As promised, my story from Grenada. This is my longest post so far…get ready. It started off “Amazing Race” style (you know...that reality TV competition show like “Survivor” where people have to run to their next destination for their next challenge..). There were six of us. We were taking a 6:30am bus from Toledo to Madrid so we could catch the 8am bus from Madrid to Grenada. Four of the six of us live in Poligono, a suburb, and the other two live in the old part of Toledo. The four of us decided to catch a 6am bus from Poligono to the bus station, and Meg and Willie decided to meet up at our school at 5:50 to walk to the bus station together (it’s about a 20 minute walk). But then the bus didn’t pick us up until 6:15, Willie never showed up, and Meg left school at 6:10 and ran the whole way to the bus station with a full backpack on her back. The Poligono crew made it there at 6:28, Meg got there at 6:30, and we had no word from Willie, who wasn’t answering his phone. Bus left promptly at 6:31. Still no Willie.
When we got to Madrid, we took the metro from the bus station where we were dropped off to another bus station where we needed to catch our Grenada bus. We went up to the ticket counter to buy tickets only to discover that there was no 8am bus. Didn’t exist. So we ended up buying tickets for the 11:30 bus. Which is a bummer in some ways because it is a 5 hour bus ride and instead of getting there at 1pm and having all afternoon in the city, we arrived at 4:30. But on the upside, at least we had tickets for a bus. We decided to walk around the city a little and find a coffee shop, since we did have three hours to kill. We found a shop, watched the sun rise (it rises around 8am here), and I ordered a tea and my favorite pastry. They have these pastries here that are absolutely delicious. Maybe we have them in the states too, but I don’t generally eat many pastries in the states. It’s a flakey thing, a rectangle about the size of two sticks of butter sitting next to each other, and has chocolate in the middle the length of it. Most of them are also topped with chocolate sprinkles. Anyways. We were sitting there in this coffee shop, I was eating (no one else had ordered anything…a bit odd considering that I wasn’t even the one that suggested a coffee shop! Someone else did!), when we finally got ahold of Willie. He had gone to bed at 4:30am with the intention of “taking a nap” and slept through his alarm. We told him that we were still in Madrid, that our bus wasn’t leaving until 11:30 and that he should meet us in the bus station in time to catch that bus. Busses between Toledo and Madrid run every half hour and it only takes 45 minutes to get there. Eventually we wandered back to the bus station and waited there for an hour and half or so. Willie finally made it, and I hit a jackpot when I walked into a magazine shop and discovered a National Geographic in English shelved in the far corner. I bought it.
A jillion hours later, we made it to Grenada. It’s in the far south of Spain, about an hour from Mediterranean, a little northeast of the Strait of Gibraltar. The landscape between Madrid and Grenada is gorgeous. We passed everything on our way. Classic old windmills you’d picture to be all over Holland, some new wind turbines, fields of solar panels, fields of crops, fields of olive trees, some mountains, some really cool geology (yes, I just said that), some more olives, bigger mountains, valleys, olives, little towns, more olives, bigger mountains, tunnels, and more olives. In some places, the olive groves were so thick and expansive that it smelled like olives inside our bus. When we got there, we took another bus from the bus station to close to our hostel, which was down the street and around the corner from both the cathedral and the Alambra. We checked in and discovered that we had the room on the very top floor of the hostel, a room for all six of us, complete with a rooftop balcony where we sat for a little bit and talked about what we wanted to do while we were there.
We ended up just walking around Friday evening/night. We walked to the cathedral, watched a street performer guy write people’s names in Arabic for €1, and ended up in this ancient little market by the cathedral where they used to sell silk back in the day. Rick Steve’s guidebook to Spain tells me the Alcaicería was was “originally built as a Moorish silk market with 200 shops filled with precious salt, silver, spices, and silk. It had 10 armed gates and its own guards.” It doesn’t give a date of when this market was built, but back in the day could mean anywhere between 711AD and 1492 when the Moors (Moroccan Muslims) took control of the Iberian Peninsula and the Reconquista and when the Moors were finally kicked out of Spain by the Reyes Católicos, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel respectively. Grenada was the last Moorish stronghold in the peninsula, and to this day, there are many lasting Arab influences there. It was pretty neat. This market was SO incredibly colorful. I loved it!
After we left the Alcaicería, we found ourselves back by the cathedral and walking down a street where they were selling spices and teas in an open market form, with baskets of spices and teas lined three or four baskets thick and maybe 30 baskets long. It smelled INCREDIBLE. At some point we turned around to look back where we had come from, only to find ourselves staring into the most incredible sunset. It was picture perfect – the magentas, oranges, purples and blues.
We made our way back to the plaza by our hostel and decided to eat dinner, as it was probably 8:30 or 9pm by this time. Rachel and I went to one place and ordered mixed salads, while there rest went elsewhere. Our salads came and were HUGE, with corn, tuna, olives, tomatoes, and onions all piled on top of a giant plate of lettuce. After dinner, we all went across the street to a bar where we sat outside and most of us ordered sangrias or lemonade and got plate after plate of free tapas with our drinks. We headed back to our hostel around midnight or so and made ourselves comfy on our rooftop patio, where we talked and laughed and hung out for a while, before the cold drove us back inside. I went back out there once more before going to bed and was pleasantly surprised to find Orion hovering horizontally above the Alhambra.
