3 September 2007 (and before...)

From 31 August 2007, when I had no internet:

Hola de Granada! I’ve finally reached my “final” destination—that is, I’ll call Granada home for the next four months. I don’t think I could have picked a better spot.

I woke up this morning a bit frazzled after a bad day of travel yesterday (I missed my flight and had to reschedule), but after a breakfast of café con leche, delicious fresh fruit, and dried ham I was more than ready to hit the streets.

Which I proceeded to do—via bus tour. It’s touristy, and cheesy, and yeah, the double-decker bus was painted red and purple, and my fellow passengers were Europeans wearing designer sunglasses and half-unbuttoned shirts… but Granada is a big city, and I wanted to get myself oriented!

Which brings me to: I love it here. It’s arid and warm, and the soil is red. Granada, which is a much larger city than I expected, is surrounded by fields of olive trees and of lower-lying crops. Besides the multi-story modern structures, most buildings are white and terra-cotta colored, with terra-cotta tile roofs. The city is hilly, and the residential buildings seem to tumble over one another, as though they’re all racing to get down into the lower-lying heart of the city.

It’s cleaner than Beijing, but dirtier than Paris, which makes me feel comfortable here! There’s graffiti and cacti, and most pedestrians wear sexy but casual clothing. (The ubiquity of sunglasses and spaghetti-strap tops takes me right back to California in the summer.) The food seems, to put it simply, good; wine, olive, ice cream, and pastry shops line the sidewalks.

I’ll get back to my bus tour. It wound through streets just outside the heart of the city, first taking us up to see the entrance to La Alhambra and then bringing us back down the hill to a modern, slightly less picturesque part of the city—home to the university where I’ll be studying. Like any good bus tour, it included audio narration, and I learned that there’s a local legend about a girl who lived in the Sierra Nevada mountains and was very beautiful but for that she had goat’s feet, and also that the city has a rich history of legends of “sultans and princesses.” Which, as someone who liked Disney’s “Aladdin” a lot as a small child, made me very happy.

When the tour dropped me back off downtown, I footed it up into the Albaicin, the Islamic market district. I bought an Horchata (a drink that I love—it’s milky and tastes of Almond) from a street vendor, and when he chatted with me and then kissed me goodbye on both cheeks I was half enchanted and half terrified! I kind of ran away.

My biggest challenge here, I think, is going to be language. I keep slipping into Chinese when I try to speak—or just making stupid, stupid mistakes. Spanish is beautiful, but it’s so much like French and English that I don’t even know how to begin studying: there are no characters to drill, which is what I’d start with when drilling Chinese all summer! I don’t think that we have a language pledge here, but I’m still going to try to speak Spanish as much as I can and not “cheat” by surviving in English, even though that seems like it would be easy here.

Tonight I’m going to a little Tapas bar that I found down the street. Tomorrow, my American classmates arrive and our program begins! I can’t believe that I get to live here for four months. I feel so lucky!