Lorca and the Alhambra

So I woke up yesterday early and checked out to head for the train station. Given how disastrous the walk from the station was, I decided to wimp out and take a taxi to the station. Right decision. I had a bit of a wait at the station because I wanted to be early and I wasn’t sure if getting a taxi right away would be easy (but a driver spotted me like the moment I came out the door of my hostal and I nodded at him and he stopped for me. It was pretty great).
The train was a bit different than the last one. I was going from a place much smaller than Madrid to a place smaller than Sevilla, so this wasn’t as fast of a train (I think around 130km/h), and had stops in what appeared to me to be the middle of nowhere.
In Granada, I started to walk, got about 2 blocks from the station and couldn’t find the street I was looking for, so after Sevilla, I said to hell with it and went back and took a taxi. Again, right decision. It was only 5euro, and I didn’t have to sweat like a crazy person and be lost for an hour.
The guy here speaks really good English, and, like in Madrid, he gave me a map and pointed out some things to do, then gave me the fax that had come from the company I booked my Alhambra tour with (more on that shortly). It was pretty much the best arrival I could have hoped for, and solved every concern I had about Granada in about 2 minutes. Sweet.
It was the middle of siesta time when I arrived, so I waited in the hostal for a bit, just hanging out. The guy from the front brought me an electric fan (because this one’s not air conditioned, but honestly, I fought with that a/c so much, I don’t really mind at all) for the room.
Eventually, when it should have been a bit cooler, I went out. I wandered up Gran Via de Colon, and turned towards what I now know is Plaza Nueva (though at the time, I was just wandering). I sat for a bit and wrote and thought. It was a really nice moment; the weather was warm but the sun was down enough that it wasn’t super hot and there was a nice breeze, blowing the leaves around. There was a fountain right in front of me, and every now and then, dogs would stop to drink and splash in it. A guy was playing Spanish guitar half a block down. It was just like being in a movie, and it got me thinking about what kind of plot my movie would have, and spurred a whole moment for me in my writing. A bit of navel-gazing never hurt anyone unless they were standing in traffic, right?
Anyway, when it finally seemed late enough to eat (a bit earlier here, probably because there seems to be a lot of older English-speakers here, a.k.a. the early bird specials), around 8 or 8:30, I picked a place right there at Plaza Nueva and ate on the terrace just on the other side of the fountain I’d been at.
I had a granizada limon (lemon slurpee, delicious), a tapa of tortilla de patatas (told you about that already, if you’ve been reading), and a tosta (like an open faced sandwich) with tomato, ali oli (garlic mayo) and little shrimps on it. It was really good, and this might have been the first time in Spain I’ve really felt like I liked the food. Mostly, I’ve found Spanish food to be ok if I order the right thing, but not my favourite. I don’t know how Spanish this meal was, but presumably more than “salty pancakes,” and I quite enjoyed it.
I also had helado from Tiggiani (which, according to my Andalucia book, has granadinos in a rave about their awesome flavours), and it was quite good. I wandered and explored and got a bit lost and wandered some more and felt a little nervous that I was actually really lost and then kept walking in what felt like the right direction and eventually hit a street I knew and found myself again (in the literal sense, not the figurative “finding oneself” sense).
The only thing I’ve found wrong about Granada so far is that this is the first European shower I’ve had where I don’t really fit. It’s way too short of a room, as in I can’t stand up straight and shampoo my hair. But really, of all the things to complain about, at least I have a shower.
This morning, I got up early to go on my Alhambra tour.
Perhaps I should explain what the Alhambra is? It’s a huge old Muslim walled city up on the hills above Granada where nobels and the Sultan used to live (before 1400, when Spain was still under Muslim rule). It’s also a UNESCO world heritage site, one of the most visited places in Spain, and widely considered to be one of the most beautiful places in the world for the architecture inside the palaces. History lesson over.
I had to go down a couple blocks to a bigger hotel to get picked up and I was very early, so I waited around. Finally, when the people arrived, she tells me (as the man tells the other people in French) that the Alhambra is having a general strike and so it was supposed to still have minimal services, but that her colleague, there since early morning, says it’s actually closed.
Shit.
So, she says, I can get a refund no problem, but really, you don’t go to Granada without seeing the Alhambra. That’s like going to New York city and not going to Times Square, even though you might never get another chance to go there. If Times Square was halfway around the world, was hundreds of years old, and was extremely beautiful, all of which, it is not.
She also says I can try to rebook for another day, but that tomorrow might be impossible because everyone from today will be rebooking for today. I leave here first thing Friday morning.
Double shit.
She gives me the phone number, and I start slowly wandering back toward my hostal, looking at my cellphone, trying to figure out what to do. I don’t even really know how to dial locally with it. But it’s the middle of the night back home, so I can’t call my Dad to ask. But I need to call right away to have much chance of rebooking.
So many shits.
Suddenly, the woman runs up behind me and says “She called to say it’s open, so we can go. Come on.”
No more shit. So many awesomes.
On the bus, I managed to hit my knee on an armrest so hard, it’s now purple and blue, despite the fact that it only happened a few hours ago. Go team graceless.
When we got there, they split us up into language groups. The English group was actually mostly non-native English speakers, but their native language was uncommon enough as to not get a full group (some from Holland, I’m certain I heard some German, and one couple were from India). Other than the daughter of one of the couples, I was definitely the youngest person there.
We walked through the gardens, and I managed to walk into a shin-high wall, scraping my leg open. Team graceless strikes again.
It really was a beautiful place.
But to be honest, I sort of expected more.

