. Some kind of devouring emotion overcame me and I burst into hot tears sitting tightly between two strangers at the back of the bus. The beauty of the landscape overwhelmed me, the remoteness of the village petrified me and I felt like a loose feather that the wind had blown far, far away.
The bus dropped me off in the middle of the town next to a little meat market on a narrow cobblestone street. The locals around me stared at the sight of this stranger, a foreigner, with her life packed into a few bags with nowhere to go and no clue where to look. As I dragged my heavy suitcase behind me and lugged my backpack strapped to my back, a kind and smiling stranger stopped me to ask if I needed help. His name was Mohammed and he was a Muslim from Morocco. He carried my stuff and took me to an internet care to look for the place where I’d be staying. He told me his birthday was coming up the following week and every time I thanked him he’d say, “No pasa nada, Jasmina” relieving me of any indebtedness and filling me with even deeper gratitude. He was every so kind and left me his number for any future needs. He even called a few days later to check how I was doing and to see if I needed any help with anything else.
The next locals whose hands I fell into were so gracious and giving as well. I’d found a young woman on the internet named Flores who lived in Alora and asked her if I could stay with her for a couple of days until I got settled and found my own place. She opened up her home and her family to me. Her mom, an old woman who didn’t speak a word of English, but instead a rapid and Andalucían dialect of Spanish, let me in and instantly started telling me stories. She showed me the room they’d made up for me to stay in and gave me fresh towels, sheets, and a little magazine about Alora. She then took me on a little walk around the top of the village and told me stories about the weather, the history and the life she’d had in Alora. In the evening, Flores came home from work and her mom cooked us a dinner of friend eggplant with honey and salmon pizza. We ate all together in the kitchen as Flores and I got to know each other in a mixture of English and Spanish.
The next morning I got on the train and headed back into Malaga to look for a place to live. The helter-skelter of the city life of Malaga was a stark contrast to the tranquility of my secret little village. After a day of searching and looking at apartments in the city I was exhausted and disheartened. The city had left a bitter, dirty taste in my mouth – like that of bad chocolate – and I got back on the train to head into the plush interior of the valley of Guadalhorce and to my village.
I searched around the village some more that evening and settled finally for a little, temporary, one-bedroom bottom floor flat, at the end of a narrow downward-spiraling street. Faster than a magic trick I found myself in the little apartment with all my belongings and a big empty space to fill with life. I panicked at first when it hit me that I was living all alone in this village in the middle of southern Spain. For the first time in my life I was completely alone with no one to tell except my guitar and my journal. I knew the day would come and I knew it was something that I had to learn at some point in my life, but I didn’t realize that it would hit me quite so suddenly – like a breathless dunk into a freezing cold mountain stream. But soon enough you get used to the temperature and you let the water unclog the pores of your prickly skin instead of gasping for air.
So I started to unpack. I hung up my green hammock from Ecuador on the white wall to give the bland room color. I spread my beach sarong across the table to make it mine and I filled up the big brown armoire with my colorful dresses and sweaters. I hesitate to put my pictures up still because the place feels temporary and I hope to find a better one in the next month; at least a more colorful one with an oven that I can bake in.
I took myself out that first night for dinner at a local pizzeria and realized as I sat there ruminating over my glass of vino tinto that I had no idea how to dine alone. As I waited for my pizza margarita to come out, I realized that I didn’t know where to divert my eyes, what to do with my hands, how to sit in my chair. I had never eaten alone at a restaurant before. I didn’t know if I should look at other people or if I should read a book. So I did a mixture of both, sipped my wine and slowly ate my entire pizza, tasting every bite. I never realized before how little attention I’d actually dedicated to the food I was eating – always distracted by the conversation or the people I was with. It was quite a fulfilling and delicious experience after I got over the fact that I had no one to share it with. And so with a full stomach and a full mind I went back to my new home and fell asleep to the sounds of the street beneath my window – kids still playing outside at midnight, the clicking of canes as old men walked their dogs, and even a horse galloping by carrying two teenage boys.
I awoke to a bright sunrise, a crowing of roosters and a dinging of bells marking a time that was at least twenty minutes off from the actual one. I spent the day exploring the winding streets, peeking behind corners, talking to strangers to practice my broken Spanish and buying local olive oil and fresh baked bread to fill my empty kitchen. I played my guitar for a few hours by my open window and remembered how much I’d been craving this time back home in the madness of my busy college life. Time. Time to bake, time to think, time to play music, time to read, time to let my muse come over me and time to let y daydreams run wild. My imagination had been suffocating under the rocks of a busy life.
I decided to go on a run up above the village, on top of the mountain. It was the most incredible run – the air was intoxicating, unpolluted and fresh, the trail was steep and rugged, the view down below was surreal. I felt like it was just as scenic still life painting beneath me, and like I was looking down below at the world from some kind of heaven. Short olive trees with bright green olives surrounded me and a tall rocky peak still towered over me. Wild flowers infused my senses from all around sending a whirling smell into my nostrils. I didn’t know which of my senses to pay the most attention to.
I took pictures of the village by sunset that evening, made myself a fresh meal of tomatoes, avocados, bread and olive oil and sat in my rocking chair reading Hemingway for hours.
And now I sit atop a mountain overlooking the valley down below, the hot afternoon sun shining on my back. An ancient Arabic castle and the ruins of a fortress sit atop the mountain with me. The sounds of life down below are distant – bells, dishes clanking, dogs barking, and of course roosters crowing. A plane rumbles by overhead, streaking the blue sky, reminding me of the modern epoch I’m in. Could this be real life?