Saturday morning we probably got up around 9ish. Anny announced that it was 15° out and Willie groaned. Too cold! And then I turned to him and said “you know that’s in Celsius, right?” and he groaned again at his own mistake. He thought Anny meant Fahrenheit. No Sir, we are not in Minnesota anymore. When everyone had showered and was ready to go, we went to breakfast at a little café that served an American style breakfast. Bacon, eggs and toast. I just ordered toast. And fresh squeezed orange juice. And as I was spreading my butter on my toast, I realized that that is the first time I have eaten any butter here! It was delicious.
We went to the cathedral and the royal chapel after breakfast. The cathedral is the second largest in Spain after the cathedral in Sevilla, and one of two built in a Renaissance style (the other is in Córdoba). The cathedral was HUGE and gorgeous. And interestingly light and airy for being so gigantic and old. The inside was painted with lime in the 18th century as per an order by a bishop for hygienic reasons in a period of disease, and since then it has stayed white. The royal chapel is next door to the Cathedral and was commissioned by Ferdinand and Isabel and has an incredibly lavish interior, light, airy, and lacey, that cost these monarchs one quarter of their wealth. There are four elaborately carved tombs here split into two pairs. One for Isabel and Ferdinand, and the other for their daughter Juana the Mad and her husband Philip the Fair. (This is where all my favorite history converges! It was Juana and Philip’s son Carlos I [as he in known in Spain and Charles V in the rest of Europe] who was the Holy Roman Emperor who denied Henry VIII of England from divorcing his first wife, another daughter of Ferdinand and Isabel, that drove Henry to split England from the Catholic Church so he could marry Anne Boleyn). Under the tombs is the crypt where we can actually see the real coffins of these four monarchs! I about died in excitement. Off the side of the chapel is a little museum of works of art collected by Isabel, which includes minor works by Botticelli. The best thing in this little museum? The actual crown of Isabel, her scepter, and Ferdinand’s sword. I could have stayed here all day. Sadly, I was not allowed to take pictures there. So I bought myself some way overpriced postcards instead.
I should pause a moment to give my friends credit and thank them for putting up with my history-geekness so well all day. Especially considering that just like I expected before we even began the weekend, I was the last person to leave everything because I was so enthralled in the history of everything around me. Thank you thank you thank you for being so awesome.
After the royal chapel we walked around a bit, and found ourselves in a little plaza where there was a bunch of things to do for kids. Like a super mini fair thing. Bracelet making, face painting, a blowup/bouncy slide thing, a guy break-dancing, and pick up street hockey. What did we do? Play hockey of course! Three of us did. Willie, Rachel, and myself. We made friends with the guy running it too. It was a good time. Meg and Laura were on picture duty, and Anny was somewhere else. Not sure where. After that, we ate lunch, splitting up again. Willie, Rachel, and I ate at an Arab place, complete with silk drapes hanging from the ceiling and low seats and tables, where I had a delicious wrap thing called a “dumus.” I feel like I need to learn some synonyms for delicious. Thoughts?
After lunch we made our way to the Alhambra, the Moorish castle/fortress complex in Grenada, and one of the top tourist sites in all of Europe, attracting up to 8000 visitors a day. It is a wonderful example of the grandeur of Moorish civilization in Spain. It was here at the Alhambra in Grenada that the last Moorish kingdom in Europe surrendered to the Christian Reconquista, to Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492. This huge walled complex is a maze of palaces, fortresses, gardens, awesome views, and water. Water was the purest symbol of life to the Moors (remember, they can’t use any representation of human/animal life in any of their artwork/architecture etc…) and they diverted the river in Grenada to swing through the grounds so they could use the water to support their water fetish here. Water that is standing still, bubbling from fountains, dripping, cascading etc. It was unbelievable. And, fun fact, the first drinking fountains I have ever seen in Spain were in the Alhambra. We were there for five hours, and didn’t have time to see all of it! Also, unfortunately, my camera, as well as all but two other people’s camera batteries died while we were there. Bummer. The worst part for me was that I actually had a second camera with me in Grenada. It was just at our hostel and not actually with me when my good camera died. Double bummer. However, I did get Willie’s pictures from the weekend, so I do have some good ones that he took at the Alhambra. His was one of the two that didn’t die, though he did have a warning blinking low battery light when we left.
When we got back to our hostel, it was 8:30pm and we sat there for an hour or so, relishing in the fact that we could lay down on our beds and get off our feet for a bit, and then we decided we were hungry, so we left again to find food. Willie, Rachel, and I ended up at the same bar we had been at the night before, eating free tapas with our sangrias. Anny ate at the place Rachel and I had eaten salad at the night before, and Laura and Meg went back to the bus station to buy us all bus tickets home because the website wasn’t letting any of us pay for tickets online and then ate somewhere on their way back to us.
Sunday, we packed up our room and headed out around 10 or 11. I ate ice cream for breakfast. Everyone else ate real food though. We walked around some more, and found ourselves in the same silk market as Friday evening and then Meg, Laura, Rachel, and I headed back to the bus station so we could catch our 1pm bus back to Madrid and then another bus back to Toledo. Anny and Willie stayed behind so they could go paragliding and took the overnight bus.
Overall, I’d say it was a very successful weekend. And I’ve decided that Grenada is my favorite city in Spain. And if you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading. I love you all!
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