The Alhambra

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Today we went to see the famous Alhambra. Best way to get there from the city center is to take the number 30 bus. Otherwise its a windy walk up hill and once you get there theres quite a bit of walking to see the whole thing. Also, if you don´t go in the right entrance you would have to walk a bit so you can get tickets. The grounds are open to everyone but you need your ticket to get into all of the buildings. The main palace area is timed and you get a special time to get into that building. Its a very ornate palace with so much detail in the walls, ceiling and floors you almost get dizzy looking around. The muslim influence is very strong here with lots of tile work and arabian words in the walls praising God. The detail is so fine.
Luke and I walked through the palace and then into a lesser area where the rooms were just a beautiful with small gardens and carefully trimmed bushes. The area is up against the hillside with mountains to the back side. You can see off to one side a large building on the hill and below it a bunch of holes in the earth. These are caves that it appears people are living in. The Seirra Nevada mountains are on the otherside and rise up to the clouds. They are all covered in snow and seem to glow pink in the light.

One of our favorite buildings was a real castle looking part where you could go up in the towers and look off. All over were fountains and small pools for water. Water seemed to come right up from under the ground. You could easily imagine the people living in this huge complex area with gardens and orchards behind them, small shops lining the streets, a few large palaces and heavily armed walls surrounding them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhambra

We had lunch at the Hotel Americas. Its an old inn looking building and we sat in a small room feeling much like we were back in the 1700´s and getting lunch. The meal was fine but your typical tourist lunch spot on a site where we had to pay for the butter!! Anyway, back down to the city through winding paths through the gardens along babbling water ways.
The hostel we are at is called Hostel Costa Alzur. We slept great. I think we are the only people up on the fourth floor and it was so quiet. They are nice enough to do our laundry so people wont flee from us on the train. Tomorrow we are up at 5am to catch the train back up to the Madrid area. Its a 5 hour ride then a bit more time to get to Toledo. OH I almost forgot dinner last night .. or I should say tapas. We went to a great little place right near our Hostel called Toleos. They gave us a bunch of FREE tapas and they were great. NOt the cheap stuff we had in other places that we had to pay for. We also got kabobs which are popular here because of the arab population. You pick the ones you want from inside a fridge box and they cook them up. We had a great meal, some nice wine (luke had fanta) and all for less than 20.00. Thats a good thing considering what we spent today for lunch at the tourist trap.

Anyway, Granada is worth the trip but I would advise going here first then down to Rhonda, Sevilla and Cordoba so you don´t get the culture shock we did coming into a city where graffitti is as common as old ruins and beautiful buildings.

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