As the train chugged away like a lazy caterpillar, leaving me standing alone on the train tracks, I looked around myself at the endless voluptuous mountains, the immaculately blue sky, and the velvety green hills and valleys. Were it not for the noise of the airplane passing above me, I’d have felt like I was dropped into another time.
I got on yet another bus and headed up the steep and winding streets that led up to the village of Alora. Some kind of devouring emotion overcame me and I burst into hot tears sitting tightly between two strangers at the back of the bus. The beauty of the landscape overwhelmed me, the remoteness of the village petrified me and I felt like a loose feather that the wind had blown far, far away.
The bus dropped me off in the middle of the town next to a little meat market on a narrow cobblestone street. The locals around me stared at the sight of this stranger, a foreigner, with her life packed into a few bags with nowhere to go and no clue where to look. As I dragged my heavy suitcase behind me and lugged my backpack strapped to my back, a kind and smiling stranger stopped me to ask if I needed help. His name was Mohammed and he was a Muslim from Morocco. He carried my stuff and took me to an internet care to look for the place where I’d be staying. He told me his birthday was coming up the following week and every time I thanked him he’d say, “No pasa nada, Jasmina” relieving me of any indebtedness and filling me with even deeper gratitude. He was every so kind and left me his number for any future needs. He even called a few days later to check how I was doing and to see if I needed any help with anything else.
The next locals whose hands I fell into were so gracious and giving as well. I’d found a young woman on the internet named Flores who lived in Alora and asked her if I could stay with her for a couple of days until I got settled and found my own place. She opened up her home and her family to me. Her mom, an old woman who didn’t speak a word of English, but instead a rapid and Andalucían dialect of Spanish, let me in and instantly started telling me stories. She showed me the room they’d made up for me to stay in and gave me fresh towels, sheets, and a little magazine about Alora. She then took me on a little walk around the top of the village and told me stories about the weather, the history and the life she’d had in Alora. In the evening, Flores came home from work and her mom cooked us a dinner of friend eggplant with honey and salmon pizza. We ate all together in the kitchen as Flores and I got to know each other in a mixture of English and Spanish.
The next morning I got on the train and headed back into Malaga to look for a place to live. The helter-skelter of the city life of Malaga was a stark contrast to the tranquility of my secret little village. After a day of searching and looking at apartments in the city I was exhausted and disheartened. The city had left a bitter, dirty taste in my mouth – like that of bad chocolate – and I got back on the train to head into the plush interior of the valley of Guadalhorce and to my village.
I searched around the village some more that evening and settled finally for a little, temporary, one-bedroom bottom floor flat, at the end of a narrow downward-spiraling street. Faster than a magic trick I found myself in the little apartment with all my belongings and a big empty space to fill with life. I panicked at first when it hit me that I was living all alone in this village in the middle of southern Spain. For the first time in my life I was completely alone with no one to tell except my guitar and my journal. I knew the day would come and I knew it was something that I had to learn at some point in my life, but I didn’t realize that it would hit me quite so suddenly – like a breathless dunk into a freezing cold mountain stream. But soon enough you get used to the temperature and you let the water unclog the pores of your prickly skin instead of gasping for air.
So I started to unpack. I hung up my green hammock from Ecuador on the white wall to give the bland room color. I spread my beach sarong across the table to make it mine and I filled up the big brown armoire with my colorful dresses and sweaters. I hesitate to put my pictures up still because the place feels temporary and I hope to find a better one in the next month; at least a more colorful one with an oven that I can bake in.
I took myself out that first night for dinner at a local pizzeria and realized as I sat there ruminating over my glass of vino tinto that I had no idea how to dine alone. As I waited for my pizza margarita to come out, I realized that I didn’t know where to divert my eyes, what to do with my hands, how to sit in my chair. I had never eaten alone at a restaurant before. I didn’t know if I should look at other people or if I should read a book. So I did a mixture of both, sipped my wine and slowly ate my entire pizza, tasting every bite. I never realized before how little attention I’d actually dedicated to the food I was eating – always distracted by the conversation or the people I was with. It was quite a fulfilling and delicious experience after I got over the fact that I had no one to share it with. And so with a full stomach and a full mind I went back to my new home and fell asleep to the sounds of the street beneath my window – kids still playing outside at midnight, the clicking of canes as old men walked their dogs, and even a horse galloping by carrying two teenage boys.
I awoke to a bright sunrise, a crowing of roosters and a dinging of bells marking a time that was at least twenty minutes off from the actual one. I spent the day exploring the winding streets, peeking behind corners, talking to strangers to practice my broken Spanish and buying local olive oil and fresh baked bread to fill my empty kitchen. I played my guitar for a few hours by my open window and remembered how much I’d been craving this time back home in the madness of my busy college life. Time. Time to bake, time to think, time to play music, time to read, time to let my muse come over me and time to let y daydreams run wild. My imagination had been suffocating under the rocks of a busy life.
I decided to go on a run up above the village, on top of the mountain. It was the most incredible run – the air was intoxicating, unpolluted and fresh, the trail was steep and rugged, the view down below was surreal. I felt like it was just as scenic still life painting beneath me, and like I was looking down below at the world from some kind of heaven. Short olive trees with bright green olives surrounded me and a tall rocky peak still towered over me. Wild flowers infused my senses from all around sending a whirling smell into my nostrils. I didn’t know which of my senses to pay the most attention to.
