Day 2: 25K+ Steps in Granada (June 13)

After eating a so-so breakfast at our hotel, we went to the Tourist Information office to activate our Granada cards that I had to purchase since regular tickets to get into the Alhambra today were sold out.  Though the older woman at our hotel advised us to take a bus up to the Alhambra, the young woman at the TI office felt that we could easily handle the 1 km, entirely uphill walk.   We set off knowing this was going to be a day of much walking.  Along the path up, we met an American woman traveling alone and got to talking.  She is on a month-long vacation through Spain after just finishing nursing school, is from Portland but lives in Oakland, and went to Pomona College!!  I failed to mention that our vacation really started last week when we flew to LA to celebrate Otis' 2nd birthday with the family and squeezed in a perspective student tour of Pomona.  Then we met Greg on the flight followed by Tara outside the Alhambra in Granada, Spain.  I am putting no pressure on Rachel to apply to Pomona, but the universe seems to be! Moments before we met Tara, Rachel said to me that she would love to study abroad in Nepal and wanted a school that offered that...can you guess where Tara studied abroad??

We said goodbye to Tara at the entry gates since she had a timed ticket for right then and we still had three hours before our time to enter the main palace.  We decided to start in the Generalife Gardens and felt certain that according to the map and according to the guidebook saying that the gardens were outside the protection of the Alhambra wall (back in the day) we needed to exit the main grounds and head off in a  totally different direction.  It very quickly began to feel wrong as our paths led us to parking lot after parking lot further from the entrance with no signage whatsoever for the gardens (a prominent part of the Alhambra grounds).  But, for some reason

we continued on in the wrong direction, even commenting on how for one of the most popular tourist attractions in Spain it was odd that we saw NO other people.  Yet still, we didn't actually abandon our path until we were clearly on the wrong side of a locked gate of a fence topped with barbed wire. Rachel might have continued along the side of the fence looking for a way in not wanting to face facts, but I decided it was time to turn back.  When we got to the main entrance again, we discovered that the Gardens were actually very close to where we had said goodbye to Tara and were indeed very well marked.  Not a day that needed a 45-minute detour to nowhere, but it gave us a good laugh.

The Alhambra was the last and greatest Moorish palace in Europe, holding off the Reconquista for 250 years longer than neighboring cities in Spain.   The Generalife Gardens still grow 600 years later, surrounding the remains of the small summer palace which hint at the grandeur of the main palace.

These stairway banisters double as a little water canals...never seen anything like that. 

 After the Gardens, we headed to the main part of the complex, stopping by the Parador de Granada San Francisco hotel inside the grounds (where we had looked to stay, but was very expensive).  It was once a palace and then a Franciscan monastery and where Catholic Ferdinand and Isabel chose to be buried. 

There is also a lovely courtyard restaurant (with terrible service) where we sat, played some cards, and enjoyed a Spanish omelette and some tea with cookies. The terrible service made us worried about making our timed entrance to the Palacios Nazaries (after getting there three hours early) but we made it with a few minutes to spare! It is far too hard to describe the palace's carved wood, beautiful tiles, molded plaster, courtyards, etc.  Must be seen. Rachel was particularly impressed to be in the room (a perfect cube) where Columbus made his final appeal for his voyage to Isabel and Ferdinand.  And it was fun to see where Washington Irving wrote his Tales of the Alhambra rekindling interest in it as a historic site.

I'm only in so many of these pics because Rachel refused to be

From there we visited the palace of Charles V, who thankfully chose not to destroy the Moorish palace after final taking Granada, but to build his own Renaissance palace with a cool circle-within-a-square design for ceremonial purposes and use the existing one as his residence. 

Then we saw the Alcazaba, the original fort and the most in disrepair. Four flags fly from it - the blue (EU), green and white (Andalucia), red and yellow (Spain), and red and green (Granada).

We walked down a different way so that we could get to the Gypsy/Roma area of town - the Sacromonte district.  As part of our Granada pass the TI woman gave us bus tickets and suggested we hop on a bus to take us to the top of the hill.  The bus driver announced when we arrived at the center of Sacromonte and, thinking that is where we should go, hopped off.  But, as no one else exited with us, we quickly realized our mistake. He had let us off near the cave museum but we had wanted to go to the monastery which was still much further up the hill.  We saw the bus coming back down and the driver told said the next bus would come in about 20 minutes and that we could just walk.  Off we set, straight up hill again - and not that close - but we did trudge up to the Abby.  When we got there we peaked inside, realized that you can only enter on a guided tour, didn't want to wait, and rechecked our guide book to see that there was no mention of it at all in the book anyway.  We didn't know why we were there at all, so immediately we started back down. We got as far as the first bus stop and let the same driver drive us back down the big hill.  We got off at the border of the Sacromonte district and The Albayzin, an old Moorish quarter. 

We walked, up hill again, to the San Nicolas viewpoint and found a spot just below with the same amazing view of the Alhambra at which to have a 6:00 pm snack. We opted for pappas bravas and a chai masala tea. 

We then wandered around the neighborhood poking into several little grocery stores, a church, and a used book store.  I bought a children's version of Cuentos de la Alhambra by Washington Irving in Spanish - which should be at a really good level for me.  We made our way back to the hotel along the streets that we had driven the night before which were much more fun as pedestrians.  We came across a vegan restaurant that looked amazing called Paprika but as it was just 7:40, it wasn't even open yet for dinner.  We went back to the hotel and despite having walked over 20,000 steps at that point mostly on a hill either up or down, we did our 7 Minute Workout before walking back to Paprika for a delicious dinner that ended with a chat with a couple from SF who is living in Granada for 1.5 years.  Enviable!

Rachel was asleep almost before her head hit the pillow.

P.S.  Rachel and I have been laughing about this all day - Marveling at how well we were doing with jet lag, I said, "It seems like the $150 upgrade to the bulkhead seats was probably worth it since it was so nice to be able to stretch out our legs.  Then I said, "The problem is though that they charge you for each leg."  Rachel looked at me so quizzically...I obviously meant for each leg of the flight - but she thought I meant each leg you stretched out!  :-)

There is also a funny story about pilots and pirates that I'll tell you if you ask.  (ie is anyone still reading??)