La odisea

One of the initial draws to the IES program for me was the option of direct enrollment, that is, the option of enrolling in classes at the Universidad de Granada (UGR). Taking classes at a Spanish university just seemed to me to be obviously a better choice than being insulated taking classes exclusively at the program center, isolated from the culture beyond. Since coming here, I’ve developed a slightly different view of direct enrollment: that is, I think a mix of some UGR classes and some IES classes is the best option, not all one or the other.

The classes at IES are all really interesting and exciting (they were really hard to pick from!); and in contrast, most of the classes available to us at the UGR are pretty dry (much drier in comparison, certainly) and follow the format of almost exclusively lecture-based classes where there are few assignments over the course of the semester and the final exam is what really makes up your grade. Of course I’ve heard of such class formats in the U.S., too, but basically there are just a lot of differences in the system that can make UGR seem like a much more difficult choice than the default IES classes.

But hey, I’m here to learn about such differences, and I want to take advantage of this opportunity to study within a totally different school system. And although all my IES classes are taught in Spanish, the professors speak moderately-slowly and simply—not excessively so, but they definitely go out of their way to speak clearly and accessibly and make sure that everyone is understanding everything. Obviously there are no such concessions in an actual Spanish classroom, which bumps up the difficulty a bit; the material is more academic (IES classes are academic, too, but they try to be fun and engaging as well, which isn’t necessarily on the UGR classes’ agenda—you’re simply there to learn information as it’s written in the book and get the required courses for your major); and with classmates also being Spanish, everything just proceeds at a faster pace. (Also, Spanish classmates = a way to break out of the American program bubble. That’s a big one.)

The class I really wanted to take at the UGR was Arabic. I find myself awkwardly between Arabic levels at the moment, having taken a summer course which amounted to about half a semester’s worth of material. IES offers a beginning Arabic class, but I didn’t want to take it because the first half of the semester would all be review and the class is taught in English. The Facultad de Traducción e Interpretación (School of Translation)* at the UGR offers a vast smorgasbord of language courses (Bulgarian to Gallego to Mandarin to Hebrew), and I decided to give second-semester beginning Arabic a shot and see if I could make that half-a-semester leap in knowledge.

[*Note something interesting: in Spanish (and this I only learned since coming here; I had no idea beforehand) the word “traducir” (which I always learned as meaning ‘to translate’) actually refers exclusively to written translation, while ‘interpretar’ (like ‘interpret’) is used exclusively for spoken translation.]

The Facultad de Traducción e Interpretación is actually about twenty seconds’ walk from where I live, which explains why 99% of the Spanish kids who live in my residencia are language students. The building was absolutely gorgeous. It was all marble on the inside, very ornamental; from the second floor I could see how the back of the building was built in a U-shape, with a large courtyard-garden (the ubiquitous orange trees!) in the middle, the hallways facing the courtyard a series of large windows filled with the lovely view. Really a beautiful place. Again, that hallowed-fount-of-higher-education feel, strong and stately and distinguished and impersonal. I can’t imagine what it would be like to exclusively attend such a university (if I had no idea of what small U.S. liberal arts colleges were like?), but I certainly enjoy it as something different.

Well, I’ll skip to the punchline. Unfortunately, I’m not going to be taking the Arabic class. It’s simply too hard for me. I thought I might be able to muddle through, maybe do some intensive catch-up—and then the nice guy sitting next to me showed me what they’d gotten through last semester: nearly two hundred pages in Al-Kitaab. Al-Kitaab (“the book”) is the book for learning Arabic, and you certainly learn a lot of material, but it’s also very intimidating. In my summer Arabic class we got through Alif Baa, which is basically the prologue to Al-Kitaab. Our teacher showed us the first chapter of Al-Kitaab, and I was, as I say, intimidated: there seemed to be a disconnect (which my teacher confirmed) between where Alif Baa ended and where Al-Kitaab began, although the two are part of a set; a sudden and pretty significant leap.

I repeat: the class had gotten through nearly two hundred pages of Al-Kitaab. In a way it was good, because it was just a very obvious, clear dividing line of demarcation between what I could try to do with the modest amount I’ve learned and what was simply beyond my reach. It was also very disappointing, though. No Arabic for me, and here I am, still caught between levels. I did, however, get one thing out of my brief time in the class…

One thing that seems to be very common here in Spain is the use of “fotocopias” in lieu of textbooks. Fotocopias are printing stores (very small-scale operations) that, just like a college bookstore, have materials on file for various university classes (though note, real university bookstores exist, too). You go in, tell them which class you need the book for, and then they get out the pages they have on file for that class, kept in an envelope. They put them in the copy machine and print out the pages right then and there. They also—and this will probably never fail to fascinate me—bind the books by running the pages through a micro hole puncher and then thread the spiral through the holes by hand. The first time I saw a man get out a fat spiral from his drawer (he had them in all sizes) and take it to the thick stack of pages waiting on the counter I was astonished: surely he couldn’t actually do that by hand? I though there were machines for that; I thought only machines could possibly do that! And yet it’s actually extremely speedy work which only takes a few seconds, and then they use a pliers to bend off the end and close the spiral. Amazing.

Back on point, after class I went downstairs to the Facultad’s fotocopia and requested Al-Kitaab. The actual textbook is colored and glossy, as American textbooks are wont to be, while the photocopied-and-bound version was in black-and-white on plain paper, as you might imagine; but hey, it was less than the quarter of the price of what I would otherwise pay (I’ve priced it online several times), so I saw it as a good opportunity to get my hands on a cheap “edition.” (Also, it could actually be nice to have a plain-paper version, because now I won’t feel bad writing in the book itself for all the exercises.) I could only get the first ten chapters, but that alone is over two hundred pages (jam-packed, as is the way of Al-Kitaab), so quite substantial and sufficient.

A funny story: I’m in the Arabic class, and the professor asks me, in Arabic, what’s my name. I tell her it’s Rhiannon, and, like everyone else ever in a foreign country, she looks confused, tries it out, asks me to repeat it—the usual run-through. Then she asks me, still in Arabic, where my name is from. Well, it’s Welsh, but God help me if I know how to say that in Arabic. I do have a stab at remembering the word for “Irish,” though, so I say that instead—who’s going to know the difference or care? And then, immediately, the girl to my right pipes out in Spanish, “No it isn’t! It’s Welsh! I am also Rhiannon!” WHAAAAAT! It was so crazy. We talked afterwards—I quickly assured her that I did know the origins of my own name, explained my thinking, and she told me she’d assumed as much—and she’s actually from Wales. What a hilarious, strange coincidence.

With Arabic unfortunately not going to work out, I had to figure out what class I would take at the UGR instead. I found some really exciting options, my top picks of which were Contemporary Arab Literature and Classical Arab Literature. Both sounded great. But here’s the tricky part: this is the only week you get to ‘try out’ classes at the UGR: come Monday, you are enrolled permanently in a class, or none at all. (Well, I think you can still drop classes later, but you can’t add any.) Since the only classes that would work in my schedule were on Tuesday/Thursday at the same time as each other, and I’d already used up my Tuesday of this week going to Arabic, today, Thursday, I would only be able to choose one to attend and would have to hope it would turn out to be The One. This felt perilous to me, so just to be safe I also met with IES’ UGR advisor, who’s there to help us coordinate UGR classes. And it’s good that I did! It turned out my three top choices of classes all had prerequisites that occluded me from taking them. That left me with Islamología (Islamology? That’s not a thing in English, I don’t think), which was my last choice because of its less-than-desirable scheduling: it’s 7:30 to 9:30 at night, at the very far away Facultad de Filosofía y Letras.

But no matter. Today I went to Islamología, crossing my fingers desperately that it would all work out fine—because if not, there would be no more UGR classes for me to try, and I would be left stuck taking another class at the IES center instead, which would be disappointing. My friend Haley also had a class at 7:30 at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, so we decided we’d walk over together. I told her I was really OCD/anxious about being on-time/preferably extremely early to things, and asked if we could leave a full hour early, especially since neither of us had ever been there, but had only heard it was far away.