I took pictures of the village by sunset that evening, made myself a fresh meal of tomatoes, avocados, bread and olive oil and sat in my rocking chair reading Hemingway for hours.
And now I sit atop a mountain overlooking the valley down below, the hot afternoon sun shining on my back. An ancient Arabic castle and the ruins of a fortress sit atop the mountain with me. The sounds of life down below are distant – bells, dishes clanking, dogs barking, and of course roosters crowing. A plane rumbles by overhead, streaking the blue sky, reminding me of the modern epoch I’m in. Could this be real life?
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Love At First Sight
Although we only spent a little more than twenty four hours in Granada, the city was the most profound and fulfilling place we’ve traveled to so far. The day we spent there felt timeless and like it’d been excised from reality. Granada is so full of history, culture, spirituality and depth and its stories can be found around every corner and in every café, so time was irrelevant and it was only the place that mattered.
We arrived in the late afternoon just as the sky was cracking open into an afternoon thunderstorm. As we had no place to stay, we asked a couple of British guys if they had a cheap hostel and when they told us it was only 10 euro we jumped in the cab with them and rode up, up, up the narrow winding streets to the very top of one of Granada’s hills, right next to the Alhambra. The streets were cobbled and slippery and the green trees were drooping down, heavy from the rainfall. Everything glowed in the evening light as we unloaded our baggage from the cab and checked into the hostel. We shared a tiny matrimonial bed in a tiny room that you could barely turn around in but it was perfect for the two of us.
The first evening we wandered down the hill, through a beautiful park, and found the main square of the city with little Tapas bars everywhere and people roaming the streets. We took a bus to the hill of Sacromonte to find a Moroccan restaurant that we’d looked up in Elyse’s travel book. It was to be our first dining out experience and we were starved. The Moroccan restaurant turned out to be quite a bust, considering the fact that we heard the microwave ding in the back right before our bland and hard dinner came out to the table. We swore to each other that we’d never eat out again and that we’d stick to our own creative culinary feats. We wandered back down into the glowing city and found a little Botega (wine cellar) to have a phenomenal glass of red wine, and of course the free Tapas that accompanied it.
Granada is one of the only cities in Spain that still practices the tradition of Tapas, and the food that they offer is excellent. We learned that Tapas originated back in the day when bartenders used to put little plates on top of the drinks of their customers to keep the flies out. Soon they started putting little snacks on the plates – chips, peanuts, etc. – but the tradition evolved into an expansive culture of cooked Tapas that now includes all kinds of home cooked dishes.
The next day we explored Granada from corner to corner. First we walked the city center’s streets, both the historic and the more modern shopping district. Then we decided to climb the hills of Sacromonte so that we could see the caves which we’d heard so much about. In the hills of Granada people still live and run their businesses in caves. Some are modern and have electricity and plumbing, but others are much more rugged and have barely anything at all. We climbed all the way up and walked along the winding, narrow road that led us around the mountain. The view below was breathtaking – all of Granada and the Sierra Nevada mountain range beyond. We stopped for a break at a little bar that turned out to be a cave and had a baby Alhambra beer and some free tapas and green grapes from the vines that grew right above our heads. We met an old man as we were sitting and having our beer, who had traveled all over the world. He was from Venice but had lived everywhere – from South America to Pakistan and Afghanistan to Bosnia and Croatia, Germany and then back to the Mediterranean. He said he had two sons in Germany and a few in Spain. He was a true nomad and spoke several languages, including English. But what struck me was the fact that he’d settled down at the end of his world route to grow old and die in Granada. Nothing could be more powerful than a man that had seen the world, and chosen to die in Granada. Elyse and I decided we wanted to grow old in Granada one day as well.
After our little break we kept walking up, exploring the modern caves and the views below. We decided to go down and go to the side across the valley where the caves were more rugged and natural. We descended and then climbed again, this time getting dirty and at some points having to climb on all fours. We found a few vacant caves and finally sat down on top of a little house, with what seemed like all of Spain spilling out beneath us. It was spectacular. We had the last bit of our baguette and brie, rested our forever roaming legs a bit and then headed back down the mountain and to the center of the city.
After taking a sleepless yet productive siesta at our hostel we went back down into town for our first evening of true Spanish tapas. We started at a little vegetarian restaurant called La Tortuga and ordered a beer each. We got two fabulous tapas plates of hummus and mozzarella spinach and after devouring it ordered another couple of beers, which came with additional tapas. This time we ordered spicy sausage cooked in wine and rice with salsa. In total we paid 8 or 9 Euros for a meal and a couple of drinks. We went to a wine bar after La Tortuga and ordered glasses of wine and with our drinks as our tapas got little turkey sandwiches and French fries. We wondered how come all of Granada’s residents didn’t weigh 200 pounds with such delicious food that comes so very free with a drink. And we both agreed that this was by far the most wonderful place we’d found in Spain. After our glasses of wine we headed back up the big hill, through the magical park to our hostel for our last night together.
The next morning we each got on separate busses heading to our respective destinations – Elyse to Motril on the coast, and I to Alora, buried in the Guadalhorce Valley between several mountain ranges in the Malaga province.
I knew I was in love with Granada from the moment the first raindrop hit my head. Perhaps love at first sight does exist when it comes to perfect places.