Federico Garcia Lorca (as you may know, one of my writerly obsessions in the past year) said “The melancholic and contemplative man goes to Granada to be all alone...near the bonfire of saffron, deep gray, and blotting-paper pink—the walls of the Alhambra.”
That description...I mean, in typical Lorca fashion, he makes it sound like the most perfect place on earth.
But the trouble is that the Alhambra that Lorca saw is not the Alhambra of today. It wasn’t really a tourist attraction then, it wasn’t half under renovation and restoration as it is now, it wasn’t populated by shouting teenagers and screeching children, all on field trips. It was contemplative and beautiful. It was a place a writer could go to write.
And I expect, if I could see it as Lorca saw it, I would feel very differently about it. But honestly, it felt like a very beautiful, but fairly empty (in an emotional sense) tourist attraction.
However, I’m finding Granada to be a lovely city. Granada means pomegranate in Spanish, and Lorca described it as hard and skull-like on the outside, but inside, containing the “blood of the wounded earth.” How beautiful is that? He grew up around and in Granada, and I’ve been reading a biography of him (by Leslie Stainton, it’s extremely detailed and about 2 inches thick, and yes, I carried it with me), trying to see how he might have seen this place. It might seem really cliché. I’m probably pretty far down the list of young writers who’ve idolized him, and thus come to Granada because of his life. But I find something about him and about his writing to be so endlessly fascinating. And don’t even get me started on his relationship to Dali.
Anyway, Granada is treating me well. It really is beautiful here.

“Al coger tu paleta, con un tiro en un ala, / pides la luz que anima la copa del olivo. / Ancha la luz di Minerva, constructora de andamios, / donde no cabe el sueño ni su flora inexacta.”

approximately “When you take up your palette, with a bullet hole in it’s wing / You call on the light that brings to life the olive tree / The light of Minerva, builder of scaffolds / Where there is no room for dream or it’s hazy flower”

-from “Oda a Salvador Dali” by Federico Garcia Lorca.