Well, thank God we left when we did. That’s one way to get my adrenaline pumping. It was a series of misadventures which might have amounted to happy accidental exploring in another context, but within the crunch of time and what felt to me like so much riding on this, my last and only chance to take a UGR class, I was really anxious.

We knew the basic way: up, up, up. But along the way I saw a road I’d gone up once before, and I knew where it came out: it was a short cut, so we took it. Up, up, up, vertically, to emerge—nowhere. This is what I get for thinking I know what short cuts are. Luckily there happened to be two policemen milling around on that corner, and I asked them for directions. My heart sank as one described to me how we needed to go down, down, down a different road, turn at the big stoplight, and then go up, up, up again—the Facultad was on a totally different hill from the one we were on. And only a half an hour to go before class. It was a long way down. I enjoy climbing hills, so that element didn’t bother me, but the fact that we were so far from our destination was really worrying.

We finally got to the stoplight and started our ascent once more—the Facultad has to be on top of one of the highest hills in the city; you just go straight up for forever. (The view is fantastic and never more so than in the twilight; we were treated to a gorgeous sunset at our backs and got to watch the city light up for the night.) We emerged—somewhere, and I pulled aside an old man and asked him for directions. Dear God. Even worse news, it seemed. His eyes got wide when I said the name of the Facultad, and he gestured with his arm way, way far away as he said, “It’s completely on the other side of this hill.” I pressed him for more: “And how can we get there?” He told us we would have to go all the way to the end of the road we were on (which was more up, up, up, predictably), and then we could turn in to the Facultad. Okay, maybe this was doable.

Actually, once we started walking in that direction, it seemed crazy. Just how long was this road, anyway? Then I remembered the route I’d looked up on Google Maps beforehand: there had been a very strange bit at the very end where you had to walk far past the Facultad in a straight line and then double back the same distance. I hadn’t understood why, and now I did: the whole complex of houses and schools and other buildings, really whole neighborhoods and more, was contained within walls so thick and high they might have made South Africa proud (that’s before the electric wire, razor blades, and armed security guards, of course). Tingling with anxiety, I was looking for any opening where we could possibly jump the walls, but it was just impossible: too high, too solid.

The walls seemed to stretch around a ludicrously long ways, but finally there came a break, where we were able to turn. We were heading in the right direction! We came to another road that stretched on forever, and although we experienced the success of being in the university complex, how to find our particular building? Luckily Haley had another map and not too much later we found the building of Filosofía y Letras itself. I still wasn’t ready to celebrate. There were fifteen minutes to go, but who could guess how hard it might be to find the right classroom?

Predictably, it was really hard. I have no idea what kind of logic the numbering system operated on. I finally found a directory board that listed where the classrooms were, and it was crazy: 5, 19, 6-13—floor one; 42, 15, 33—floor two; etc. My classroom number was listed as “accessible from the exterior of the building.” This is an enormous, sprawling building complex. Was I going to have to run around the perimeter of the thing to try to find where some door on the outside was? With five minutes to go, I was getting desperate. I asked several people, without luck, until I approached a girl, opened my mouth to ask, and saw from the corner of my eye people disappearing into a door that had to be mine. I shut my mouth, and she read my thought process instantly and laughed as I ran off. It turned out my classroom was in a kind of separate, add-on building, like a portable. Success at last, and exactly to the minute. Whew, that was cutting it fine.

Nobody was there. But they had the class number posted on the door. I thought it was quite possible that on Tuesday, when the class had started, they had discussed changing the classroom, perhaps; I’d glimpsed this kind of flexibility in the Arabic class, when the professor had said, “I know you guys probably aren’t too keen on this class schedule—so everyone, get out your schedules and let’s pick some other day or time to have class!” Luckily for me, this wasn’t the case, and the other students came by shortly. (For all I’ve ever heard about the Spanish culture of not placing so much importance on being on time to things and all that, everything I’ve seen here has been the model of punctuality. Maybe the stereotype is more true of Latin America?)

Well, good news at last! Islamología looks like it’s going to work nicely for me. The professor was wonderful, there are only twelve people in the class, and the class actually happens to be structured the way I’m used to it, with a more lecture-discussion mix, where participation is worth a considerable amount of your grade and the final test is only worth 40%.

It would actually probably be much easier for me just to have the lecture-format and have the final test be worth everything, because as the professor reviewed the syllabus I realized it’s virtually identical material to what I studied last year in my History of Islamic Civilizations class. I could probably do well on the test, whereas participation in such a class is a lot harder. I participate easily and often in my Whitman classes, but that’s a far cry from doing so in Spanish, in front of Spanish people. That said, I’m sure having to participate will be really good for my language skills. Even if it’ll be embarrassing to stumble in my words in front of everyone (there are several other foreigners, but they’re all extremely fluent), it’s the better thing in the long run.

It would probably be nice to take a class that isn’t a repeat of what I’ve already learned before, but then again, maybe not: a lot of the reasons for why I’m taking the class have to do with language and culture, and not the content of the course itself. In fact, it might actually be very helpful to have already learned this stuff, because it’ll help me stay on track easily and not get too lost. For example, the teacher had many asides today, little throwaway comments, that I wouldn’t have understood without my background knowledge: about the Almohades, the Umayyads, the Nazarí, the ‘Umma, etc. So this might actually work out to be a very good balance indeed.

One last (considerable!) trial of my night. The professor let us out a few minutes early, and I saw it was 9:22 as I left the building. They stop serving dinner in the comedor in the residencia at 10. In the very near future, I plan on figuring out the bus schedules and system and taking the bus home from class at night, since it’s late, not the best part of town, and so far away that getting back in time for dinner would otherwise be impossible; but I wasn’t willing to right then risk getting on the bus going the wrong direction, not knowing when the bus would come to a particular stop, etc. I was going to walk back instead.

But I still had this time crunch squeezing me tightly: could I really get back to the residencia in 48 minutes? (Where Haley and I had set out from had been a good fifteen minutes from my residencia, so I was really looking to shave off thirty minutes from the walk.)

Had I known what I know in retrospect, I would have never attempted it, and would have either resigned myself to finding food on the town somewhere or chancing the bus system. There were no street signs anywhere in the area, so charting a route from my map wouldn’t have been possible, so I did the obvious thing: go downhill and hope for the best.

(I never worry about getting lost here. Sure, I take wrong turns, and I do often end up far from where I intended to go, but I’ve never been truly lost. That is, no matter where I end up, I can figure out where I am and easily get to a main artery that I know well—but it might take a little wandering. Which is completely fine, until I actually have a firm time commitment and then actually need to know the most direct route somewhere. What is very strange, though, is that for the first time in my life I feel like I have some innate, quasi-mystical directional ability. This has happened to me now on almost a daily basis, where I will be somewhere completely new and unknown to me, and without any visual landmarks I will intuitively feel in what direction I need to go, and everything goes fine. It’s so strange for me to have that feeling and be able to trust it implicitly, but it’s been one of my very favorite things here. Nothing is more fun than deciding to explore for hours and not letting myself ever use a map, purposely getting lost so I can find my way back again just by feel.)

I ran the whole way home. It started off really fun. The hill was steep and the road was a rollercoaster of delightfully-banked curves. I couldn’t believe how far down the road went. I was charging full speed, and it was at least fifteen minutes on that one hill, winding around and around and around. I emerged somewhere that, surprising to me (I’ve really gotten around), I didn’t recognize in the slightest. (I went down a different way than Haley and I had gone up, because we definitely hadn’t gone the most direct route.)

Never more so have I trusted my homing instinct (its accuracy is really unbelievable), taking turns and going straight and turning again in certain places because it felt like the thing to do, still running the whole time, trying to get myself to somewhere useful. I was getting really tired by now, in my two-inch heel boots and peacoat. I finally emerged onto a big road and consulted my map. Oh, bad news: I was some ways before Gran Vía, the main road that would take me back to familiar territory. I knew where I was, but knowing was much more disheartening. Gran Vía is a really long road, and here I was, so far down that the street wasn’t even called Gran Vía yet.