Conquering the tiny village of Alora is next…
We arrived in the late afternoon just as the sky was cracking open into an afternoon thunderstorm. As we had no place to stay, we asked a couple of British guys if they had a cheap hostel and when they told us it was only 10 euro we jumped in the cab with them and rode up, up, up the narrow winding streets to the very top of one of Granada’s hills, right next to the Alhambra. The streets were cobbled and slippery and the green trees were drooping down, heavy from the rainfall. Everything glowed in the evening light as we unloaded our baggage from the cab and checked into the hostel. We shared a tiny matrimonial bed in a tiny room that you could barely turn around in but it was perfect for the two of us.
The first evening we wandered down the hill, through a beautiful park, and found the main square of the city with little Tapas bars everywhere and people roaming the streets. We took a bus to the hill of Sacromonte to find a Moroccan restaurant that we’d looked up in Elyse’s travel book. It was to be our first dining out experience and we were starved. The Moroccan restaurant turned out to be quite a bust, considering the fact that we heard the microwave ding in the back right before our bland and hard dinner came out to the table. We swore to each other that we’d never eat out again and that we’d stick to our own creative culinary feats. We wandered back down into the glowing city and found a little Botega (wine cellar) to have a phenomenal glass of red wine, and of course the free Tapas that accompanied it.
Granada is one of the only cities in Spain that still practices the tradition of Tapas, and the food that they offer is excellent. We learned that Tapas originated back in the day when bartenders used to put little plates on top of the drinks of their customers to keep the flies out. Soon they started putting little snacks on the plates – chips, peanuts, etc. – but the tradition evolved into an expansive culture of cooked Tapas that now includes all kinds of home cooked dishes.
The next day we explored Granada from corner to corner. First we walked the city center’s streets, both the historic and the more modern shopping district. Then we decided to climb the hills of Sacromonte so that we could see the caves which we’d heard so much about. In the hills of Granada people still live and run their businesses in caves. Some are modern and have electricity and plumbing, but others are much more rugged and have barely anything at all. We climbed all the way up and walked along the winding, narrow road that led us around the mountain. The view below was breathtaking – all of Granada and the Sierra Nevada mountain range beyond. We stopped for a break at a little bar that turned out to be a cave and had a baby Alhambra beer and some free tapas and green grapes from the vines that grew right above our heads. We met an old man as we were sitting and having our beer, who had traveled all over the world. He was from Venice but had lived everywhere – from South America to Pakistan and Afghanistan to Bosnia and Croatia, Germany and then back to the Mediterranean. He said he had two sons in Germany and a few in Spain. He was a true nomad and spoke several languages, including English. But what struck me was the fact that he’d settled down at the end of his world route to grow old and die in Granada. Nothing could be more powerful than a man that had seen the world, and chosen to die in Granada. Elyse and I decided we wanted to grow old in Granada one day as well.
After our little break we kept walking up, exploring the modern caves and the views below. We decided to go down and go to the side across the valley where the caves were more rugged and natural. We descended and then climbed again, this time getting dirty and at some points having to climb on all fours. We found a few vacant caves and finally sat down on top of a little house, with what seemed like all of Spain spilling out beneath us. It was spectacular. We had the last bit of our baguette and brie, rested our forever roaming legs a bit and then headed back down the mountain and to the center of the city.
After taking a sleepless yet productive siesta at our hostel we went back down into town for our first evening of true Spanish tapas. We started at a little vegetarian restaurant called La Tortuga and ordered a beer each. We got two fabulous tapas plates of hummus and mozzarella spinach and after devouring it ordered another couple of beers, which came with additional tapas. This time we ordered spicy sausage cooked in wine and rice with salsa. In total we paid 8 or 9 Euros for a meal and a couple of drinks. We went to a wine bar after La Tortuga and ordered glasses of wine and with our drinks as our tapas got little turkey sandwiches and French fries. We wondered how come all of Granada’s residents didn’t weigh 200 pounds with such delicious food that comes so very free with a drink. And we both agreed that this was by far the most wonderful place we’d found in Spain. After our glasses of wine we headed back up the big hill, through the magical park to our hostel for our last night together.
The next morning we each got on separate busses heading to our respective destinations – Elyse to Motril on the coast, and I to Alora, buried in the Guadalhorce Valley between several mountain ranges in the Malaga province.
I knew I was in love with Granada from the moment the first raindrop hit my head. Perhaps love at first sight does exist when it comes to perfect places.
Conquering the tiny village of Alora is next…
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
The "Libertad" concert was in the Arc de Triomf plaza. Thousands of people all over the place....lots of music....lots of fun.
Elyse and our Argentine friend Niko. I'm not sure what's going on in this picture.
Maybe the most fun I've had dancing in a long time. We even got pushed into a few front-of-the-stage moshpits.
Our romantic, hostel-made dinner without an oven, to feed our hungry, frugal bellies. Couldn't have been more delicious.
Another thrifty picnic in the Plaza Reial with our beach sarongs spread out on the ground.
Elyse prepares her avocado, which we purchased 8 of for 2.50 euro. Not everything is expensive. In fact, some of the best stuff (produce) is not.
