Granada

We finally ended out car journey in Granada. It was a very good decision to go driving in Spain, as it allowed us to get much farther off the regular tourist trail than we would have been able to otherwise. It also allowed us to experience the countryside much more, which was really amazing. The most prominent feature of the countryside south of Madrid is acre after acre of olive groves that are carpeting the entire countryside. At least I think they are olive trees. I’m no botanist and I usually only see them from afar, but I think they are mostly olive trees interspersed with some orange groves (and also vineyards, in you’re in a wine region). You see olive trees here like you see corn in Iowa. It sometimes seems to be covering everything. This was particularly striking in the hillier areas, where you see the scraggly, brown hills covered by a perfectly green set of olive trees lined up in neat little rows, with a large row of tree-covered mountains in the background.

While driving in the country was a joy, driving in the cities just sucked. The street plan for the parts of the cities we were visiting was laid out for donkeys, not for cars. As a result, the historic parts of cities are labyrinths of dead-ends, one-way streets, and tight corners and spaces where you can barely squeeze a compact car through. Since I needed to be doing the navigating Juls did most of the driving (and put on a pretty impressive display of driving skills), but even with two people including a NYC driver that’s an expert with a stick and a obsessive-compulsive planner with a very good sense of direction and Google Maps on his iPhone, driving in the cities was often quite frustrating. Google maps on an iPhone, it must be said, does not work all that well in the historic parts of cities we’ve been visiting. The accuracy of the maps is usually not too bad, but the location positioning service is often unable to identify our location accurately, sometimes pinpointing my location half a mile away from where we actually are. The Google Maps app actually functioned better when I was in India this year, believe it or not. And it certinaly wasn’t much help in getting us into the train station in Granada. We so much difficulty finding the rental car agency where we had to return our car that eventually a cop stopped us and ended up escorting us to the drop point.

One thing that has surprised me on this trip is just how fast it is to get around. The Iberian peninsula isn’t near as big as it looks on a map. This was compounded the fact that Google Maps was again lying to me, both on the routes I pulled up on my computer at home before leaving and on my iPhone. For whatever reason, routes that it said would take 3 hours to complete ended up taking us maybe 90 mins, door to door. This is the primary reason I’ve had so much trouble keeping up with my blog on this trip. I thought I would have a fair amount of down time on some drives, but often by time I navigated our way out of the city and got us on the major highway and spent a little time checking out the scenery on the way to our destination, we’d already be close enough to where I’d have to start navigating us to the parking space at our destination.

I loved Granada. The big sight there, the Alhambra, in my opinion didn’t quite live up to the billing. It had some beautiful decorative work in it, but after spending several weeks in north India earlier this year it seemed like just another fancy Muslim palace to me, albeit with some particularly elaborate ceilings. I was actually more impressed with the Mezquita in Córdoba. It was my favorite city of the trip so far, though. It’s absolutely littered with charming little squares. You can be in a square, take a street out of it, and in another 50 yards you’ve arrived at yet another square. These will often have a small park with a fountain, be lined with tapas bars with outdoor seating and ice cream shops and stores. In addition, the city has a large Moorish quarter, the Albazýn, which is filled with helal butchers, hookah bars, Moroccan restaurants, and kitschy little shops with mid eastern and north African stuff. Most importantly, Granada had the prettiest women of any city we had been to in Spain.

I got some more great food in Granada, as well. To give Juls a break from a plain steak with soggy fries we hit a Moroccan restaurant one day, and the food was quite good, although I was enraged when I discovered that it was a non-alcoholic restaurant (having lamb tagine without of bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape is criminal, as far as I’m concerned). I also grabbed the house specialty from a Galician restaurant the people at our hotel recommended which was killer. It was bacalao (dried salted codfish) with a tomato-based sauce with shrimp, scallops, and clams. I also had a local specialty, fried eggplant with honey, that was quite good. There were two food disappointments while I was in Granada, though. They weren’t disappointing because I didn’t like the food, but were instead disappointing because I never got to try them. One of these was the ajo blanco. This is a cold soup, like gazpacho, which instead of tomatoes and cucumbers is made out of garlic and almonds. This, along with gazpacho and salmorejo (kind of like a thicker, richer gazpacho) are the three signature cold soups of Andalucía. As Granada was my last stop in Andalucía, I absolutely had to have all three of these before I left. I had already had gazpacho and salmorejo several times, but was having a hard time locating the ajo blanco. My last night in Granada, I actually went out in search of it, going from tapas bar to tapas bar asking every single one if they had either it or the tortilla sacaramonte which is a Granadan specialty which I also had to have before leaving (it’s a Spanish-style omelets with pig’s brains and various other meats). I checked out about 25-30 different tapas bars before I finally ran out of steam. Most of the waiters I asking didn’t even know what I was talking about, which wasn’t a good sign.

The one other problem I had in Granada was messing up my back at the gym. I had some free time my second day there and really wanted to get a workout in, and particularly wanted to get a workout for my legs, so stopped by a local place in the early afternoon (I can work out my upper body doing things in my hotel room with the furniture or with the jungle gym at a kid’s playground, and I also worked out on this trip in Madrid using the metal scaffolding constructed when work is done on commercial buildings, but for legs I need real gym equipment). This was a decision I came to regret. For those of you that weren’t aware, I injured my back in college and it’s given me trouble ever since. Normally I can manage it without too much problems, I just have to be very careful with certain activities, including training my legs in the gym. I wasn’t training very strenuously, but the equipment there wasn’t very familiar to me and I nevertheless ended up aggravating my back. It didn’t seem to be too bad, I was able to finish my workout for my upper body that I was also getting in and so far doesn’t seem to be interfering with my travel agenda too much. My only problem at this point is sleep—it doesn’t prevent me from doing anything I need to be doing during the day, but last night it was painful enough just lying in bed that it kept me from getting any significant sleep at all. Hopefully in a few days it will heal up enough so at least I’m able to get a decent night’s rest, but otherwise shouldn’t interfere with the rest of vacation. Quite frankly, I’m much more concerned this point at the impact it will have on my ability to train in the gym and the salsa studio once I get home.

If you're also checking out the snaps, note that I've needed to start a new photo album since Google Photos limites you to only 1000 in each. You can see the continued set of photos here. Note this album may disappear later if I'm able to trim the fat and consolidate all the snaps into one album.