Feliz Navidad

Merry Christmas everyone, and yes, I am still alive. I don’t have much of an excuse for not writing these past five weeks, other than the last three weeks of term were absolutely insane and I’m a slacker, but I’m back with this, the first of what I hope will be multiple interesting, engaging, and noteworthy posts on this blog.

My story begins with a 4 a.m. bus ride from Oxford to Gatwick Airport outside of London. It was the morning of December 14th, a day that would find me traveling from Oxford to an ultimate destination of Granada, Spain, where my friend Tom has been studying and blogging these past four months. I quickly realized on that misty morning something that would be reinforced for the rest of the day: that I am utterly incapable of getting anything remotely resembling sleep on anything that isn’t a stationery bed in a room. On the bus, I had to reconcile the fact that I’m 6’4” with two cramped seats, a battle that only resulted in severe lower back pain. On my flight from London to Granada, I lucked out and had an entire row of seats to myself, so I could actually lie down in a position roughly resembling that of one dozing naked in an igloo. However, as it turns out, commercial aircraft are powered by jet engines, which tend to be on the noisy side, so not only did I not get a solid nap, but I also missed out on enjoying my complimentary ham-and-pasteurized-cheese-food sandwich, courtesy of British Airways. Luckily, I had the forethought to put this scrumptious morsel in my backpack to enjoy later, as I sat in a Madrid train station almost passed out from hunger. Finally, I would have slept on the four-and-a-half-hour train ride from Madrid to Granada were it not for the yelping children in my car. I instead contented myself with watching Iron Man dubbed in Spanish by actors who sounded nothing like Robert Downey, Jr. and Jeff Bridges.

Granada itself is a beautiful city in southern Spain of medieval streets and wide boulevards, palm trees and pomegranate orchards (the Spanish word granada translates into “pomegranate”), Moorish facades and Franco-era fascist apartment blocks, a thoroughly enjoyable locale to say the least. First on my list of things to do (a list actually created by Tom, since I didn’t know a single thing about the city before I arrived) was to visit the Alhambra, the 14th-century Moorish fortress and palace overlooking the city. It happens to be Spain’s largest tourist attraction due to its exemplary Moorish architecture, and had I remembered to bring home my camera’s USB cable, you could see pictures of what I’m talking about (I’ll try to upload them once I get back to England). Take my word for it, though: the Alhambra was an amalgam of shady courtyards, trickling fountains, imposing towers and sheltered cloisters, all shaped with the distinctive touch of the palace’s Muslim denizens. Unfortunately, I happened to visit during a spell of the city’s coldest weather in forty years, so I only spent as much time outside as I absolutely needed to, and the palace’s naturally cool interior was a little too cool to thoroughly enjoy.

There were two other choice locations in Granada that I briefly explored. The first was the city’s old Muslim quarter, El Albaicin, a neighborhood of narrow, twisting streets and street vendors where during certain hours of the day you’re just as likely to get mugged as you are to buy a cheap Pashmina shawl. This also happened to be the part of town in which my hostel was located. The other attraction was the city’s cathedral, and again, if I could I would post pictures. The cathedral and the adjoining Capilla Real (Royal Chapel) hold fantastic chapels and the remains of King Ferdinand, Queen Isabella, and their daughter Juana (commonly known as “Juana la Loca” because she went a bit insane at one point in her life). Both were very cool, and the latter contained what I thought was a quintessential Spanish biblical representation: a statue of John the Baptist, or rather, John the Baptist’s headless corpse, complete with blood dripping down the neck and a large hole for an esophagus, while John’s executioners hoist his head in the air. I think I might have forgotten to mention that the Spanish are Catholic. Very Catholic.

My final note from Granada concerns speaking the language. Now, I took four years of Spanish in high school, and as far as I can tell I learned about as little as one possibly could in those four courses. Tom kept telling people I spoke Spanish, which inevitably led to me standing there with a dumbfounded expression while they rattled off some insanely long sentence that often contained some joke that Tom and the other Spanish speakers present found very funny. I came pretty close to mastering the art of what I call “laughing in context,” or, “when you see other people laughing, laugh along with them and hope to God that they don’t ask you your opinion (not that you’d know that they were doing so, anyway).”

I should probably give myself a little more credit (after all I did survive ordering breakfast one morning on my own) but it was painful at times. The true test of my Spanish-speaking ability came when Tom invited me over to his host family’s apartment for lunch. They were truly lovely people, a señora and her son, but the first time I went over I was very quiet because I couldn’t understand a damn word. However, Tom’s host mother apparently enjoyed my reticence very much, because she invited me over the next day to dine again, which gave me another opportunity to test out my almost non-existent bilingualism. The second time, however, Tom and I spent the half hour beforehand chatting with a couple of his friends while Tom introduced me to his favorite Spanish beer, Alhambra 1925 Reserva. The beer is excellent and I highly recommend it, but what Tom didn’t tell me at the time is that it has an 8% alcohol content, roughly twice that of normal beer. So, when we look at our watches and realized we had to haul it across the city to be in time for lunch, I had to chug most of my bottle, and as Tom and I speed-walked across Granada, I gradually became more and more buzzed until we reached his apartment and I was speaking Spanish like I’d never done before. Granted, I still had the vocabulary of a first grader, but I was at least able to carry on a half-stilted conversation. It was wonderful, to say the least.

That’s all the news I’ve got for now. I’ll try to write more often, I promise. Merry Christmas, and if I don’t write again before 2009 arrives, Happy New Year as well.