Monday, September 14, 2009
The Two Faces of Barcelona
A week in Barcelona feels like a lifetime; like a whirlwind voyage around the world. We just got back to the warmth and comfort of Madrid last night and the shower we took and the night's rest we got was epic. The energy in Barcelona, the nightlife, the sleeplessness, is electric and we enjoyed it to its fullest, but it's certainly left me craving the quietude of my little sleepy southern village that I'm going to finally move to in the next few days. Spain has been an incredible experience at every corner over the last few weeks, but it still doesn't feel like I live here. I'm still a traveler, a transient person in the lives of everyone we've met. I look forward to the permanence and the idea of home in Spain.
After a seemingly nonexistent night's bus ride from Madrid we arrived in Barcelona just as the sun was coming up. We were meeting a friend of mine from Italy and hoping to stay with him for a few nights but it was too early to call him so we made our way into the heart of the city from the bus station. You'd never guess where our first stop was....the Starbucks on La Rambla, Barcelona's biggest pedestrian and tourist hub. We gushed over our big "American" cup of coffee and read the newspaper of Barcelona for a few hours before finally trying to call my friend. To make a long story short, I'd misunderstood his emails in my confusion of Spanish, Italian, English, Bosnian, and whatever else is in my head and it turned out that he was actually leaving that very afternoon instead of the following week. So we only got to see him for a little while and we didn't have the place to stay where we thought. We bartered for a hostel right in the center of the city and found a place to stay for 15 euro. We realized later in the week just how lucky we were to have payed so little in a city that's as expensive as Barcelona is. The dollar doesn't go a long way when you take into account the exchange rate and the standard of living here. We were as frugal as we could be during the whole week. We never ate a single meal out and fed ourselves (well) with baguettes, brie, fruit and the amazing Maoz falafel places that are ubiquitous in the city. Believe me, Mediterranean Deli has nothing on this falafel.
Our first mission in Barcelona was the beach and as soon as we dropped our stuff off at the hostel that's exactly where we went. The beaches were huge and there were thousands of people on them - topless, completely naked, of all shapes and sizes. The water was clear and beautiful, the sand was course and warm, but the beach experience was much like that in America. Except for the hundreds of immigrants from Pakistan, Morocco, Thailand who walked up and down the beach like robots selling "sexy beer," sarongs, massages, coconut, everything under the sun. They never cease to offer their goods. That was something incredibly shocking to me in Barcelona - the number of illegal immigrants, especially from Pakistan. The saddest thing is how little respect they get, how they have to run from the cops as soon as they round a corner, and how meaningless their efforts at making money are. These Pakistani men, who I believe come from one of the most religiously observant countries in the world, are standing on dirty street corners in the middle of the night selling beer for a euro. And I wonder - do they have families? And what is it about their own countries that has made this a more desirable option? That was one of the sadder sides of Barcelona...
That first night we got a free meal at this place called Travel Bar and we quickly realized that the only language around us was English. Barcelona's primary tongue is English, I'm certain, and the population of Americans who don't speak Spanish is embarrassing. They get under-the-table jobs as "pub crawl" promoters and they just stand on street corners and hand out obnoxious fliers advertising their respective bar crawls. We weren't interested in getting wasted for 15 euros nor speaking English, so we headed to our hostel with a baguette and a jar of Nutella for our own private night and then went to bed.
The next day we took our own walking tour of Barcelona, heading north from Las Ramblas to the very northern corner where the Parque Guell is located. It was a long meandering walk through the historic part of the city as well as the more metropolitan shopping area. The park was phenomenal. It reminded me ofAlice in Wonderland in its magical structures, palm trees full of beautiful green parrots, and the incredible view of the city and Mediterranean Sea down below. The architecture looked as though Gaudi had made it out of playdough and then blown it up to real size. Apparently he was hit by a train on his way to church when he died, an incredibly spiritual man. Some say he was tripping on LSD, but I don't think that it's true. After our regular afternoon at the beach we met up with our friend Lauren, who's been living in Barcelona for the last year, and then went to her friend's apartment in another part of the city. It was nice to have a quintessentially Barcelonean evening and to spend it in the company of Spanish speakers.
The next day we decided to get out of the helter-skelter of the city and visit a less populous beach up the coast from Barcelona. It was about an hour's train ride before we arrived to the peaceful beach of San Pol de Mar, halfway to France on the Costa Brava. It was beautiful and serene and a nice change from the filthy beaches of Barcelona. We spent the entire day basking in the sun and observing the locals in their games of kadima and beach soccer. The water was perfect - cool and clear and so salty. Being there and just feeling the waves rhytmically crash against the shore made me realize that I really want to grow old by the sea. As we were getting back onto our train to head back to the city, we watched a group of retired old locals play Bocci ball in the park. Their skin was bronze and healthy and they looked blissful to be by the water.
That evening we wandered around the streets for a little while looking for signs of Spanish speaking bars and we finally stumbled upon a tiny little, hole-in-the wall place that was packed full of people. We were a little discouraged at first at the familiarity of all the people at the bar, but in no time we were approached by Spanish speakers (yess) and got to start practicing our Spanish. I've learned that what's more effective than any intensive Spanish course, is just striking up conversations with strangers in bars. We talked to a few guys from Portugal who'd been living in Barcelona for a while and then after the bar closed we went to a "clandestino" bar nearby with a Turkish guy who'd been living in Barcelona and studying cinema and a guy from Chile named Sebastian who had somehow acquired the nickname of "piojo," which means lice in Spanish. The Turkish guy blew me away with the number of languages he spoke. He was born in Turkey so that was his mother tongue, but then he also lived in Germany so he spoke German, he'd lived in Italy so he was fluent in Italian, he spoke perfect English and Spanish and was learning Catalan (the language of Barcelona). I was amazed at how young and how well versed he was in languages. He was quite a character though - a skinny little guy with dread locks, who talked a lot and was incredibly angsty. He was a complete anarchist revolutionary who supported the Basque separatists and when we asked him who he voted for he said he voted for the party that's been illegalized in Spain. "Piojo" moved to Barcelona from Chile where he'd studied psychology and he was working in Spain now as a counselor with heroine addicts. By four o'clock in the morning we were exhausted and wanted to go home but our new friends tried to convince us to go watch a soccer match at another club. Of course, we went back to our hostel to sleep. The people of Barcelona don't go to bed, I'm convinced.
