Weekend with Deboo/Day of Gustation

It’s difficult to describe the feeling you get when, after spending a month submerged in a new atmosphere with total strangers speaking a totally different language, you see a familiar face; but it’s a good one. Yes, it had only been a month, but I believe that even in that short of a time you can begin to forget your home and your friends – how the people close to you act and what it is about them that makes you smile and laugh. Anyway, seeing Chris this last weekend was a very welcome reminder of home and the people I’m starting to miss. The feeling was almost surreal, seeing him standing there in Cegri’s courtyard as I walked out of class on Thursday, like a piece from the wrong puzzle now suddenly transposed into the picture before me. We spent the weekend in pretty regular Granada style, eating a lot of tapas, walking around a lot, and visiting his old haunts from when he studied here two years ago.

Thursday was basically recap time. Neither of us felt great, myself a having a little esfriado and he being a little travel weary, and after some tapas on Calle Navas, ended up spending the remainder of our night at Bar Loop, a fantastic bar right on my street that sells records and literally never plays a song I don’t want to hear, except maybe when they played “Times Like These,” by The Foo Fighters the other night – o well….. We spent about two hours there, recapping, sharing Granada impressions, and drinking Bud diesels (something else that reminds me of home).

Friday night Chris’s travel weariness and exhaustion from having a bit of a day drunk caught up with him, and he ended up staying in. A professor at Cegri, Elsa, who had gotten to know Chris pretty well two years ago, was graciously putting him up until his flight on Tuesday. As for me, I met up with some fellow students, and headed up to the Albaicin. We first went up to the Mirador de San Nicolas, which had been my plan, but unfortunately by the time we got up there the bars were closing. I guess the view had been worth the climb up there? So it was back down the winding streets of the Albaicin to Gran Via, where we knew of shop still open to buy litros de Alhambra. We picked up our litros, and I was the only one to pick up two. (This made me feel like more of a drunk than my companions, but proud at the same time?) We strolled up to another vista, one that we know of in the Albaicin from which you can also see the Alhambra, but not as high up as the Mirador. We spent the night chatting and getting buzzed underneath that massive, ancient monument.

Saturday, por suerte, Chris was ready for action. Since Thursday we had been on and off discussing a trip to Almeria to see his old friend Xavier, an Almeria native who had been studying in Granada at the same time as Chris. However news of shitty weather and more shitty weather from Almeria and the southeastern coast made us finally decide to forget it. Cabo de Gata would be incredible, but a lot less incredible during a torrential downpour, and Granada surely has enough going on by itself. We met up sometime in the early afternoon at a very nice bar off Calle Darro. It happened to be Elsa’s birthday, and I entered the bar to find him carousing with her family, all of whom seemed to be as open and funny as her. A day-drunk ensued. Plenty of beer (and later tea) was drank, probably the best tapas I’ve had here so far were eaten – compliments of Elsa’s family, and cigarettes were chain-smoked by all. They were really great people, and had some pretty interesting local expressions to share, for instance:
1) De Puta Madre (fucking awesome) – For instance: “!Estas tapas son de puta madre!”
2) Tiki Tiki (sex) – Example not needed…….
3) Si, y una Polla (very rude way to say no to someone if they ask you for something, not sure exactly what it translates to, but I think it’s vulgar) – I’ll have to remember to use this one on the bum in suspenders who walks into cafes unnanounced
to demand a cigarette from people.
We parted ways with Elsa and her family and, a little dazed, headed to catch a bus to the other side of town. Chris had some stuff to pick up at the hipercor, a mall type building with a silly amount of floors and departments and merchandise – almost like walmart – and then some. We sampled wine from a very rotund, slippery sort of man in the gourmet foods section. When he asked me what kind of wine I’d like to sample, and I responded “lo mas seco,” I was not expecting of the tannish coloured, brandy tasting business that he ended up filling my glass with, but I drank it just the same. I have no idea what sort of food you would “pair” that stuff with – very intense. Chris’s wine was also intense, although a bit more normal looking at least.
Now it was off to continue the marathon of eating and drinking at a nearby tapas bar. I can’t remember the name of the place, but it had a very Latin feel to it, both with the food and the atmosphere. We got two round each of canas y tapas. My first was pretty de puta madre, a mini pork chop sandwich with some red sauce while the second, some small mushy spinach empanadas, were not as de puta madre but still edible. Now it was time for the mother of all tapas bars, and el mejor by far – El Nido del Buho. A bit of a trek from the neighborhood we were currently in, but no matter. We needed to work off a bit of the beer and tapas we had been consuming all day anyway. Once at the Buho, Chris ordered the tuna with red sauce and I got the stuffed avocados. We then each swapped half of our plates for the others. Cute, right? The Buho is this weird/beautiful enigma in Granada where the tapas are somehow able to be 4 times larger than tapas at any other bar, and yet the same price of 2 euro with your wine or beer. The amount of food they give you for next to nothing actually kind of scares me, but hey, I haven’t ended up having to kneel at the toilet after eating there yet, so I trust them so far.
After the Buho it was off to a teteria to relax and settle our bellies. My tea, “Mil Flores,” did not taste like a thousand flowers, but rather peach rings – an old fashioned candy that used to be one of my favorites – in liquid form. Chris’s was a little less sugary and tasted a lot like the green tea with honey you can get back home. Soon enough we met up with Eddie, grabbed litros de Alhambra, and spend the next few hours at the Mirador smoking and drinking and staring at the Alhambra (not the beer, but the ancient Moorish monument in front of us). I think I spend too much time drinking beer in plazas here……..

