Our next stop was my favorite city in
Spain,
Granada.
We got off to an inauspicious start, as we were staying at a hostel in Albaycin the old Muslim Medina and after taking the bus to the center still couldn’t find it. We ended up taking a taxi only to find it that it’s faster to walk and that we had originally been only a few minutes away.
One of the most annoying aspects of moving so quickly is that by the time we learned our way around a city we were already on our way to the next city.
We had bought tickets to Alhambra for that day (there I learned my lesson and booked ahead, some folks we met had forgotten to buy their tickets online and had to do some crazy long line to get tickets, if they were even able to buy them.) and I had to run cause my slot at the Palacio Nazaries was from 4 to 4:30 pm. On the way up the hill I asked three people for directions and they all pointed me in different directions. Consequently, I decided not to risk it and we took a taxi even though once again when we arrived we found out that we were only a couple of minutes away. Those damn windy streets. Again I barely made it, and again it rained. The palace was beautiful, but we got soaked.
The hostel in Granada had even more personality. When we arrived soaked, an Italian dude who I realized later was in charge at the reception desk, invited us to the kitchen where he and some other Italian dudes and assorted other foreigners were smoking big cone-shaped Euro-style spliffs. Then we took “soccer” pictures, the kind where the team huddles and the camera takes pictures of a circle of faces. This is also the same place where they had me sleep on a mattress set up on the loft. I had to climb a ladder to get to my bed and once in bed couldn’t stand-up, sit-up or even bend my knees. I paid money for this. Actually I liked sleeping up there, it was warmer and quieter, and I had a full-sized mattress.
The place was full of characters. Another employee was Esther or Pipi, a young Austrian flower child who biked from Austria to Portugal to meet a woman who claimed to be the inspiration for Pipi Longstockings. She said that she had always admired Pipi’s self-confidence and once she found out that Pipi existed she had to meet her. I honestly don’t remember anything about the book and think this lady was an impostor, still it makes for a great story. The next day it rained some more, ruining our plans to explore the city. That night, though, we went clubbing with Pipi. We decided to go to Afrodisiac, which advertised itself as a funk club. We showed up at midnight and that the spot was empty. So empty there wasn’t even someone at the door. We grabbed some beers (with complementary tapas) at a Moroccan bar and then went back to the club which by then was full of casually dressed white folks dancing funny, drinking cheep local brews and smoking way too much. Those fools were rolling hash spliffs freely on the streets. Marijuana is clearly decriminalized in Spain, how enlightened of them. The DJ was decent and every funk song was familiar as some hip hop hit from the last decade. I had to wonder if he only knows of funk through hip hop, or if there are just no good funk songs left unsampled.