The next day we hiked the streets of the city again to get to the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi's magnificent church that is still being constructed to this day. It was enormous and looked like a Gothic castle in so many ways. His idea with this church was to build the perfect place of worship and he died in the process of doing it, leaving the construction plans behind. The Spanish government is still subsidizing its construction. Will it ever be finished, I wonder. Or perhaps the idea is that the perfect place of worship could never actually be constructed so they keep building it forever and ever.
That afternoon we went to "La boqueria," the big outdoor market full of fresh fruits, vegetables, fish, meat, nuts, everything your heart could desire and bought phenomenal farmer's brie, a baguette, peaches and avocados and we took a little beach sarong out into the Plaza Reial (where all the expensive restaurants are) and we had a little picnic in the middle of the plaza. I guarantee you we ate better than any of the fools paying fortunes for the finger-picking food in the pretentious restaurants and we made people stare....what could be better?
That evening we went to a salsa club on the beach with a guy we met from Colombia. He turned out to be a little unpleasant with all the whiskey he was consuming so we left him and walked along the beach. We ran into a guy on a skateboard and Elyse proceeded to show off her skateboarding tricks, breaking our recently acquired salt shaker along the way. Our skateboarding friend Niko turned out to be a great find - a guitar-playing, vagabond traveling kid from Buenos Aires who'd been living in Barcelona for a while. We stayed out with him for a few hours talking about our different cultures and then went back home to our hostel.
Niko was an interesting character, one I could probably write a book about. He looked like he was 16 but was in fact 21, he was constantly smiling and laughing and called us his "cute chicas." It was as though he was dying for good, normal friends to spend his time with. He was a musician who played his guitar on the Metro to make extra money for lunch, he said. He'd been traveling around Europe and was settled in Barcelona for a while. We met his brother the next night at a Libartad concert, a revolutionary separatist radical experience for the liberation of Barcelona from Spain. His brother, one would think, would also be Argentine. But his brother was in fact from Cyprus. He and Niko didn't have a language in common so they spoke some kind of broken Spanglish between the two of them. Andrea (the brother) had found Niko a couple of years before on the internet as his long lost half brother and they'd met up for the first time in Europe. They shared the same father, but came from different mothers. We paraded around the city with the two of them that night after the concert and ended up on the beach on a blanket under the stars of Barcelona.
On our last official day in Barcelona we were homeless and it was quite an experience. We spent the afternoon hiking up a mountain in Parc Montjuic. I had my heavy backpack with me the whole day, my brilliant idea, of course; but now I tell myself I was training for my next adventure. We climbed to the top of the mountain which overlooked all of Barcelona and the sea below. There was a castle on top that we walked around in and had a little picnic of brie and baguette (our staple diet) as we towered over the world below. We spent the afternoon in the park, watching Spanish families enjoy their Saturday afternoon lounging in the grass and watching their kids play soccer. Here's a little park muse that I wrote, in case you're dying for poetry at this point:
A simple life...
spending a Saturday afternoon in the park
sitting on a blanket in the grass, drinking mate and eating sunflower seeds
watching your kids play futbol down below, electrified with energy from the afternoon sun
the city's angst exhales down below
but you don't feel it because you're so high
rolled r's, "goal" yells and high pitched laughter break the silence of the world
but the noise is like honey in a cup of hot tea
warming your body through your lungs
as dusk trickles in like an unnoticeable, stealthy thief
the mate is sucked dry
the birds are settling in the palm trees
the kids are still playing, and beg to stay longer
the mamas and the papas are content in their languid sprawls
"10 more minutes" tunres into 20, then 30, then more
But it's Saturday and it doesn't matter
and even if the bats come flying and the stars starting shining
they'll stay until the last drop of honey is sucked from the straw
they'll stay to pick the stars from the sky like fruits from a tree
they'll stay until their heart's content
as their chatter trickles, trickles, trickles away
And that's the image I hold in my head of Spanish families on Saturday afternoons.
In the evening we met up with our friend Niko and walked around the city for a few hours before heading to our friend Lauren's bar, where we planned to spend most of the night before going home with her to sleep at her apartment for a few hours before our bus left for Madrid. The bar was small and smoky and most of the customers were regular loonies. At one point we went to an ATM machine to try to withdraw money and when we went into the "cajero" we realized there was a group of Spaniards doing coke lines off the teller. That's Barcelona for you. Drugs on every corner, and not a shrug about it. We finally got to Lauren's apartment at 7 that morning and slept for a few hours before catching our bus back to Madrid. The bus ride was like a dream from which I couldn't wake up and before I knew it we were pulling into the station in Madrid.