The Españolification of English Words

Agh....the very excellent bar I've discovered in my neighborhood, Pícaro, where I've been coming to for café con leche and internet that thus far has played excellent soul tunes, the likes of Ray Charles and Bill Withers, is now playing live Sting. I'm listening to this tantric-sex-having idol of wealthy housewives around the world singlehandedly destroy his own songs, which were groundbreaking 20 years ago and are now being reinvented as slowed-down, smooth jazzy mush. I feel utterly betrayed. But hey, I guess nobody's perfect. I'll let it slide for now, Pícaro.

Anyway enough of the Sting rant. Here's something I though was blogworthy, or at least mildly funny: Tons of words here, being English in origin or from American pop-culture, are here in Spain used with the same spelling and meaning, but pronounced Spanish style. I guess this is bound to happen, because there are vowels and consonants in English that people are just not accustomed to here at all, but sometimes it sounds pretty hilarious. Although I shouldn't make too much fun, considering when I try to roll my "rr's" I often end up sounding like I'm choking on something.


Whip Express (Beep Express)
Club (Cloob)
My Morning Jacket (Me Mourneeng Chocket)
Jazz (Chozz)
Michael Douglas (Meekol Dooglos)

La Alpujarra

The villages of La Alpujarra are like giant staircases on the mountain faces. Each step is another row of white stone buildings and churches, one on top of another. Laid out ingeniously, they have for a long, long time provided proper dwelling for communities in an area that, if I understood the guide’s Spanish correctly, has not one but five separate climate zones in the 30 miles from the mountain villages to the sea. Hiking the area, I found myself actually getting high off thin air and mammoth landscape. One section of path would feel like hilly areas in northern Wisconsin, with pine trees and familiar shrubs, while another would feel almost tropical, with trees that had giant bright green leaves and rushing streams. Every now and then I’d look up and see yet another small white village, perched securely near the top of a mountain face. How many of them there are extending from the south of Granada’s city proper to Spain’s small eastern coast, I’m not sure.
There’s not much else I can say about the place that would make much sense in writing. Some friends and I are already cooking up plans to return, this time climbing one of the highest peaks in the area, with little equipment and probably no guide.
A bit reckless? Perhaps.
But worth it? In every way.This was my first taste of mountain climbing/hiking, and I can already see why for some people, this becomes an addiction and life pursuit……

Nerja

Thoughts of getting myself to a pool, beach, mountain spring or any source of cool aquatic relaxation have been floating through my head pretty much as soon as I landed in Granada. Although not very humid due to the dryness, this place is hot, with temperatures that hovered around the hundreds for the entire first week here.

So last weekend, the dream became a reality as the other students in the program and I headed for Nerja, a beautiful costal town about two and a half hours south of Granada. The bus ride, although a bumpy one, was gorgeous. I was thinking the other day about weather, and how it never seems to change here, and how in the Midwest it changes constantly, with beautiful storms that roll in and change the color of the sky to a deep gray or sometimes even red hue before unloading all that wonderful water. I miss those storms, but as I looked out my window on that bus ride through the Sierra Nevada I realized something this area´s got that at least makes up for if not totally dwarfs its lack of weather; as you move through the landscape, it actually changes, dramatically. Hills unfold into more mountains, mountains unfold into more mountains still. Small villages of whitewashed homes and factories pepper the hillsides. Soon the landscape descends lower and lower until you can´t see any more peaks out in front of you, and suddenly, there´s the sea staring you in the face. Ya, there´s not anything happening in the sky, but who needs to look at the sky with such an incredible landscape around you.

Upon arriving in Nerja, we realized right away that out of the 15 or so of us on the trip, none had bothered to check out a map of the place, and where our hostel might be on that map. Responsibility did not just diffuse with numbers in this case, it straight up disintegrated. Anyway somebody called the hostel, and we met the guy who runs it in a plaza nearby.

