From Granada I bring you ….

… Graffiti. Because that is what I am going to remember most about the city – graffiti everywhere, some of it elaborate, amazing, however most, like always, ugly, annoying without any creativity. It is all over the city: on churches, houses, windows, pillars, fences, telephone booths, museums - nothing seems too old, sacred or important not to be defaced. Since there was no way of avoiding it I decide I might as well photograph some of the good examples.

We took off Thursday morning and drove the approx. 90 km in no time to reach Granada in the late morning. The guide book wasn’t mistaken by saying that Granada’s charm and beauty isn’t obvious on first glance. Like with many other largish cities one drives through suburbs one rather never saw and by buildings that suggest that capital punishment for architects might not be such a bad idea after all. We finally reached the Centro, which like any centro in any old European city is a nightmare to drive through but that’s the fate of the motorized tourist: being stuck in a tiny, cobblestoned one-way street behind a delivery truck who tries to back into a side alley that is about 3 mm wider than the truck. Street parking was nonexistent in an absolute kind of sense. Uli’s speculation was that parking spots are passed down from generation to generation and no cars are ever moved unless in the event of death. After finding a parking garage (still cheap by San Francisco standards where these days a quarter buys you 6 minutes of parking time and probably less by the time we return) we took a little tour around by foot hitting some of the sights. To Max’s great dismay all of the Iglesias – and there are a lot of them, even by Spanish standards – were closed for good or at least for lunch.
Granada has an interesting history. It was the last bastion of the Moors that was finally re-conquered for the Holy Roman Church by Ferdinand and Isabella, who both are graced by the qualifier “the catholic” in the year 1491. The last Moorish king, Boabdil, which allegedly means something like “the not-so-attractive one”, turned over the key to the city on January, 2 1492 and then rode out of town with his followers weeping. His mother is credited with the somewhat cold-hearted remark:”Don’t cry like a woman for something you failed to defend like a man.” Such ended the reign of the Moors which began in 711. As to be expected, the good catholic king and queen and all the other good catholic kings and queens that followed didn’t make a name for themselves as tolerant and open-minded. The Jews and remaining Moors in the city were repressed - and that is probably putting it mildly - and then finally expelled. Then happened what always seems to happen in such situations: after the Jews and Moors, that means all the traders, bankers, and artists left town the whole place fell into disrepair and declined economically as well as culturally. In 1936, after Franco’s coup, the city lived up once more to its narrow-minded, intolerant reputation by unleashing a fascist blood-bath killing roughly 7000 of its liberals, artists and other unsympathetic people, including one of the more famous sons of the city, the poet Federico Garcia Lorca.
The 700 years of Arab influence is seem mainly in the Alhambra and a couple of old Barrios which still have the steep cobblestone streets and some of the ornate decorations on houses as well as the typical roundish windows. Some of the vistas are surprising and occasionally you turn a corner to find yourself on a charming little plaza with a few little cafes and tapas bars, a nice little fountain and a relaxed atmosphere. Otherwise to say the city is crawling with tourists would be an understatement. I don’t quite understand why but the city seems to be a major attraction to the typical Eurorail travelers – young people with dreadlocks (seems to be all the rage) and very little money who come up with the brilliant idea to hassle the rest of us. Poor beggars in India I gladly give to but I can be as cold-hearted as an arctic winter when it comes to young, healthy, able-bodied but unwashed young men and women who think it is my duty to share my money with them or – probably worse – think that their very questionable interpretation of “I can’t get no satisfaction” played sitting on the steps of the cathedral warrants any donation whatsoever. I am not quite sure why they all come to Granada, as the interest of the majority of them in medieval church history seems rather limited.
Another curious fact was the souvenir shops there: anything I forgot to buy in Varkala I could have gotten in Granada for more money. Why people feel inspired to buy and sell incents, those baggy pants, pillow covers with elephants ,and colorful lamps (like the ones I dismissed as not-Indian-enough-to-warrant-another-glance in Kochi) is beyond me, but sell and buy they do. There might be an underlying confusion at work as to where the Middle East ends and the Far East begins as a bunch of more typically “Arab” souvenirs sit amicably right next to the pseudo-Indian pants and little earthenware egg cups saying “huevos”. Having said all that, it’s kind of fun to walk along the steep streets and look in disbelieve at all the things for sale while trying to keep Max from bringing down a whole shelf of the darn egg cups.
We had scored a “triple room” in a hotel at the Gran Via Colon only to find out that triple meant a regular small double with an extra bed cramped into it. This also meant that Uli and I enjoyed or bottle of evening wine (a good one as it happened to be my birthday) in the bathroom, Uli sitting next to the toilet and me in the bath tub – the situation was absurd and bizarre enough to qualify as hilarious.
Being our usual optimistic/unrealistic selves we actually thought that getting up before 8 am, skipping breakfast and taking a taxi cab up to the Alhambra would be enough to score us a ticket for the Alhambra only to find out that about 800 people had gotten up earlier than us and that there were only 350 morning tickets left. So we looked at all the things we could look at without a ticket and are palnning to come back again, maybe next week, this time Internet-purchased ticket in hand mocking the stupid tourists who believe they can just show up and buy a ticket as if this was any old movie theater and not the Alhambra.
Live and learn that there is no way of beating busloads of Germans and Japanese to the ticket office.