My friend Carina wrote to me in an email that Barcelona is a rock star and Madrid is like an old woman, and it's such an accurate depiction of the difference between the two cities. After a week of Barcelona's madness, it felt nice to come back to the old woman that gave us a hot shower and a comfortable bed to sleep in. And tomorrow we head south. South to where the weather is hotter, south to where the people are kinder, south to where the accent is inimitable, south to where the wine and cheese are cheaper and tapas are free. South. I'm so glad I'm moving south. Tomorrow to Granada and in the next couple of days after that to Alora, where I will finally feel like I'm living in Spain.
After a seemingly nonexistent night's bus ride from Madrid we arrived in Barcelona just as the sun was coming up. We were meeting a friend of mine from Italy and hoping to stay with him for a few nights but it was too early to call him so we made our way into the heart of the city from the bus station. You'd never guess where our first stop was....the Starbucks on La Rambla, Barcelona's biggest pedestrian and tourist hub. We gushed over our big "American" cup of coffee and read the newspaper of Barcelona for a few hours before finally trying to call my friend. To make a long story short, I'd misunderstood his emails in my confusion of Spanish, Italian, English, Bosnian, and whatever else is in my head and it turned out that he was actually leaving that very afternoon instead of the following week. So we only got to see him for a little while and we didn't have the place to stay where we thought. We bartered for a hostel right in the center of the city and found a place to stay for 15 euro. We realized later in the week just how lucky we were to have payed so little in a city that's as expensive as Barcelona is. The dollar doesn't go a long way when you take into account the exchange rate and the standard of living here. We were as frugal as we could be during the whole week. We never ate a single meal out and fed ourselves (well) with baguettes, brie, fruit and the amazing Maoz falafel places that are ubiquitous in the city. Believe me, Mediterranean Deli has nothing on this falafel.
Our first mission in Barcelona was the beach and as soon as we dropped our stuff off at the hostel that's exactly where we went. The beaches were huge and there were thousands of people on them - topless, completely naked, of all shapes and sizes. The water was clear and beautiful, the sand was course and warm, but the beach experience was much like that in America. Except for the hundreds of immigrants from Pakistan, Morocco, Thailand who walked up and down the beach like robots selling "sexy beer," sarongs, massages, coconut, everything under the sun. They never cease to offer their goods. That was something incredibly shocking to me in Barcelona - the number of illegal immigrants, especially from Pakistan. The saddest thing is how little respect they get, how they have to run from the cops as soon as they round a corner, and how meaningless their efforts at making money are. These Pakistani men, who I believe come from one of the most religiously observant countries in the world, are standing on dirty street corners in the middle of the night selling beer for a euro. And I wonder - do they have families? And what is it about their own countries that has made this a more desirable option? That was one of the sadder sides of Barcelona...
That first night we got a free meal at this place called Travel Bar and we quickly realized that the only language around us was English. Barcelona's primary tongue is English, I'm certain, and the population of Americans who don't speak Spanish is embarrassing. They get under-the-table jobs as "pub crawl" promoters and they just stand on street corners and hand out obnoxious fliers advertising their respective bar crawls. We weren't interested in getting wasted for 15 euros nor speaking English, so we headed to our hostel with a baguette and a jar of Nutella for our own private night and then went to bed.
The next day we took our own walking tour of Barcelona, heading north from Las Ramblas to the very northern corner where the Parque Guell is located. It was a long meandering walk through the historic part of the city as well as the more metropolitan shopping area. The park was phenomenal. It reminded me of
The next day we decided to get out of the helter-skelter of the city and visit a less populous beach up the coast from Barcelona. It was about an hour's train ride before we arrived to the peaceful beach of San Pol de Mar, halfway to France on the Costa Brava. It was beautiful and serene and a nice change from the filthy beaches of Barcelona. We spent the entire day basking in the sun and observing the locals in their games of kadima and beach soccer. The water was perfect - cool and clear and so salty. Being there and just feeling the waves rhytmically crash against the shore made me realize that I really want to grow old by the sea. As we were getting back onto our train to head back to the city, we watched a group of retired old locals play Bocci ball in the park. Their skin was bronze and healthy and they looked blissful to be by the water.
That evening we wandered around the streets for a little while looking for signs of Spanish speaking bars and we finally stumbled upon a tiny little, hole-in-the wall place that was packed full of people. We were a little discouraged at first at the familiarity of all the people at the bar, but in no time we were approached by Spanish speakers (yess) and got to start practicing our Spanish. I've learned that what's more effective than any intensive Spanish course, is just striking up conversations with strangers in bars. We talked to a few guys from Portugal who'd been living in Barcelona for a while and then after the bar closed we went to a "clandestino" bar nearby with a Turkish guy who'd been living in Barcelona and studying cinema and a guy from Chile named Sebastian who had somehow acquired the nickname of "piojo," which means lice in Spanish. The Turkish guy blew me away with the number of languages he spoke. He was born in Turkey so that was his mother tongue, but then he also lived in Germany so he spoke German, he'd lived in Italy so he was fluent in Italian, he spoke perfect English and Spanish and was learning Catalan (the language of Barcelona). I was amazed at how young and how well versed he was in languages. He was quite a character though - a skinny little guy with dread locks, who talked a lot and was incredibly angsty. He was a complete anarchist revolutionary who supported the Basque separatists and when we asked him who he voted for he said he voted for the party that's been illegalized in Spain. "Piojo" moved to Barcelona from Chile where he'd studied psychology and he was working in Spain now as a counselor with heroine addicts. By four o'clock in the morning we were exhausted and wanted to go home but our new friends tried to convince us to go watch a soccer match at another club. Of course, we went back to our hostel to sleep. The people of Barcelona don't go to bed, I'm convinced.