The proprietor of our hostel turned out to be a bit of a sight for sore eyes. He had bleached blonde hair, very casual sort of hippie-sheik clothing, and pale skin. He was American, raised in the Midwest even, and talked with that sort of outer planetary, “I’m not gonna come down to earth cuz I’m on a higher plane man” sort of drawl that you only hear from the headiest of heads back at American music festivals. I liked the guy. He began calmly explaining to us that, due some sort of loophole or flaw in the online booking system, we had somehow booked the hostel for about twice its capacity. But apparently this wasn’t a huge deal, as he soon began leading all of us there anyway. The place was nice. Everything was clean, there were two bathrooms, a large outdoor sink (we used it as a shower as well), a back patio with mosaic tiles on the wall, and a decent sized terrace up top. Although at first we thought some of us might have to look elsewhere for a place to sleep, we managed to make it work, with all the girls sharing twin beds (thanks girls), and the guys sleeping on whatever else was available: a cot in the laundry room, two mattresses on the terrace, the sofas in the front room, etc. The place was definitely over-booked, but we made it work, and surprisingly with little discomfort for all parties involved.

I'll say a little bit more about the proprietor/manager of the hostel, and the life he leads, or at least appeared to have led during our brief 3 days and 2 nights there. However I’ll preface this by saying that I did like the guy. He was genuine and nice and everything, I just would never want to live the way he lived. To start, I never once saw him leave the hostel, and I don’t think anyone else did either. Not only that, but he never really left his table, on top of which was always a copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, a mamouth work of objectivist philosophy and fiction, rolling papers, rolling tobacco, and a hash pipe, which he was perpetually smoking, day in and day out. Next to him was an I-pod player that perpetually played Grateful Dead, or offshoots of the Grateful Dead post Jerry Garcia’s death. At one point I made a reaching comment along the lines of “O! Nice. Grateful Dead huh?” and he was quick to inform me that it was not, in fact, Grateful Dead, but Bob Weir’s (rhythm guitar, backing vocals for the Grateful Dead) band, who were also “very excellent.” The exact same thing happened to a friend of mine the next day, except this time he had to inform her that it was not Grateful Dead, but Phil Lesh’s (bassist of Grateful Dead) band. Whatever, the player was always on, and I’m almost dead positive that nothing else was ever playing besides something with at least one of the members of the Grateful Dead involved. Someone said that he played a Beatles song at one point, but I’m pretty sure it was the Grateful Dead covering the Beatles. A bit strange, but then I guess I can think of worse, a lot worse, bands that I could have had to listen to for 48 hours straight. When I said this guy perpetually smoked his hash, I meant it. It was very much a non-stop process. At one point someone apparently told him that he did so too much, and he apparently replied that he had to, because when he didn’t, he didn’t like people. And that was it. Don’t know how he ended up in Nejra as a manager of a hostel, or for how long he’d been spending his days on a strict diet of hash, objectivist philosophy and Jerry (I never saw him eat anything either). I couldn’t live that way, but I respect what he does. He keeps a clean establishment and everything for travelers from all over Europe, and is certainly friendly enough, and I’d recommend his hostel to anyone.

We spend the days in Nejra roasting it up on the beaches and cooling off in the Mediterranean water. I don’t really have too much to say about the beach during the day. I’m not really the biggest beach guy, and get tired of the hot sun pretty quickly, but it was sure as hell relaxing.
The highlight of the weekend for me was definitely the “secret beach.” It so happened that at the hostel, I was sharing a room with a really kind gentlemen from Manchester. After little chatter, he told me that not too far off the beaten path of the main beaches that we were at during the day, there lay a few, as he put it, “private beaches,” that were ideal for bringing a few bottles of wine and good friends to during the nights. I went downstairs, confirmed the existence of these elusive beaches with the hostel manager who I've just finished describing, and he even showed me where they were on a map. After at least 10 collective bottles of wine on the terrace with the group, we decided to go find the “secret beach,” and headed out equipped with still more wine and vodka. The journey was pretty quick. I think for a fleeting moment I began to worry that I was leading everyone to a place we couldn’t actually find, or didn’t exist, but it was very fleeting. I was already too intoxicated to be all that concerned about it. After heading east along the beach and climbing over and around a few large boulders, we found ourselves in a truly picturesque place. Totally enclosed by mountain and rocks on all sides except the sea, it truly was secluded. The night was still as could be, with only the slightest breeze coming in from the sea. The waves whashed up against the shore like a quaint symphony. The moon reflected brilliantly off the water. We were there. We opened our bottles, toasted to the view, and had a ball on that tiny little beach out of sight from anyone or anything. Everyone was in their element, totally content, and I don’t know how you couldn’t be in a place like that. I could have stayed there for a lot, lot longer….