<3angi

Strange in Sevilla

A day late and a buck short (or something like that). I'm now caught up. My pictures won't upload right now; I think the connection's a little too slow. I'll make sure that I have tons of photos up at some point, at least in July when I get home.
So, this is my last day in Sevilla. I haven’t written much for the blog while I’ve been here. I think because I’ve been having a hard time here, and mostly I write blog updates when I’m stoked about life. Here, I’ve felt cut off and out of place, despite (or maybe because of) having immediate internet access, and therefore being able to skype with my family. I think part of it is simply that it seems like Sevillians don’t smile at you much. I don’t know if that’s because I’m clearly a foreigner, or just a general tendency, or maybe something else entirely, but for a day or so, I really let it get to me and felt ugly and stupid and strange.
I am feeling much better about it now. I think I’m finding there’s a real adjustment period to each place I’m in. The first two days in Madrid were difficult and then I found I was really enjoying it. Here, I wasn’t happy until this afternoon, and I leave tomorrow morning. Oh well.
So, to catch you up: the day I arrived, I didn’t do much. Just went to the tourist info place and got a map of the city, and found I almost melted walking over there, so I came back to the hostal and waited for it to cool off. I went for dinner very late (because it’s the Spanish thing to do). I ate a tapa of shrimp salad that was super full of mayo, and tortilla Espanola, which is like potato omelette. I gotta say, it was the worst of the tortilla I’ve had so far (which is to say out of 3); the potato was undercooked but the egg was still runny. Ew. Then I wandered a bit before coming back here.
Yesterday morning, I went to the Reales Alcazares, which is basically an old muslim palace from the time when Spain was ruled by the Almohades. I took some photos, but I didn’t want to carry my big camera, so they’re not fantastic. You can find great ones on the internet, I’m sure. It’s the kind of place that’s so intricately detailed and beautiful and amazing, that you kind of get overwhelmed and give up trying to capture or catalogue it in any way. The architecture...I mean, it’s stunning. I can’t even find words for it. It’s a level of detail that absolutely nothing in Canada compares to, as far as I know.
After walking around there for several hours early in the morning (it’s cooler until around noon, it seems), I was going to go to the cathedral, but I couldn’t figure out where tourists could go in. Basically, it has multiple entrances, and it would be really disrespectful to just wander in with the people there for prayer when I’m so clearly not. I was also being hounded on the steps of the cathedral by women pressing little sprigs of plant into my hand, and then spouting off a fortune and a blessing involving “Santa Ana,” and then asking for money. The first one, I gave her a euro and she asked for five euro (that’s like...almost $7CAD). I have trouble with this kind of thing because I feel sort of bad, but at the same time...5euro?? I mean, seriously.
Anyway, I gave up and went back to the hostal and my little siesta ended up with me waking up at around 8pm. Oops. I went for dinner then. Thankfully, that’s still early for dinner here, so it wasn’t a problem that I slept so late. I ate at a place called Levies Cafe, and had tapas: empanadillas de espinachi (basically spinach wrapped in a dough and fried), pollo frito (fried pieces of chicken), and paella (traditional Spanish rice, which I had to try once, but it contains pork and bunches of seafood I won’t eat, so I kind of picked at the rice and pretended I wasn’t eating anything I don’t eat. I’m still trying not to think about it). Weirdly enough, in Vienna, at 1516, there was a guy from Seville and he had written down a place I should go for dinner. It was the same place. I didn’t look at the name of the place when I decided to eat there (just the menu), and I didn’t look at the thing in my wallet until I’d eaten. It was kind of strange to end up there anyway.
On the way home, I ate helado de avellana (hazelnut gelato). Seriously, since I’ve been in Europe, hardly a day has gone by without either lemon or hazelnut gelato (and sometimes both, though not together. That would be weird. So yes, I ate gelato twice in a day at least once).
Today, I got up early again and walked to the Museo de Bellas Artes (Fine Arts). It didn’t take too long, and seemed pretty lacklustre after the Prado and Thyssen-Bornemisza and Reina Sofia, so I was finished there around 11, and the cathedral doesn’t open until 2:30 on Sundays (to tourists, that is). So I wandered and wrote and wandered some more, generally feeling sorry for myself and stupid and annoyed (I know. I’m such fun, huh?).
At 2:30, I went to the cathedral and the line up to get it was masssssssive (emphasis on the mass. get it?) and in full sun. So I waited a bit and by about 3, it was considerably shorter.
I’ve never in my life seen anything so ridiculously amazing. It is, according to Wikipedia, the third largest church in the world, and the largest gothic cathedral in the world. It’s like the size of a city. I mean, you could house all of Stettler in there. Not that that’s saying much, but...You could stack airplanes. In the middle of the church, it’s 37m high. It’s enormous and detailed and crazy. I think I said it a few entries ago...Nobody does finery like the catholics. It’s still true. I climbed the bell tower too, and the view is ridiculous. I thought Seville was kind of small. Yeah, it’s not.
Anyway, the thing I found sort of surprising was how much I found the cathedral lifted my spirits. Obviously, I’m not catholic, nor religious at all; I consider myself a conscientious dissenter to the whole idea of organized religion. But I found that I felt better about the whole of Sevilla when I left there. Is that totally weird?

Later, when I went for dinner, I found a place that looked decent, and the english translation for part of their menu was "salty pancakes" which came in chicken, spinach with prawns, and other flavours. Well, clearly I had to try that. Salty pancake just means savoury crepe, but it was good nonetheless, if not particularly Spanish. I also had a chocolate and banana one for dessert, but then it made me think of Cora's. When I get home, someone take me out to Cora's for breakfast, ok?
Anyway, that’s all for now. Tomorrow, to the train station and I head for Granada, birthplace of Garcia Lorca, where I hope to chase some ghosts and find some inspiration. I’ve discovered there’s a bus to a village right by where he died as well, so now I think I may have to do that. I’m seeking adventures, right? Buses to random tiny Spanish villages can only mean adventure. Wish me luck with that, everyone.