The next day we hiked the streets of the city again to get to the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi's magnificent church that is still being constructed to this day. It was enormous and looked like a Gothic castle in so many ways. His idea with this church was to build the perfect place of worship and he died in the process of doing it, leaving the construction plans behind. The Spanish government is still subsidizing its construction. Will it ever be finished, I wonder. Or perhaps the idea is that the perfect place of worship could never actually be constructed so they keep building it forever and ever.
That afternoon we went to "La boqueria," the big outdoor market full of fresh fruits, vegetables, fish, meat, nuts, everything your heart could desire and bought phenomenal farmer's brie, a baguette, peaches and avocados and we took a little beach sarong out into the Plaza Reial (where all the expensive restaurants are) and we had a little picnic in the middle of the plaza. I guarantee you we ate better than any of the fools paying fortunes for the finger-picking food in the pretentious restaurants and we made people stare....what could be better?
That evening we went to a salsa club on the beach with a guy we met from Colombia. He turned out to be a little unpleasant with all the whiskey he was consuming so we left him and walked along the beach. We ran into a guy on a skateboard and Elyse proceeded to show off her skateboarding tricks, breaking our recently acquired salt shaker along the way. Our skateboarding friend Niko turned out to be a great find - a guitar-playing, vagabond traveling kid from Buenos Aires who'd been living in Barcelona for a while. We stayed out with him for a few hours talking about our different cultures and then went back home to our hostel.
Niko was an interesting character, one I could probably write a book about. He looked like he was 16 but was in fact 21, he was constantly smiling and laughing and called us his "cute chicas." It was as though he was dying for good, normal friends to spend his time with. He was a musician who played his guitar on the Metro to make extra money for lunch, he said. He'd been traveling around Europe and was settled in Barcelona for a while. We met his brother the next night at a Libartad concert, a revolutionary separatist radical experience for the liberation of Barcelona from Spain. His brother, one would think, would also be Argentine. But his brother was in fact from Cyprus. He and Niko didn't have a language in common so they spoke some kind of broken Spanglish between the two of them. Andrea (the brother) had found Niko a couple of years before on the internet as his long lost half brother and they'd met up for the first time in Europe. They shared the same father, but came from different mothers. We paraded around the city with the two of them that night after the concert and ended up on the beach on a blanket under the stars of Barcelona.
On our last official day in Barcelona we were homeless and it was quite an experience. We spent the afternoon hiking up a mountain in Parc Montjuic. I had my heavy backpack with me the whole day, my brilliant idea, of course; but now I tell myself I was training for my next adventure. We climbed to the top of the mountain which overlooked all of Barcelona and the sea below. There was a castle on top that we walked around in and had a little picnic of brie and baguette (our staple diet) as we towered over the world below. We spent the afternoon in the park, watching Spanish families enjoy their Saturday afternoon lounging in the grass and watching their kids play soccer. Here's a little park muse that I wrote, in case you're dying for poetry at this point:
A simple life...
spending a Saturday afternoon in the park
sitting on a blanket in the grass, drinking mate and eating sunflower seeds
watching your kids play futbol down below, electrified with energy from the afternoon sun
the city's angst exhales down below
but you don't feel it because you're so high
rolled r's, "goal" yells and high pitched laughter break the silence of the world
but the noise is like honey in a cup of hot tea
warming your body through your lungs
as dusk trickles in like an unnoticeable, stealthy thief
the mate is sucked dry
the birds are settling in the palm trees
the kids are still playing, and beg to stay longer
the mamas and the papas are content in their languid sprawls
"10 more minutes" tunres into 20, then 30, then more
But it's Saturday and it doesn't matter
and even if the bats come flying and the stars starting shining
they'll stay until the last drop of honey is sucked from the straw
they'll stay to pick the stars from the sky like fruits from a tree
they'll stay until their heart's content
as their chatter trickles, trickles, trickles away
And that's the image I hold in my head of Spanish families on Saturday afternoons.
In the evening we met up with our friend Niko and walked around the city for a few hours before heading to our friend Lauren's bar, where we planned to spend most of the night before going home with her to sleep at her apartment for a few hours before our bus left for Madrid. The bar was small and smoky and most of the customers were regular loonies. At one point we went to an ATM machine to try to withdraw money and when we went into the "cajero" we realized there was a group of Spaniards doing coke lines off the teller. That's Barcelona for you. Drugs on every corner, and not a shrug about it. We finally got to Lauren's apartment at 7 that morning and slept for a few hours before catching our bus back to Madrid. The bus ride was like a dream from which I couldn't wake up and before I knew it we were pulling into the station in Madrid.
My friend Carina wrote to me in an email that Barcelona is a rock star and Madrid is like an old woman, and it's such an accurate depiction of the difference between the two cities. After a week of Barcelona's madness, it felt nice to come back to the old woman that gave us a hot shower and a comfortable bed to sleep in. And tomorrow we head south. South to where the weather is hotter, south to where the people are kinder, south to where the accent is inimitable, south to where the wine and cheese are cheaper and tapas are free. South. I'm so glad I'm moving south. Tomorrow to Granada and in the next couple of days after that to Alora, where I will finally feel like I'm living in Spain.
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