Advertisement
Published: August 7th 2007
Edit Blog Post
4/4/07 Granada
After a very long bus ride in which I had a slight war with the man behind me concerning the reclining of my seat (When I first got on, I reclined my seat slightly and the man behind me pushed it back up with his knees. Since I was not about to sit completely upright for 7 hours on the bus, I waited until he was comfortable and had his eyes closed and I reclined my seat and then, pushed with all my might against it as he attempted to push me forward once again. In the end I won.) However, they did attempt to pass the time by playing the movie Troy (in Spanish of course) yet for some reason felt the need to fast forward through all the violent or sexual scenes (so basically they played a total of 5 minutes of the movie). Little to say, I got maybe a total of 2 hours sleep. Oh, and then as we approached Granada the bus driver said something over the speaker which was basically “Is there anyone who can come up here and show me exactly which exit to take to Granada and how to get
Granada
The Alhambra to the bus station?”. It was actually quite funny.
We ended up getting into the city earlier than expected at about 5:50am. Nothing in the station was open, and we had no map (so we didn’t know how to get to our hostel by walking) so we ended up waiting for about 45 minutes outside for the city bus to come. It wasn’t warm either. Finally we made it to our hostel only to find out that we can’t check in until noon (granted we were very early, and we were sort of expecting this), but they would at least let us leave our bags there until check in. They gave us a map, and we decided to make our way to the Alhambra to attempt to get tickets. The path up to it was completely uphill, and when we finally got to the top there was this extraordinarily long line of people who all had the same idea as us. The ticket sellers opened at 8:00am and we waited in line for quite literally 3 hours. Since we had quite obviously not expected to have to wait in line for this long, neither of us was dressed very warmly
Granada
The color of this tree was amazing (I mean we were in Spain and we had this crazy notion that it was going to be relatively warm) and I was so cold. I’m pretty sure that I had slight hypothermia and at one point I actually became a little dizzy and light headed. It also didn’t help that I had had only about 4 hours of sleep in the last 48 hours, and that my feet and legs were killing me. Then, to top it all off, we weren’t even allowed to choose what time we wanted to see it. So, we rushed back to the hostel, checked in, I put on an additional pair of socks and 3 additional shirts, and we set off once again up the hill to the Alhambra. As if none of this was enough, it began it rain. Not just any rain, but a full on downpour (I had somehow managed to bring an umbrella with me so that became my new best friend for pretty much the remained of our time in Granada).
The gardens within the Alhambra were so pretty. There were so many colorful flowers and trees. The Palace which is Moorish in style was amazing. The architecture
Granada
The Moorish area where our hostel was located and all of the detail was really very cool. I really enjoyed it, though I wish we had spent more time there. When we were done, we headed straight for the train station (we had yet to get tickets to Algeciras and I was slightly freaking out due to the problems we had faced in actually getting to Granada). Thankfully, we had no problems and didn’t even have to wait in line. From there, we headed back to our hostel (which was a part of the Oasis chain of hostels and was absolutely amazing). The hostel was located in the sort of Arabic part so there were tons of shops (basically what I imagined Morocco to be like) and we spent some time just looking around. We ended up sort of stumbling onto a sort of parade. There were all these women dressed in black dresses with black veils, and a bunch of others in purple and red robes with the head gear that is very Ku Klux Klan. Unfortunately because of the rain they didn’t actually do the parade. Since we were both exhausted, we went back to the hostel and paid 3.50 euros for an all you can
Granada
A man dressed up for one of the many parades that were occuring. Unfortunately the rain put many of them off. eat dinner that they made which consisted of hot and sour soup, sesame mandarin salad, and red curry and vegetables. Have I mentioned how awesome this hostel was? I really liked Granada despite everything that happened, though I would have liked to have a little bit more time.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.106s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 14; qc: 68; dbt: 0.0775s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
urs
non-member comment
looks great
I think I would like to see granada somtime also. what a beautyful place, the public tv station here, prodcasted a concert from Loreena McKennitt in the Alhambra just the other day.