I had fifteen minutes till the clock struck ten. Running, it’s about five minutes from the corner of Gran Vía to my residencia, but who knew how long running the whole length of Gran Vía to get to that corner would take. That was a really unpleasant stretch to run. It was so long, so monotonous, I had a splitting sideache and was so ready to give up, except I’d already gone so far… I took a shortcut at the end (a verified one, this time), and finally made it back, at ten o’clock to the minute. I could feel from the burning in my face that I must have looked a complete mess, bright red with sweat dripping off me in sheets, but I plopped down in the comedor nonetheless. The old woman who runs the kitchen didn’t look the happiest to see me, and I felt bad, because I didn’t want to make her wait around for me too long, but victory was mine. At that point I’d lost my appetite, but it didn’t matter; I ate up anyway.

All in all, it was a tough run, though I guess getting some quality exercise in can’t hurt me. I'd like to go back this weekend and leisurely explore around that area. I’m really glad it looks like things have worked out and I’ll get to take this class at the UGR, and finally my schedule is all set. 

Love,

Ronda y Sevilla

Last Friday morning we left early in the morning for an IES trip to Ronda and Sevilla.

Ronda is the largest of the “White Hill Towns” (I’m not sure if that’s a real term, but it’s what Rick Steves calls them) with a population of about 35,000. As you might imagine, it is whitewashed and it is in the hills—built into the side and on top of a very high one, in fact. As Rick notes in his guidebook, Ronda appears flat…until you walk to the edge and see there’s a few hundred? thousand? sheer feet just under the lip of the street. (Later I looked back at where we’d stopped for our first outlook point/photo opp, and my stomach dropped: a whole section, right where I’d been standing, jutted out over space, totally unsupported…I’m feeling sick just thinking about it.)

The dazzling views out over and across the hilly countryside is one of Ronda’s draws; another, especially and foremost, is its “New” Bridge. What happened to the old bridge? Back in the, what, 1500’s I think it was? maybe earlier? they built a bridge to span the yawning chasm, and they built it in a record nine months (the chasm is hugely wide, not to mention extremely deep). Well, you get what you pay for, and forty years later the bridge collapsed spectacularly, killing the hundred people who happened to be on it at the time. The town learned its lesson and resolved to make an indestructible bridge the second time around. This time they spent a very long time on it (the figure of seventy years is in my head, but I’m not sure if that’s right) and produced the New Bridge, which has stood there ever sense. The New Bridge is, to my eyes, an architectural marvel. It is made of three immense stone arches which go all the way down to the valley floor to span the river. I can’t imagine how high it is (I couldn’t glimpse the bottom) and how much stone it took to make. In the middle of the middle column there is a little window and a little balcony, just wide enough to stand out on (again, the thought of standing there is making me nauseated), and apparently that window belongs to a room that they used to use for a jail. There couldn’t be a better place for a prison: I don’t know about the security on the other end, on the entrance, but you’re certainly not getting away out the window…

I learned all these factoids from our tour guide, Bea. They divided us into groups, most of which were led by art history professors. I don’t know what Bea’s background was, but she had just passed her exams to be an official tour guide and we were her very first tour. She did an excellent job!

Ronda is also notable for its bullfighting ring, which is one of the oldest in the country and which was the first to introduce the idea of bullfighting on foot (prior to that it was done on horseback)—we didn’t go inside the ring, but ah well—and its Moorish baths: Ronda wasn’t reconquista’d by the Spanish until 1485.

We only spent a few, very sunny and comfortable hours in Ronda before packing into the bus again to continue on to Sevilla. Sevilla, with a population of over 700,000 (that’s twice Granada) is the largest city in Southern Spain and the capital of Andalucía. Of course I’ve always heard of Sevilla as a destination, but I had no idea what to expect.

Sevilla definitely felt like a big city to me, much larger than Granada. A river cuts through the city that reminded me of the Columbia river in Portland at its narrower parts, replete with people out practicing all sorts of water sports: tons of rowing shells, paddleboards, kayaks and dragonboats. Everything felt very colorful, with most all the buildings painted some color other than white (usually yellow, red-orange, pink, and all shades in between). There were lots of palms trees and, obviously, just as many churches.

An amazing fact: how many orange trees do you think there are in Sevilla? I can tell you that they are everywhere (and all of them are absolutely dripping with fruit), but the actual statistic is astounding: more than 35,000 have been officially documented! Although they’re mouthwatering to behold, they are cultivated for decoration only, and the fruit itself is apparently practically inedible it’s so bitter. The English, however, load up these oranges with sugar and make a marmalade, which they (fittingly) call “Sevilla orange.”

[A linguistic sidenote: many words for fruits in Spanish are feminine, such as la naranja (orange), la manzana (apple), la almendra (almond), and la oliva (olive); but when you’re speaking about the trees that these fruits come from, you swap the gender—el naranjo, el manzano, and so on. I assume this is because ‘fruta’ (fruit) is a feminine word and ‘árbol’ (tree) is masculine. (I’m assuming this because in Slovak all the words for colors are feminine because the word ‘color’ in Slovak is feminine—all individual colors are, in a sense, adjectives modifying the word ‘color,’ and the adjectives’ gender must match that of the noun they’re modifying.)]

We arrived in Sevilla in the late afternoon, spent the night, and left the next day in the afternoon. As far as actual allotted daylight hours for touring the city, it felt like there weren’t very many, but maybe just enough for a quick dip. I saw a lot, I imagine I saw all the big sights, but I definitely wouldn’t have minded another day or two to soak in the city some more. All-in-all a very fun, must-see destination. 

Here are the highlights from my whirlwind tour:

1) The Cathedral. The cathedral in Sevilla is—get this—the third largest church in the world, after the Vatican and some basilica in Brazil. It’s also the world’s largest Gothic cathedral. From the outside it looks sprawling, all made of the same tan-colored stone walls capped with ornamental spindles and flourishes. Inside, yes, it is immense. Wikipedia tells me the ceiling gets up to 138 ft. in height (I’m terrible at estimating these things, but that sounds about right). I kept looking at the tree-trunk-sized supporting columns wondering how many people it would take, holding hands, to encircle them. There were many, many naves and side-chapels and altars (including one made entirely of silver—which was amazing, even though apparently it used to be twice as big but half of it was melted down to finance some war along the way) and treasure rooms.  The height of the ceilings was definitely the most impressive aspect of the cathedral for me.

I can’t say the cathedral comes close to ranking in my list of favorite, or prettiest, churches I’ve seen. Inside the stone was very gray and dark. I wasn’t sure where to focus my attention; sprawling is the best word for it. There were few stained glass windows, and they were very high up, much too high up to even see what they depicted. (I learned recently that this is Gothic style, in keeping with the belief at that time that a dark sanctuary better helped people direct their focus to God.) But unquestionably an impressive building overall.

Part of the cathedral complex is La Giralda, aka the Tower of Giralda, which, judging from the stock of the souvenir shops, is an icon of the city. It was originally built as the grand mosque’s minaret under Moorish rule, and has that Moorish feel to it, but after the Reconquista in 1248 in Sevilla it was converted into the church’s belltower. (The tower is 312 feet high. I wonder how much they had to add on to the original minaret!) We climbed up to the top—interestingly, there were no stairs, only a series of ramps, and we saw many a stroller make it to the top—and had a tremendous view of the whole city. The rain and wind, which had dogged us ever since we got to Sevilla, were lashing violently and it was quite wild up there. A little later, down in the main plaza, the rain really broke and it was a downpour for the ages. There was nowhere to flee to. The city block was an unbroken stretch of people pressed under the foot of awning jutting out from the storefronts, but it wasn’t nearly enough. On the bright side, we found somewhere to eat, had a lovely lunch*, and when we emerged the sun was out again. Happily, my shoes, which I’d been meaning to wash ever since they got muddy on our Alpujarra hike, had gotten thoroughly soaked and were now squeaky clean.

*On that note, we had to fend for ourselves for dinner the first day and lunch the day after, and I, quite by accident, wound up having delicious tortellini with Fanta and Italian breadsticks (the real stuff: hard, salty sticks that come in packages) both times. There’s nothing I love more.

