good times in Southern Spain

Ahh still so much to blog about. I can’t believe how fast the time is flying by; I want to have everything I see and every experience I have written down so I never forget, but the days are getting away from me. This trip is 2/3 over already. It’s insane.
Halloween was a three day weekend, and I spent it with seven other ladies from Cal Poly on an adventure to Southern Spain. Between my first trip to Spain after high school and this trip so far, I have Northern Spain pretty well explored, but any place south of Madrid was completely unknown territory. We spent our time in Granada and Sevilla, probably the two most tourist-y cities in Andalusia. The biggest attraction in Granada is La Alhambra, a Moorish palace built when they ruled Spain, and Sevilla has the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. Both were incredible to see in person, but let me backtrack and recount my trip from the beginning.
We left on Friday night, taking a bus from Valladolid to Madrid. We had to wait in Madrid for over an hour before our bus left for Granada. Hopefully that will be my last overnight bus ride - it turns me into grouchy sleep-deprived zombie for the entire following day. We arrived in Granada at 6:30 am, tried to wake up, pull ourselves together, and figure out our hostel situation... Dalia, one of the girls who did a lot of planning for this weekend trip, had booked a hostel for our night in Granada, but when she called or tried to email to confirm our reservation, we couldn’t get through. Turns out the hostel wasn’t registered, and the day before we arrived in Granada, it had been shut down, along with a good half a dozen other hostels in the area, almost all of which we had tried to contact and make a reservation. Upon our arrival we didn’t know for sure that hostel had been closed up, so we decided to take taxis to the hostel and try to figure out what was going on. Obviously, that did not pan out, but we did find a hostel on the same street that wasn’t closed, and miraculously, could put up all 8 of us for the night. We were so relieved to have a place to stay after that whole ordeal, but the hostel we ended up in turned out to be the coolest hostel I’ve ever stayed in. It was set up like a villa, with a hang-out area in the middle, hammocks hung up all over, an outdoor brick oven and bar, and then all the rooms around it. It was a really social hostel, throughout that day and night we met traveling students from Oregon, Australia, Chile, Italy, and one guy from Denmark who ran out of money during his travels and just stayed at the hostel and started working. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to toss life plans to the wind and say “oh hell, I’ll just stay in Granada for a while.” As much as I’d love to be that spontanious and ballsy, I think I need some sort of structure, or goal, or schedule in my life... I’m more conventional American than I want to admit.
Priority one in Granada was obviously La Alhambra. I was impressed at all of our abilities to remain awake and attentive the entire day, not just that, but thorougly enjoy our tour. The gardens around palace were gorgeous - blooming flowers everywhere, fountains, beautifully decorated staircases and fences, no detail left untouched. The palace was the same way - every wall, every ceiling, hallway, archway, everything decorated. In my humanities class we talked a lot about how influential eastern art was on Spain and how incredibly talented Moorish artisans were; after Christians conquered Spain, they hired back Moorish artists to decorate Christian churches and buildings. Their art contains no people or iconography, it is all based on geographic shapes and intricate patterns. The attention to detail is immaculate, I can’t even begin to fathom the amount of time spent perfecting every design covering so many of the surfaces inside the palace.
After wandering around in awe and taking pictures of everything (and I mean everything) for a few hours, we left for lunch and a stroll around the city. Granada (and Sevilla, as we’d discover the next day) both feel like southern California. Palm trees (!!!!) wide avenues with lots of shops and gift stores, restaurants with patios lining every street, and the typical Spanish Plaza at almost every turn. We had AMAZING helado (ice cream!) at a shopdowntown, and ended up walking back later that night for seconds.
The cathedral in Granada is right in the middle of downtown, but it’s kindof hidden, (seems weird to say that, because it’s humongous), tucked in between commercial buildings and shops. We decided to take a tour before heading back to our hostel for dinner. I always think I’m burned out on visiting cathedrals, and walk inside thinking, yes, another Jesus on yet another cross, another huge organ... seen it all before... but I have yet to step inside the nave of a cathedral and not have my breath taken away. Visiting the Granada cathedral was especially nice because we weren’t with a giant tour group - it was jus t us girls walking around, spending however much time we wanted taking it in at our own pace. I chose to sit in a pew, and pull out my ipod.
Being in choir at Nevada Union tought me a lot about spirituality. I am not a Christian (it’s the History major in me that struggles with blind faith), but singing sacred music in choir for years, especially in European cathedrals, is absolutely a spiritual experience regardless of what I do or don’t believe. It makes me feel weightless and cleansed, body and soul; making music is the most liberating thing I know how to do. So there I sat, dwarfed by this huge expanse of a building, with my headphones on. I listened to songs that I sang in Spain with my high school choir, and it wasn’t long before my eyes welled up with tears and I had goosebumps all over my body. I felt reconnected with the me four years earlier that recorded those songs, and I was completely at peace. I feel like cathedrals are built to overwhelm you with the incredible elegance and wonder that God is, and music is the vessel that makes me feel spiritual, whole, and connected to the world.
