Granada

I'm still in Granada, but have been derelict about posting on account of a small lack of joie de vivre. (Which, of course, I feel more than a little silly about. I'm at a language school in Spain, with time and life on my hands. What more could a person want?)
But by now I could kill for a cup of vegetarian chili, an American coffee or a paper version of the Sunday Times. And after ripping up perfectly serviceable roots in Barcelona to come down here, I was greeted by wet dark days, an empty apartment, and a language school dominated not by the twenty/thirty-something European amalgam I'd grown accustomed to in Barc, but by a large troupe of barely-old-enough-to-vote UMass students on their semester abroad. And living the elections vicariously through the NY Times at internet cafes got me homesick fast. I miss you--people who would be thrilled to talk about the why and when of Rumsfeld, for instance.
But I think I've just been rescued from this bout of gloom by a lively Iranian-turned-Swiss woman on leave from her work with the Red Cross in the Sudan and full of stories that she's glad to tell in her month-old, month-to-go Spanish. The first night we went Salsa dancing, or rather, she did, and I watched from the safety of the bar. The next night we went to a Scandinavian movie dubbed badly into Spanish in what turned out to be a makeshift theater that doubles as a nightclub on the weekends. So we understood little but did so from the relative luxury of shiny gold couches.
Good enough. I mustered up the energy to unpack and am ready to dig in my heels and see what the next month has to offer. After all, all reports of Granada have been amazing. This weekend I think I'll point my bike in the direction of the Sierra Nevada mountains and see what happens.
As for these pictures, the first is a corner of the Albaicín (barrio with narrow winding streets, a mosque and teahouses, first developed in the 8th century when the Moors invaded the Iberian peninsula) from through a small hole in the door of the second. The third is untitled, the fourth is a door to nowhere hiding in the medieval city wall, and the last is my wannabe postcard shot of the Alhambra. More on that later.