2) The Alcázar. Originally a Moorish fort, the Alcázar was converted sometime along the way into a lavish, immense palace for los Reyes Católicos and their descendants. Every successive monarch contributed some add-on to the complex and it just grew larger and larger. The Alcázar was definitely the most beautiful thing I saw in Sevilla by a long shot. Every last inch of it was absolutely stunning. Every room was lavishly decorated in intricately-patterned, colorful Moorish tiles and detailed, engraved marble designs, or gilded, or painted; there were countless inner courtyards with fountains and plazas and gardens and baths; and domes and delicate archways abounded. There was Arabic aplenty as well, woven around doorsills or cut into wood window shutters. That made me wonder: maybe los Reyes Católicos were pragmatic, and if it was pretty enough, they kept it, and never mind if it was a reminder of their defeated foes? All in all, a sumptuous feast for the eyes, and although opulent, incredibly tasteful as well: it was never ‘too much’ or over-the-top, even though no possible expense had been spared or stretch of wall left bare.

3) The Plaza de España. Something that was a bit over-the-top, but marvelous nonetheless, was the Plaza de España. I don’t know how to describe its size. Of all the things I’ve described so far, it felt the largest of all of them, and certainly by design. It’s a ‘big’ (for lack of a better term) plaza with a ‘big’ building at one end. The building, which feels like several buildings (a central building with two wings that lead to two more buildings, and then the continued wings that culminate in towers), is all one, a giant (monstrous?) stretch, too big to take in in one view, bowed into a kind of parabolic effect. To make things more outrageous, there is a moat in front of the building—but only in front of the building; it doesn’t wrap all the way around—with gondolas (and gondoliers) and other boats in it; several bridges traverse the water to get to the building itself. There are also scores of horse-drawn carriages for tourists. The Plaza de España is shockingly young: it was built in 1928 for an exposition. As far as I could tell, tourists are only allowed in a very small part of it, that of the main building, but really it all feels like a shell anyway: it’s the show, the presentation of the façade, that counts, not whatever’s inside (and what could be inside? it’s completely impractical). For all its ostentatiousness it was still quite fun to see.

4) Flamenco. Andalucía, as the cultural heart of old Spain, is known for its flamenco tradition. The Andalucíans (or at least the Granadinos) themselves tell you this is an overblown stereotype, but the fact remains that the dance originated here, and is still wildly popular (at least with the tourists). I’ve kept my eye out for cheap flamenco shows in Granada, but they’ve all seemed overpriced to me thus far. I was delighted, then, when IES took us to a flamenco show in Sevilla! It started at 11 PM, a perfectly respectable hour by Spanish time. It lasted about forty-five minutes, and yes, it completely lived up to the hype. I’d seen flamenco on TV and in movies before, but there’s always an added magic to seeing a live performance. There was a guitarist and a singer, who crooned in a strange, haunting voice much like a muezzin’s call to prayer (it kept surprising me when I would tune in to, and understand, the song lyrics: they were in Spanish, but the overall tone sounded so Arabic to me). There were two dancers, a female and a male one, who performed independently of each other. The female dancer, who was first, was what I was accustomed to seeing: the furious stomping and clicking of the shoes, the undulating hands and snapping fingers. The male dancer surprised me, simply because I’d never seen a male flamenco dancer before. His moves were very much the same as the woman’s, but it was different to watch because you could see what his legs were doing (as opposed to not being able to see the female dancer’s legs under her long skirt). They both did an exceptional job. It was breathtaking. I’ve never read Lorca, but I know he was a big flamenco aficionado, so now I’m hoping we’ll read some of his flamenco-based poetry in my class on him.

Well, I think I’ve summed up the major events of the weekend (skimming out the minor ones in the interest of my time and yours). It’s so great that IES has so many amazing trips planned for us throughout the semester. I think Córdoba’s up next! 

Love,

Éxitos y fracasos mezclados juntos

Today was a mixed day, as far as language goes. But it’s ended on a very good note, and so I’ll go to sleep satisfied.

This week, with the start of my advanced Spanish grammar/vocabulary class (just generalized Spanish language class), I’ve gotten very pessimistic very quickly about the language and me. How so? Well, the class is very challenging—which is good! I always want to be challenged, and I’m certainly going to learn a lot. But it's depressing to just see how much farther, ever further, there is to go; to picture, for example, the graph of a logarithmic function and know that you, on the curve, are long past the days of exponential improvement, and are now slowly, painfully inching towards that asymptote that is perfection.

I understand so much (certain people’s accents are what can trip me up, not particularly the content itself); I can read so much (including Lorca, as yet pretty easily without a dictionary); and yet producing the content myself is so hard. I can communicate what I need/want to; I can write fairly eloquently; and yet there are still (it feels like) a billion grammatical structures/words I “should” know (or else feel like I don’t really need to know, something like “grasshopper,” for instance, but this is the pursuit of perfection, and suddenly every word becomes necessary knowledge) that are still completely occult to me, that I haven’t even glimpsed or dreamt of. I can understand the higher-level language, but I can't come up with it myself. Even though I’m learning new words all the time, even though I’m certainly learning quite a lot in general, it feels like I’ve come up against a huge roadblock. I know, given time, I can reach the level of mastery of Spanish that I want. But how much time that might require I can’t imagine, and from this side of the wall I can’t fathom what scaling it will look or feel like intellectually. It’s a level of language I’ve never reached before, and every new level I've passed through, every new, essential breakthrough along the way has felt completely transformative.

I remind myself I’ve faced greater linguistic hurdles before, and more acutely, such as, well, basically teaching myself Slovak and learning everything on-the-fly. (To use a melodramatic metaphor, my Slovak difficulties could be related to a momentary depression triggered by a traumatic event, as opposed to this, which is like the more numbing ache of a low-grade existential crisis.) Not to mention the utter, devastating feeling of ineptitude I remember being overwhelmed by the night I suddenly grasped the magnitude of declension in Slovak. I had finally grasped the whole overarching design, and it horrified me, tore me between what seemed to me to be two simple, irrevocable facts: one, I could never do this, and it was impossible; and two, despite knowing it was impossible, I was still going to try. Knowing that I was going to give it my all was horrifying in and of itself, because in light of Fact #1, Fact #2 was going to see me wear myself ragged trying to break down something as certain and immovable as infinity, that would be completely unknowing and uncaring of my tiny human struggles. Yes, it’s laughably melodramatic, but I really felt that way.

I feel a bit the same again now, but I remind myself it’s not as bad as all that, and no matter how much I may want to skate into fluency, there’s a timescale for everything that no amount of wishing is going to accelerate. I’m studying voraciously, soaking up every last drop of information that I can, and that’s all that I can ask of myself, and all that I can duly provide.

One more unfortunate conclusion that this all brings to my mind is what I’m going to do about Arabic. Though part of me wishes I would just realize my total, undivided devotion towards Spanish, so I could focus on Spanish and have an easier time at figuring out grad school options, I can’t deny how my pulse quickens when, as happened yesterday, I wander into a Moroccan-owned store (there are dozens) to browse and hear the shopkeepers bantering in Arabic, or go down the strip of Arab-themed stores in the Albayzín and listen to the Arab pop music pumping out of them. Arabic still has me enthralled. But Spanish is one of the easiest languages there is. Arabic is well-known to be one of the hardest. If, after so many years of Spanish studies (admittedly, very slow-paced) I still have so much further to go, how can I ever expect to be fluent on a native-speaker level in Arabic? It just seems simply impossible. And yet I know it’s done. Still, even if I didn't have the example of thousands of other native English speakers who have successfully mastered Arabic, I know myself, and know that (even when I half-wish I could operate differently) I’m always going to try.