“wake up and waste a day/chase away/a day at a time/and waste away”

“Scratched Out” by The Matches

<3angi>

Dreams, Musings, Train Travel

This entry spans June 4 and 5. I'm still behind on uploading. Hopefully by tonight (ie. by Sun. afternoon in Canada), I'll catch up. Also, if you're reading these blogs of mine, leave me a comment. I feel super far from home right now, and it would be really nice to know who's interested in my blogs. :)

There’s a really surreal quality to sitting in a Madrid hostel room, and realizing someone’s playing Muse’s “Exogenic Symphony” loud enough that it carries all the way to you (I actually first heard “Map of the Problematique.” ...Ellie, are you in Madrid and didn’t tell me?). I guess it’s just one of those things where I stupidly expect everything to be foreign because I’m far from home, but the fact is that English music is still the major music in most of the world (I mean English language, not necessarily from England). On the one day that I had working tv in Madrid, I saw several Lady Gag videos come on the music station. That makes me sad.
But the Muse thing makes me happy, so at least there’s that.
Today, I had no plan when I woke up, since I’d done all the things I planned to do for sure. I decided then, that I might as well go to the Museo de Thyssen-Bornemisza.
And thank god I did. As is always the way with me, I would have really regretted missing out on that experience.
It meant that I got to put my face about an inch from “Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bumblebee around a Pomegranate a Second before Waking Up” by Salvador Dalí, one of my favourites of his. If I’d not bothered to go to the Thyssen, and then realized what I’d missed, I would have been extremely upset with myself.
And actually, the Thyssen ended up being possibly my favourite of the museums I’ve seen so far in Europe. It had more breadth than most; there is something kind of great about being able to survey art history from 1290 all the way to the 2000’s in one building. Plus, of course, one of my favourite Dalí paintings (and two of his others), another Magritte (not my favourite), and a bunch of really great moderns. I have to say, Lichtenstein really loses something in reproduction, because seeing it up close and realizing that he really did that with oil paint and a brush, not a computer program as would be done today...it’s pretty amazing. I also found an artist called Frantisek Kupka who I’ve decided is a genius of the abstract. His composition skills are ridiculous. I probably stared at “Positioning of Mobile Graphic Elements” for 10 minutes because my eyes just kept going around and around. Brilliant. Wassily Kandinsky’s “In the Bright Oval” really had a lot to say to me, and I really kind of want to take an art history class or two now. Or at least more art classes. I miss painting.
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Since I haven’t had internet to post that one, and it’s short, I might as well just keep adding on, despite the fact that it’s now the next day. I’m writing to you from a train from Madrid to Seville, where I’ll be for a few days. Thus far, I have to tell you, trains...are so, so, so much better than airplanes. Sure, it’s going to be a little longer on the train because it doesn’t go as fast, but I have leg room, and the luggage was all easy and nobody looked at me like I was a bug like most airport staff do. I think a while back Via Rail was calling train travel back home the “more civilized” way to travel, and I’d say that sounds about right so far. I’ll probably even get some real work done on this train. And it went so smoothly, I’m kind of looking forward to having two more days like this (one from Seville to Granada, the Granada back to Madrid), as opposed to plane travel, which I tolerate only for the cool places it gets me (as opposed to my mother who says she actually enjoys it?? I don’t get it, mom).
On that note, “D’yer Maker” by Led Zeppelin just seems like the right song for this mood I’m in. And if you know me, you should know that means all is well.
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Ok, so trains are good, but they’re a little like cars for me; trying to read doesn’t end well. No, I was fine, but I had to take gravol and chew some mint gum and put away anything I could conceivably read for a little while. It kind of sucked. Anyway, I’m still looking forward to more trains, I just know to be careful now.
I arrived in Sevilla around 12:45 today, and began the attempt to walk from the station to my hostal, not having, of course, a clue where I was going. My only decent map is actually on my computer, and I wrote what I thought were decent instructions from them, but the trouble is that without the map right in front of me, I tend to get a bit turned around (and even then, in a new city...who knows). Anyway, I walked a bunch and realized I was going entirely the wrong direction, then walked most of the rest of the way relatively with ease (though it was hot as hell, and I have sooo much crap to carry because I’m an idiot), and even found the right street. I only had to whip out my computer twice to look at the map again.
Once I found the street, it was supposed to be about 1 block to my left, number 27. So I went there. And saw nothing. Numbers 30 and 32, sure, but no 27. So I asked someone at a restaurant there, who told me it was the exact opposite direction and on the right. Oh, good. So I tried that. And continued to see nothing. Except now I was at number 5. Even better. I asked another someone, and they pointed me in the same direction as the first guy had. Good sign, I guess.
Long story short, what is, according to the hostal website a “25 minute walk from the train station” took me and hour and a half in 32degree heat with something like 40 kilos of luggage. I was literally soaking wet, and kept getting sweat actually stinging my eyes.
But, there is a happy ending to this story.
My hostal has A/C.
The end.
Ok, and a nice shower. And my bathroom isn’t down the hall. And the tv works (not that there’s anything I want to watch here, but sometimes the background noise is nice when I’m in the room.
And now that there’s internet, I’m actually posting blogs to catch up, and I can check email and things.
Cheers from Sevilla!

<3Angi