Granada: The Early Days

We arrived here on Friday in the late afternoon. We hauled our luggage to our apartment which is in a nice residential neighborhood close to all the things we want to see, but not on top of the tourist traffic. Our apartment is what I believe is a standard Spanish apartment. It has two bedrooms in a building that surrounds a courtyard with a fountain. You have to unlock an outside gate/door to get into the courtyard and then unlock the front door of the apartment when you get to it. It has a proper coffee maker which thrilled me, refrigerator, washing machine and wi fi.

On our first night here we just wandered the city, getting a feel for the geography and remembering the last time we were here with John. We tried to find the tourist office to get a map, but everything except restaurants were pretty much closed. We did find a small market where I was able to purchase coffee for the morning. We had a great dinner at an outside restaurant in a small plaza. I had an avacado and salmon quiche. It was good, but a little rich for my tastes.

The next day we found the tourist office, got a map and wandered through the Arab Market. That evening we went to wander the Albacin which is the Arab area with small winding passages, lots of touristy shops all selling essentially the same thing. We had some Turkish tea in a small den with people smoking hookahs (tobacco) and were all wired up. We climbed up and up and further up the narrow passages, getting lost, finding ourselves again, coming across lovely views and charming plazas and parks. It was fun and we were exhausted.

On the way home we stopped at a Chinese/Japanese restaurant and were pleasantly surprised. I ordered dumplings with pork. Leea had miso soup, tuna rolls and fried rice. I helped with the fried rice. Before dinner they brought us these wavy chips like things that looked sort of like styrofoam but were quite appetizing with a dipping sweet and sour sauce. In the restaurants here, they often bring you things for free that you did not order. It is like a treasure chest of goodies. The dinner was great. After dinner the owner/waiter offered us a “digestive” drink. John and I had a strange experience with a waiter bringing us an alcohol drink as a digestive. I told him we didn’t drink alcohol. So he brought us one without alcohol. Again the digestive was free and very tasty.

Our third day in town, we went to the municipal cemetery. Doesn’t everyone visit cemeteries when they are traveling? Well this one holds the remains of Garcia Lorca and many other famous and semi famous Spainsih writers, poets and artists, as well as average citizens. Mostly the fashion is to put the date of death and how old the person was when they died. This is a reasonable way of doing things and eliminates all the messy arithmetic. We were surprised at how many of the people were in their 70’s, 80’s and 90’s when they died. The life span in Granada must be fairly long, if you survived the Civil War. This cemetery was huge, not just in length and width, but heighth. Many of the graves are in structures that mirror the apartment buildings most Spanish people live in, at least in the cities. That is the are large retangualar blocks of several stories. In the cemetery they were like five or six stories high, with the coffins inserted and a plaque or other memorial placed as front or cover. The apartment buildings in the cities are usually five or six stories high with the bottom story often used for commercial purposes. The bottom story of the vertical graves are reserved for larger multiple person burials. There were also more standard graves similar to the ones we see in the states. And there were big family graves that are crypts holding six or eight family members with huge house like structures built on them or large sculptures. I mean this cemetery has a little guide booklet to tell you where the famous sculptures are and to guide you through the many sections. There is even the Miradora section where the crypts have views. Leea asked that we bury her here with a glass front and her head facing out so she can appreciate the view.