So, this is all to say, these were my depressed musings as I walked the city streets this afternoon, out after siesta on an errand to pick up a language book for class. On my way to the bookstore, I saw a gaggle of old women (I think that’s the appropriate word for the plural) milling around at the corner, obviously lost and muttering to each other, “Eh, where is it? We should ask for directions—” Observing in that split-second instant that I was the only person nearby, I quickly readied myself for what came immediately after: one of the more assertive of the abuelitas directed herself towards me, and asked, “We’re looking for the church of Nuestra Señora de San Agustín. Can you give us directions?” (I’m not going to flatter myself to think that I come off as a local—I think my blonde hair and facial features will forever be foreign. I think they just asked me because I was the closest person on-hand.) I did know where the church was, and I told the woman; but I stumbled nervously in my words, and by the way she cocked her eyebrow skeptically I’m willing to bet anything she promptly asked someone else for some real directions. I took my leave of her and continued down the street feeling like I’d failed.

Well, I was in for a greater failure shortly thereafter, once I got to the bookstore. I told the shopkeeper the title I needed and she quickly retrieved it for me; I paid, and she said “gracias” to me, and, meaning to reply “hasta luego” (‘goodbye’) as I left, instead, completely inexplicably, “de nada” (‘you’re welcome’) popped out of my mouth. I apologized awkwardly and made a speedy exit. I could actually feel the heat flooding my cheeks—I was mortified. And I dwelled on my faux pas for several blocks more than was necessary. There's nothing to do but move on!

My faith in my language abilities, somewhat shaken by my rough afternoon, improved a few hours later, however. The Universidad de Granada (UGR), which is an enormous school with 60,000 students, includes several thousand foreign students in its ranks (the number I have jotted down in my notebook is 10,000—although that seems shockingly high to me, it may well be the case). With that in mind, the UGR hosted several events this week for its foreign students as a welcoming. Most of the events weren’t really pertinent to me, but tonight they put on a theater performance, and five of us IES kids went.

It was a fun, because long, walk just getting to the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras where the performance was held. (The UGR is spread out among many buildings all around the city.) We had to climb a long hill to the very top, and were rewarded with a sparkling view of the city lights by night. The building itself felt very large and monolithic, in a way I like: the awing, impressive, impartiality of higher education— sixties-or-seventies architecture with all high ceilings and almost-excessively wide halls, marble floors, and floor-to-ceiling windows.

The performance was very modern, very experimental. I absolutely love avant-garde theater when it’s done right (though it's oh-so-very easy to do wrong) and was excited. In general I did really enjoy the performance, in terms of entertainment: there was a lot of movement, a lot of choreography. All of the spoken lines were rubbish, the pseudo-intellectual, wannabe-deep nonsense that nearly all experimental theater I’ve seen has suffered from. But hey, I understood almost everything, which was a nice bout of affirmation, and I don’t care if the script was devoid of real meaning: I hadn’t been looking for it going in, and the physical performance was still a lot of fun to watch (as is typical of experimental theater, it featured an ensemble cast with everyone acting very purposefully as they performed random, nonsense actions, like throwing a hundred folding chairs in a pile, whipping the ground with a rope, and pontificating in French at odd intervals).

My second cosmic pat-on-the-back came after the theater, when I came to dinner and was stunned to find myself utterly alone in the dining room. I checked my watch again, just to be sure I hadn’t gotten the time wrong, but no, it was definitely dinnertime, and the women working in the kitchen gave me some food. (I still have no idea where everyone was. Had it been Saturday I might have assumed they were eating out on the town, but I feel like Thursday, as the start-of-the-long-weekend/party night isn’t that big of a deal here—not really a “thirsty Thursday,” as it’s known to the collegiate U.S.) Not long after, three Spanish students came in and joined me at the table, and I had a really nice dinner talking to them, and understood everything they said. (It can be interesting accent-wise in the residencia, because students come from all over to go to UGR. So there’s a total mix of accents from all over the country and even from outside it, and some are easy to understand and some leave me completely at a loss. I’m sure it’s also a matter of the individual speaker, though, too.)

On a totally different topic, here’s an interesting linguistic note. In Spanish, to give one’s opinion, one can say “pienso que…” (I think [that]…) or “creo que…” (literally: “I believe [that]…,” but equivalent in usage to English’s “I think”). I’ve known for a while that “creo que” is more common in Spanish, but it’s hard for me to break the “pienso que” habit, which is easier to revert to because it translates out neatly in my mind. I’m also more reluctant to use “creo que” because, even though I try not to translate it literally into English, I can't help but think of it as "I believe," and so it feels off to me, just so much more sure and determined than what to me sounds more tentative or subjective, open to change, the “I think” of “pienso que.” The latter to me just seems more apt when one is giving one’s personal impression of the moment. A belief is so much more firmly-held and essential than a thought, right? But as I've said, this thinking on my part is really just a fallacy of translation (when the two essentially mean the same thing), which I may be aware of consciously but still have trouble shaking when it comes to my subconscious feelings. Regardless, I know I need to convert to “creo que” eventually.

My perspective on this was shifted a bit today in class. A teacher mentioned the “pienso que” vs. “creo que” distinction—as in, essentially the same, but “creo que” being more commonly used—and then went on to note why she thought this was so culturally: to “believe” is more faith- and intuition-based, in fitting with the Spanish way of processing; to “think” is about logic, the head over the heart (she noted, too, that in French as well as English the “I think” equivalent prevails: she sees this as the legacy of Descartes). I don’t know whether her view is founded in anything other than, well, her belief, but I think it’s interesting nonetheless, and a completely different way of looking at the distinction between these words from my own.

I'll end on a tidbit of irony. Walk around many tourist shops in Granada and you’ll see the green-and-blue-painted pottery unique to the city (each Spanish city/region has its own characteristic color scheme). Many of these plates and other dishes also have a little picture or quote in the middle; a very common one is the saying “Dale limosna, mujer, que no hay en la vida nada como la pena de ser ciego en Granada.” Roughly translated, it means “Give him alms, lady, for there is no greater pain in life than being blind in Granada”—in the context of a third-party observer who is watching a woman pass by a blind beggar. Obviously the quote’s trying to illustrate how richly beautiful Granada is to behold. But in a twisted bit of irony, even as I see this saying on bowls and plates all over town, I concurrently have noticed an incredible preponderance of blind and/or seeing-impaired people here. I’ve seen several dozen: with seeing eye dogs, with their poles in front of them (once I saw a blind couple, arm-in-arm, both tapping with their sticks); there’s also an incredibly nice guy who’s blind in my residencia whom I’ve talked with a few times. It’s just very ironic, that I’ve never seen such a concentration of blind people in my life, and here there’s this ugly quote popping up at every turn. 

At least two more blog posts on their way soon. Stay tuned. 

Much love.

Otro interludio

(Note a longer new post just below this one.)

Today is Sunday, aka the day when everything is closed (except the churches, haha) and the residencia doesn’t provide meals. Having had an eventful weekend (to come in a later blog post) and needing some downtime after orientation finally ending, just finding food was my big priority for the day. I still had an apple and orange saved up from a few days ago and was crossing my fingers that a few bakeries might be open where I could get something for breakfast. Success, I found one, and got a chocolate “empanadilla” (kind of like a croissant/turnover—made of filo dough, stuffed with a filling that can be either sweet or savory) for the road. Eating on the go is simply not done here, so I decided to take a walk and along the way hopefully find some kind of park where I could sit and eat (sadly, there are very few parks here—practically the only thing missing from this city). I decided to head for Camino de Ronda, a road I’d heard so much about, mainly from IES friends who live along there, which is so long that it apparently goes all the way to—is it Sevilla? Somewhere like that. Basically, I’m not going to try to walk the whole thing any time soon.

I got to where I thought Camino de Ronda ought to be, and the street I found myself on seemed to fit the bill: large, apparently very long, and very residential, just apartment buildings on both sides of the road as far as the eye could see (since I know so many people whose host families live along there I guessed it would be a residential area). But there were no signs saying the name of the road. I decided to walk it anyway. (It was only an hour later that I saw a sign—yes, Camino de Ronda indeed.)

I just went straight. And straight. And straight. For forty-five minutes. Which, you know, when you’re in a city, can really take you far. I just had a really good time seeing what all there was to see. I kept having to remind myself that I was in Spain. I didn’t know where I felt like I was. I was having that kind of déjà vu where you’re feeling echoes of somewhere that you might have imagined, or seen in a dream once. Camino de Ronda, I’m pretty sure, is not known for its scenic beauty (it was a stretch of pure pragmatism), but I enjoyed it.