Back to reality...
We returned to our hostel to figure out some plans for dinner, there was a small kitchen and we were thinking of buying some pasta or something and cooking ourselves (oh, how I miss cooking!), but the people running the hostel offered us homemade paella, cooked over an open fire on the patio. How could we resist?! It was hands down one of the best meals I’ve had in Spain. Paella is probably the mostwell-known Spanish dish, it’s rice cooked with usually seafood, shellfish or some type of meat. It’s very flavorful (especially for Spanish cuisine, which in my opinion has been fairly bland) and really filling. They served it with homemade sangria, which was also delicious. To top of our night in Granada, we took a walk through the neighborhood after dark.Our hostel was tucked away on a hillside near the Alhambra, and it was gorgeous to see at night. We walked up and down cramped cobblestone streets that don’t seem wide enough for a Vespa, much less two lanes of traffic (it’s beyond me how Spaniards make that work without head-on collisions every 5 minutes), and sat on a rock wall and gawked at the Alhambra all lit up on the hill facing us. It was one of those surreal moments, where I all-of-a-sudden get hit with a wave of “no way is this reality...” I’ve had lots of those moments in the past two months...
The next morning it was up early and back to the bus station to get ourselves to Sevilla.We took it easy that afternoon, resting up a bit in our hostel, making lunch, and eventually departing on a walking tour of Sevilla organized by our hostel. Our tour guide was a girl from Austria, probably my age, who showed us around the city, discussing both historic sites of Sevilla and places famous for superstitions and Spanish folklore. We saw the Plaza del Toros, and were informed in detail about the process of a Spanish bullfight. Disgusting. I get that it’s a deeply-rooted part of Spanish culture, and I can respect customs different than those of my own country, but I cannot bring myself to have any respect or understanding of the sick and brutal tradition of bullfighting. On a happier note, we saw some gorgeous buildings and parks throughout the city, and I fell in love (yet again) with the vibe of this city. The Rio Guadilquivir runs through the heart of the city, and there are beautiful towers and bridges lining it, lit up at night, it was breathtaking. Only drawback to Sevilla was the FOUR Starbucks I saw on the tour... It had been a wonderfully refreshing 6 weeks without it, but, alas, there they were, on multiple streetcorners in downtown Sevilla.
After the tour, we all saw a traditional Flamenco show. It was not at all what I expected, for some reason I had pictured tons of guitars and other instruments, and lines of dancers in shiny outfits prancing around like Vegas showgirls or something. The show was much more intimate and classy, with a singer, a guitarist who was amazing, and male and female dancer who hardly ever danced together, when one was dancing, the other was clapping, the only percussion in the whole show. There is so much passion in Flamenco, and so much of the dancing and music was improved like jazz, you could sense all of the performers totally tuned in to one another making music.
When the show ended, we went straight back out for a pub crawl with our hostel, one of the stops being an American bar, complete with Hooters bumper stickers and a Packers game on the tv. That was a trip.
After a fun night of dancing and roaming the streets of Sevilla (safely, mom and dad), the next morning we returned to the cathedral we saw on our tour the day before, and went inside. Like I said, the cathedral in Sevilla is the largest Gothic style cathedral, and third largest cathedral in the world, only St. Peters in the Vatican and St. Pauls in London are bigger. Columbus’s tomb resides in the cathedral, which was cool to see, but anticlimatic after our tour guide the day before told us that the only thing in the full-size tomb lavishly decorated and held up by four statues, is Columbus’s finger. BUT they ran tests, and they know for sure it’s his finger. The rest of his body? Many claim to have had it, but no one knows.
After paying tribute to the founder of the New World’s finger, we climbed the tower for a full view of the city. Every city I’ve traveled to on this trip I’ve happened to go on some tour, or hike, or visit some building in which I’ve had a view of the entire city laid out in front of me. It’s a great feeling to take in a city all at once, it make me feel like I’ve conquered another place in the world, not to mention all the pictures will make for an epic picture collage when I get back to the states. The breath-taking view of Sevilla from the cathedral tower was our farewell, right after we left it was back to the bus station for our trek back to Valladolid.
Leaving Sevilla and Granada was sad for me - I felt like one weekend was not enough to do either city justice, like I had just barely scraped the surface of what these places had to offer, and just as I was getting my barings, had to leave. Only seeing a day’s worth of sights in each city definitely made me want to come back, and one day, hopefully in the near future, I will.