I never did really find a park, though I know there’s one around there—even though I always have my map on me, I was having a no-map kind of day—but I found a park bench between two big palm trees to finally eat my empanadilla. It was after one, I hadn’t eaten all day, and I was starving. That empanadilla was out of this world. It turned out to actually be Nutella-filled. Nothing could have been tastier.

I finally decided to turn back, and made my way back in the same straight line, but then I had fun taking all sorts of turns, deliberately getting lost, and then finding my way home by feel, exploring how everything connected up.

I don’t need to go further into the blow-by-blow details of my day, but one more thing:

Dinner time came around and I was getting really hungry, and I decided to go out and hope that the supermarket next door was open so I could get some produce. Well, it wasn’t. And neither were any of the other supermarkets I went to. I was really disappointed, and getting a little desperate—I was really hungry, and the only places that were open were a few sit-down restaurants and coffee shops which wouldn’t have real food, and neither fit the bill of what I was looking for.

Just as I was about to call it quits and eat some biscuits I bought for emergency snacking a while back I found a place advertising its Indian take-out. Take-out?! Yes, that was exactly what I wanted! And take-out isn’t a big Spanish idea (they prefer to sit and dine leisurely with friends and have a nice, relaxing social time), so I felt extremely lucky to have found this place, which was open on a Sunday no less.

I went in and the place was empty. I ordered a schwarma, which turned out to be like dönor kabab, and while the man working there was assembling it we got to chatting. We talked for about five minutes, where are you from, how are you liking the city, etcetera etcetera, and then he asked me if I had a boyfriend or any friends here. The ‘boyfriend’ part made me raise an eyebrow a little, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt and gave a cheerful, neutral answer about not knowing many people yet but hoping to meet lots. His tone turned somber as he said, “It’s the same with me—I’m all alone.” He sighed, and then muttered, “You’re a really good girl. A really, really good girl.” I thanked him (always happy to practice my Spanish!) and then he said, “Hey, you know…I mean, I’m single, you’re single…You don’t have a boyfriend…You, me…You, me?” It turned into a question. He looked at me, waiting. He couldn’t have been younger than his late thirties, if not in his forties. I just stared at him, uncomprehending. “No,” I said. “Nope.” Luckily it was just about then that my schwarma was done on the grill and I could change the subject by asking how much it was and paying. On my way out he called after me, “Come back soon! See you later!” and I was thinking nope, that’s not happening… The schwarma was delicious, though.

I’ve gotten catcalled (sometimes pretty lewdly) several times here, as well as the lesser version, which is some guy stopping me on the street to say “Wow, you’re so beautiful” in a sweet, polite tone—and then when I keep walking proceeding to say angrily, “Hey, wait! I just want to talk to you! Hey! Come back!” (which makes me a little nervous, but it’s always been during the day on a crowded street), but this was my first taste of the, uh, assertiveness I’ve heard about Spanish men. (Catcalling doesn’t count, because that happens to me all the time in Walla Walla, too.) 

In a total shift of topic, here’s an interesting culturolinguistic distinction for you. My orientation-week Spanish class teacher talked about this with us, and it brought back a suspicion I’d harbored in Slovakia, too. Our teacher told us that in Spanish “por favor” is not used all that often; certainly not to the extent that we use “please” in English. Expressing politeness is instead achieved through, for example, tonal inflection: “¿me da un café?” when said in a light, supplicant way carries the same meaning as “a coffee, please.” “Por favor” is more forceful than “please” in English, and is used alongside requests when you’re really begging for something.

For me, this is a hard line to walk. I don’t want to come off as ingratiating and excessive, but simply saying what would translate to “a pastry” (when ordering in a bakery) or responding to Antonio, the ultra-nice owner of the residencia where I live, when he asks me which dessert I’d like, with “[will you] give me a chocolate mousse?” is difficult—it feels like there’s an obvious omission hanging off the end, the neat capstone that makes any interaction well-mannered and respectful. That’s the culturolinguistic bias I have to overcome, but it’s particularly sensitive when what’s on the line is not just a misconjugation or malapropism, but coming across as rude.

I don’t know if, similarly, “gracias” is used less often in Spanish than “thank you” is in English, but I think that it’s the case in Slovak. I remember my Slovak host mother once remarking to me that “it’s obvious you’re the child of two teachers. You’re so…polite—you say ‘thank you’ all the time…” It was mostly a compliment, but I could tell by the way she said it there was something about the way I said ‘thank you’ so often that it was culturolinguistically excessive. Even understanding that, I inwardly shrugged and kept saying “d’akujem” as much as I would have said “thank you” in the U.S., because I didn’t know the nuances of appropriateness, and always better to err on the side of caution—especially as a foreigner with a limited vocabulary whose smile and effusive displays of appreciation are her biggest/only assets in warming herself to people and staying on their good sides after the inevitable cultural faux pas.

I’ll have to talk to someone about the frequency of “gracias.” For now I’m navigating “por favor” carefully. Unlike in Slovak, I have the linguistic dexterity in Spanish to a degree where I think willfully ignoring this difference in usage is unacceptable. It’s just one of those things that makes me uncertain and uncomfortable while I figure it out. 

In other news, I've just about fleshed out my class schedule (IES classes start tomorrow!). As far as IES classes, I'm taking a general advanced Spanish grammar class (required--I'm super excited), "Lorca and the Andalusian Literary Tradition," and "Islamic Art and Architecture." I'm also doing an internship, which will meet once a week at IES for a more theoretical/discussion component, but the bulk of which will be me helping out and full-on teaching English at a local elementary school. I had thought I would just be assisting or something in the classrooms, but it sounds like it will be more intensive than that, with many teachers fully handing over the classroom reins, and me having to come prepared with lesson plans... Well, that'll be eight hours a week in the classroom. And then for my last class, I'll be taking one at the Universidad de Granada, but I don't know what I'll be taking yet. I had hoped and planned for Arabic, but schedule-wise it doesn't look like it will work out. So I'm considering my options. Classical Arabic does fit with my schedule... It wouldn't help me with learning modern Arabic, and I don't know if there's any modern-Arabic prerequisite, but it sounds so fun, I think I'm going to take it, provided there are no other obstacles.

Love.

La Alpujarra y el Sacromonte

A week ago, on Sunday, IES took us on a dayhike in la Alpujarra, a nearby hilltop region.

(Note the name: in Spanish, most nouns that start with an ‘a’ are preceded by a masculine article when in the singular, even those which end in an ‘a’ and which would otherwise be feminine, for example, “el águila” (the eagle) instead of “la águila.” This is just done for easier pronunciation, because saying the latter would run together with the double ‘a.’ But there are notable exceptions to this rule, like “La Alhambra,” and here, “la Alpujarra.” I haven’t heard the official explanation, but since these words are derived from earlier Arabic names, I’m guessing that’s the reason—though I don’t know why a word of Arabic origin would take the feminine article, especially since other Arabic-derived words like "el aljedrez" follow the rule.)

La Alpujarra is characterized by a series of tiny, blindingly-whitewashed village/towns built on the edges of cliffs in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. It’s a rugged country, very rural and weathered-feeling, the kind of place that’s desolately beautiful but also makes you feel that life there is lived subject to the elements.

We took a bus up a narrow, very curvy road, the mountain on one side and sweeping, dizzying sheer drops on our other, to the little pueblo of Pamponeira that was our starting point. There was an icy mountain wind blowing and when the clouds parted we could see the entirely-snowy cap of el Pico Veleta, the highest peak in the Sierra Nevadas, the only crag looming above us because we were already at the top of the lower mountains.

Our guide who briefed us initially told us that 25% of Spain’s plant diversity was found here, in this tiny mountain region, and nowhere else in the country. There wasn’t much visible vegetation, actually: mainly low-lying scrub and chaparral with occasional trees, but for the most part what few landmarks there were were very exposed. We were in a valley-chasm, with a string of three white pueblos (village-towns) at the top of one of the walls, the river at the bottom, and nothing on the other side but a blank mountain stretch, dramatic under the uniform gray sky.

We self-divided into two groups, for an “easy” or a “hard” hiking route. The hard hiking route, as might have been predictable, was not actually hard, except for a few small muddy bits (my shoes! Well, I got caught in a huge downpour yesterday and now they are squeaky clean, so that worked out well) and the last twenty minutes, which were straight uphill. We hiked down to the bottom of the valley, crossed the river, hiked partway up the other side, and then hiked up to finish at a different pueblo (called something like Bobillón?).

The hike was about two hours long, if I remember correctly, wending through the valley and offering neverending views of the little white pueblos poised on their perches. The lighting was strange, with a pearly gray sky that would sometimes be lit up from within surreally. There were several small waterfalls snaking down the valley walls and we passed several shacks, most of them abandoned, assumedly where shepherds had lived. We did however see a few shepherds still at it with their herds of what were either sheep or goats (who of course ran nimbly down incredibly steep hills without a second thought), tending a smoky fire. We also saw a few stocky ponies and mules left to graze at the subalpine stubble.

From Bobillón we walked back to Pamponeira, had a little free time for a drink and a tapa (there’s always a little extra time for those—such windows are built into any Spanish schedule), and then went back home.

Back in Granada in the evening, I went out for dinner with my friend Franchesca (there’s no food in the residencia on Sundays). But in sharp contrast to the overwhelming deluge of people on the streets the night before, Sunday night Granada was a ghost town. There was no one out and everywhere was closed. Although it had always seemed like every other shop on the street was a tapas bar when I’d pass them during the day on my way to elsewhere, of course, now, when I was finally looking for one, I couldn’t find any. We walked in circles that kept ending in stores battened down with metal gratings over their shopfronts.

We did, however, get to one place that Franchesca had been before. It was a little tea place in the lower reaches of the Albayzín called Ali Baba. It was ultra-cozy, with red plush cushions everywhere in a recessed, dimly-lit, cave-like arched room. Arabic, Hindi, and Spanish-that-sounded-Arabic-or-Hindi music were playing at a reasonable volume, and like almost all Spanish waiters, our waiter was pleasantly attentive when we ordered but otherwise left us alone to ourselves in the room. We had chai tea that Franchesca had had there before, served in a beautiful silver Arab teapot. I’m not a big tea person, but it was absolutely delicious, milky and sweet with a few cloves of some kind of spice sinking to the bottom of my glass.

In Granada (unlike anywhere else in Spain) you also get a free tapa with any drink, so we also got a small pizza to split. It wasn’t enough food for dinner, but we couldn’t find any other acceptable places to eat afterwards and by then it was well after 11 and I was ready for bed. A really fun place—I’ll definitely go back sometime.

Switching gears to a completely separate anecdote, Tuesday I went with Talia, a friend from my orientation-week Spanish class, on a pilgrimage to el Sacromonte.

Sacromonte is a historic neighborhood close to, but higher up than, the Albayzín. It’s somewhere I’d wanted to get to but hadn’t yet had the chance; Talia felt similarly, and since we had to made a “creative project” to finish off our orientation-week class, she had the idea that we could make a video together about our trip (in the tradition of Spanish classes, dating back to the beginning of time--always the final video project).

Sacromonte is known in particular for two things: caves (cuevas) carved into the hillside as houses and the Gypsies who live there. Most cuevas are uninhabited now, and seem to be more of a historical/publicity thing for the neighborhood (every last tavern and hotel is called “cueva” this and “cueva” that; there are museums about cuevas…), but not all. More on that a little later.

Getting to Sacromonte was pretty easy, just a matter of getting over and going up, up, up, through and then above the Albayzín. When we “got there,” up high, it suddenly felt very rural and completely different culturally. (A big shift: cats everywhere! Everywhere else in the city are dogs.) The streets (just a patchwork of alleys, really) were very quiet and mostly empty; there was a veritable forest of prickly pear cacti, a good half of which were in bloom. Through an alley made entirely of random sheet metal, rusted springs and pinned-up grass mats we came to the final hill, which had no paths at all. It felt very isolated, dropping off at the end of the earth. It was a surprise, then, to come to the top and see three cars parked out there on the dirt. (How did they get up there?! It must be more accessible up the back side.) We were treated to a view looking down on the Alhambra and the rest of the city. It was so strange to see the red glow of traffic lights in the city center, where we’d been just forty-five minutes before (and we’d been walking slowly, really meandering, so had we been determined we could have gotten up in probably twenty minutes), and here we were now in what felt like the most rural of countrysides. To our left was a nice view of the Sierra Nevadas and the lower, green foothills spreading out beyond the city limits; to our right was a large, terracotta-colored stone-brick wall that cut the hill in half, apparently separating Sacromonte from the Albayzín. I don’t know what purpose it served, but we gave it a token touch.

Although we felt very much alone at the top of the hill, we definitely weren’t. Amidst a loose assortment of abandoned junk (including a suitcase filled with empty beer bottles and some scrap metal) were some real-life, very-much-inhabited cuevas. They had yards, with potted plants, a water tap, what looked like a chicken coop; we heard music coming out of one, and a little bit below us some people stood out in front of theirs socializing—they waved to us.

We had filmed a few segments along the way, and Talia had taken pictures, and then we filmed a final segment from the top and then made our way back down. (The toughest part: turning a blind eye to the legions of glossy, well-fed and satisfied calico cats that were everywhere.) A fun jaunt, and there are so many more places in and around the city still ripe for exploring. (Oh, and we ended up editing our film—extremely shoddily, as neither of us knew more than the very basics of iMovie—a few days later over sangría and tapas in a pub. That’s how you get a project done.) 

Much love.

Un día pasado en las calles: La vía española

For this orientation week we've been having a class that is a mixture of grammar and practical vocabulary (words that might be especially pertinent in homestays, such as common household chores) and cultural lessons. Pertaining to the latter, one big cultural difference we learned about was where Spanish people, as opposed to Americans, spend most of their time. For Americans it's the home; for Spaniards, the street. Apparently inviting friends over for dinner or socializing is less common in Spain, with eating out preferred; and it's a different idea of where you find comfort, in that in the U.S. you go out, you do your errands, and then the reward is getting to get back to your house and relax, whereas in Spain, the streets are home (and as our teacher laughingly told us, you can come up with all sorts of excuses to stay out).

Well, that being the case, Saturday I had a very Spanish day.

But first, Friday evening: our teacher (of our orientation class--a young, very lively, woman) met us at the statue of Isabel la Católica* at 5 PM to take us out exploring. (One other great thing about this class is there's also a focus on developing basic Granada savviness, with things like map exercises, where we had to locate on our maps different important places, like the health clinic, and lessons on food vocabulary, including common kinds of tapas. Very useful information.)

*[that's Isabella of Isabella and Ferdinand fame, of course. Her statue is huge, flanked by fountains, in a square, and is a landmark. The funny thing is, the statue actually depicts her blessing Colón (Columbus), who is partially kneeling, and a girl who has already been in Spain a semester warned me about a possible confusion: apparently some people call the statue "Isabel la Católica," while others call it "Colón"--by virtue of which, if you didn't know better, the two names would seem to refer to two completely different statues, when it's really the same one. And funnily enough, no one calls it "Isabel y Colón."]

Our teacher took us for an evening walk in the Albayzín, the historic Muslim quarter, with its characteristically narrow, winding streets and whitewashed walls. Many of the buildings' upper floor walls were decorated with items like the traditional green-and-blue pottery of Granada or even, as I saw once, a gilded picture of Jesus, and the terraces were overflowing with potted plants; our teacher told us there's a yearly competition in the neighborhood for most well-decorated balcony area.

We passed through several tucked-away plazas, beside many an ancient church (I noted one monastery's tour hours: during only one half-hour window each week! Someday.) There was one kind of park (not much greenery, but an open area), in a stepped brick style, that was at its peak of activity, with street performers, musicians, and many a toker. (Everywhere we went we would suddenly get overtaken by a cloud of marijuana.)

With the Mediterranean climate there are loads of lovely orange and lemon trees simply bursting with fruit that even make the air fragrant. Many of them were tucked inside the high-walled gardens (referred to, in a term unique to Granada, as "carmen"s), the majority of which I assume we passed unawares: according to our teacher, walling off one's wealth from public view by hiding one's opulent gardens was a Muslim tradition as a way of showing humility. I can't guess how much we couldn't see, but I loved peaking through the rare little openings in the walls, or seeing the occasional garden sealed by a wrought-iron gate, rather than a solid wall, and getting to see the indescribable beauty therein. The few places that come to mind had such things as the biggest trunk of a palm tree I've ever seen (the actual palm was unfortunately decapitated) and the biggest hydroponics-like archway of orange-and-lemon trees I could have never imagined beside a still green pool. Everything was so lush, and a perfect mixture of ancient, overgrown wildness tamed into luxury.

We stopped for a while at the Mirador de San Nicolás, which is the most famous lookout point for the Alhambra. We reached it by way of the garden of the mosque of Granada, which is gorgeous. The mirador was packed with people (again, the omnipresent marijuana cloud), but the view was great.

Our furthest point, which we reached just at sunset, was up on a copse at the Mirador de San Miguel (el?) Alto, which provided a vista of the city. I was most taken by what seemed to be a white cloud hovering over the high peaks in the distance: it was actually an even higher peak of the Sierra Nevadas (the highest, I later learned), entirely white with snow.

The church behind us, San Miguel, had some interesting graffiti on it: quite a bit of detailed, well-drawn Egyptian hieroglyphics in green paint. Graffiti in general is common throughout the city, especially semi- or overtly-political statements scrawled in all-caps. (A feminist sentiment near my residencia translates to "no action without response! you think you're free? you are just as oppressed as we are!" accompanied by a women's power symbol; there's one nearby that says "socialism or barbarity?" with a hammer-and-sickle design underneath; in Sacromonte, where many Gypsies live, "Vivan Gitanos!" ["long live the Gypsies!"], and my very favorite: in green ink, "we accept utopia because reality seems impossible," and then, in blue ink, the words 'utopia' and 'reality' have been crossed out and replaced with each other, so it reads instead "we accept reality because utopia seems impossible.")

In total, we were out on the move for two hours, and really covered a lot of distance. I was heartened by what our teacher told us: sure, you're bound to get lost in the Albayzín, but it's as simple as going up and down. You go up, you explore the maze, and then you go down, and all paths lead to one of two main roads, both of which are well-known to me. So, despite the example of difficult foot-travel I offered in an earlier blog post (the Albayzín without a map), it's actually quite easy after all!

With that in mind, Saturday morning I got up early and decided to do some exploring of my own. I guessed (rightly) that after a busy Friday night Saturday morning might be quieter. I decided to first go back to the Albayzín and follow the rule of up-and-down. Although I brought my map just to be safe, I didn't plan on using it whatsoever (and I'm not even sure if would have done me much good--most of the streets are so small, I bet they aren't even on there). So I had total freedom to go down any street I wanted to and just enjoy the sights and follow my impulses. To my amazement, I happened to hit every last place we'd been the night before, though in general I hadn't been aiming for any of them (except the big lookout of the Alhambra: nice to return there when I had the place all to myself).

It was also fun to note the differences that time of day/day of the week make: in the "Plaza Larga," that had been empty the day before, there was a bustling, mainly produce-filled, farmers market underway.

After about an hour and a half I was ready to move on, and found my way down. The highlight of the morning came, though, about halfway down my descent on the long road (towards el Paseo de los Tristes, the road that leads into the Albayzín--a bad, literal translation of the name would be something like 'the walk of the sad people'), when I saw a man who was obviously a tourist in front of me disappear into an enclosure. Like everything else, it was walled, but one wood-and-iron door was open, and the sign above the door declared it the public historical archives of the city. I peeked in, and there were several tourists taking pictures... so I went in too!

It was an immense series of landscaped gardens (with paths and fountains) and courtyards, exquisitely beautiful. It was actually somewhat eerie, with the dense hedges lining the walls serving to muffle the street outside and all the vibrant greens therein darkened under the overcast sky. I walked down a broad path lined by the biggest cypresses I'd ever seen, black and dense, and felt a sense of almost disturbing calm, with Maximus Decimus Meridius' warning ringing in my ears: "If you find yourself alone, riding in the green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled. For you are in Elysium, and you are already dead!"

The archives themselves were a huge, old building flanked by a series of flags in the shadow of the Alhambra. The heavy iron door was closed, and I didn't feel a need to go in.

Onwards, on the Paseo de los Tristes, I felt inexplicably spurred upwards, so I decided to follow a side street up to see where it would take me. To the Alhambra, undoubtedly, but plenty of charming neighborhoods at its foot as well, I assumed. Actually, I missed out on the latter: I wound up on a steep road that was a straight shot to the Alhambra. Well, why not? I was enjoying the exercise. It was a bit of a climb, though I was in no rush, and then there I was. I strolled through a few grand archways until I reached the ticketbooth for the complex, and then headed back down the way I'd come.

(Aside: there I saw the first two cats I'd seen in all of Spain! They looked well-fed and had a healthy sheen to their coats, but I still wasn't entirely sure that they weren't feral, so I let one sniff my hand but restrained myself from actually petting them. In contrast, dogs are everywhere. Everyone's out walking their dog. And a good deal of the dogs are medium-to-large-sized, with a tough, muscular, wild look to them. You often see a big, no-nonsense dog, maybe with a bit of shag to his coat and muddy legs, on the patrol: he's probably got a collar, but you might not know where his owner is. They're somewhere nearby, and he can mind himself.)

I still wasn't through with exploring. So I went to the Plaza de Isabel la Católica and took a right for the first time, into the Realejo, a neighborhood I hadn't yet visited. The Albayzín is the historical Muslim quarter, and the Realejo is the historic Jewish quarter. The first main street featured brightly-colored buildings and a cool, young/hip feel distinct from that of other areas I'd been to. There were several pleasant graffiti/paintings, very artistically done: apparently they're all by an artist who calls himself El Niño de las Pinturas (the boy of the paintings), although he's in his thirties now, and many of these are from a while back.

I went up a very steep, long granite staircase cut into the street to a higher tier of land where another network of narrow streets began, these whitewashed as in the Albayzín and with a similar, but still distinctly different, feel. It was pretty high up, with a good panoramic overview of the city from many vantage points. I walked as far as a huge building painted to stand out in a bright terracota color with green shuttered-windows (in contrast to the white all around) which I had thought from a distance must be the old synagogue, based off the design of the towers and the tiled dome on one side of it. Actually it was a four-star hotel. Maybe a converted synagogue? But that would be sad...

I had been out for three hours and had had my fill, so I went back to my residencia and rested a little before lunch.

Later that day, I met up with my friend Franchesca (a friend from Whitman on the same program) and we had a lovely walk around the Plaza de Congresos, which I hadn't been to before. It's a huge, open, flat area broken up by rows of palm trees and park benches, a playground, and, most strikingly, a giant building, very modern and beautiful, entirely tiled in green marble, with a hundred green marble steps leading up to it. I think it's an exposition/convention center, though someone told me that they hold arts and entertainment events there, too. The Plaza is next to the river (the larger one--there's a smaller one that runs at the base of the Alhambra) that to me demarcates the old-town from the newer, modern Granada.

Then, Franchesca had made plans to meet up with some other girls for a tapas dinner, and although I have dinners in the residencia (most people are in homestays, which don't provide dinner, so they eat out), I joined them for a bit before the comedor opened. We walked around for at least an hour, part of the time in an area of the city I'd never been to before, in the modern parts of town. This for me was a whole different dimension of how I thought of the city, and the modern was in its own way very appealing with so much to offer. This being Saturday, the later it got, the more the streets swelled. It was utterly jam-packed with people. (Noting that eight o'clock is still considered "the afternoon.") It was fun to see the city at its most alive (though I'm sure that wasn't until ten or eleven at least).

In total I was out walking and exploring for five hours. Pretty decent. I'm always up for more.

Much love to all.