Part 2: Granada
With our spirits high from the beautiful trip to Alicante, Dana and I boarded the bus piling many an awkward seating mishap onto our list of great vacay moments. Finally in the right seats we prepped ourselves for the journey. The old man next to us seemed to have an unhealthy obsession with nuts and seeds as he chowed down on peanuts and spewed the shells all over my coat and bag. A few minutes into the ride he looks at me and offers me some of his sunflower seeds. I politely decline. Dana for some reason accepts, and he comes back to me. I shrug as in ‘No thank you’ but unfortunately cupped my hands at the same time, apparently giving him the impression that I wanted a sky high pile of them, there had to be 75 in my hand. I managed a smile and gingerly ate as many as I could, finding it harder and harder to stow the shells somewhere. When he finally closed his eyes I threw them all in my bag and prayed he wouldn’t notice that the crunching to his left had stopped. We really should have taken this as a sign that we should get off the bus but nah, it was just 2-3 hours on a bus to Granada right? We’d be there by 1, get to our hostel by 1:30, perfect. Here’s why that didn’t happen.
The man to our right continued to crunch on seeds.
The man diagonal from us in an orange corduroy blazer was snoring up a storm.
The man in front of us had unimaginable B.O. and was doing (no joke) arm stretches.
A little girl a few rows up was puking on and off for the entire ride.
An hour into the ride the little girl moved back two rows closer to us.
The ride was actually supposed to be 4-5 hours.
Our driver got lost, nearly inciting a riot led by a young Spanish man screaming a mix of English and Spanish curse words at him. We made out about 7 ‘Mother Fuckers!’ and 5 “Idiota!’s” before we figured we were going to die on this bus.
We finally rolled into the bus stop at around 4:30 AM and took an unhelpful taxi to a location a few blocks from our hostel and thanks to Katie’s directions made it to the street we needed to be on to find the place, but even with blangin’ directions…our exhausted minds could not comprehend how to find our hostel. We rolled our incredibly loud wheeled suitcases back and forth over the same cobble stone street 3 times before I decided to scout things out sans suitcase and finally found it on a bizarre poorly marked half street. It was now nearing 5 AM. We stumbled into the hostel and blindly accepted our two separate rooms, one with strangers and one with my friends. We randomly picked our rooms and said goodnight, crashing immediately.
I had set my alarm for 9 AM so I would be able to meet up with everyone and let them know we’d arrived before they left for sightseeing or whatever. I of course stayed in bed longer, awkwardly peeking out from under my covers every time someone walked by in hopes that it would be one of my friends. It never was. And they always noticed me quickly closing my eyes when I realized I didn’t know them. Haha in retrospect it seems terribly awkward, but in the moment it was 9 AM and I was exhausted. I crawled downstairs half expecting more strangers, but was pleasantly surprised to find Dana and everyone else in the same room!! She had of course continued the Peterson tradition, creating an awkward situation by waking up and softly saying the only name of my friends she knew…”sugarpants…??” We shared our story and heard about their weekend in Barthalona, all stoked to finally be together! The skies were gray but Granada was beautiful! Coder, Sugarpants and Liz went to get tickets to the Alhambra while we all waited around in the hostel. A few hours later, the soaked trio arrived, letting us know that a) it was pouring and b) we had to book it to the Alhambra to make our tour. With our new friend Phyllis in tow we trekked out into the rain to visit one of the most gorgeous sights in Spain. It’s impossible to summarize such a place in a journal entry, but I’ll do what I can. The views from the top of the hill alone allow your imagination to run wild, recreating ancient battle scenes or lavish garden parties thrown by Spanish royalty. The architecture and colors were absolutely gorgeous. It was enough to make me add ‘arches’ to my favorite things list. The red clay pillars stood in perfect symmetry surrounding the spiraling hedge mazes. Rectangular ponds reflected the marbling clouds in the open air courtyards and freshly blossomed orange trees happily gave off their post rain scent. The sun started shining as we exited the palace, which changed the day entirely. The flowers got brighter, the palace walls glowed a dusty orange and the clay tile roofs of the surrounding village created a colorful mosaic that will always come to mind when I think of Granada.
All a little more in love with Spain, we headed back to the hostel to get cleaned up and ready for whatever else the day had in store for us. We grabbed some lunch and Dana and I decided to do some intense shopping. Although we were warned that Granada wasn’t a great place to shop, we were completely caught off guard by the amount of very shoppable stores toting ‘Rebajo!’ signs in the windows. With an hour to go on, we browsed like champs but turned up nothing, swearing to ourselves we’d return ready to swipe away after buying tickets for the train to Sevilla the next morning. Once the group all reassembled we made the trek to the train station to purchase said tickets, which turned out to be a little bit of a hassle. On the walk back Dana and I spotted a fountain and veered off to take advantage of the beautiful post rain, exceptionally colorful Spanish sunset behind a large monument and fountain. We took our fair share of jumping pictures and headed back to the hostel ready for our welcome drinks and a tapas tour! After arriving at the first bar we decided to break off from our overly large tourist group and go to a smaller place so we could actually get our tapa on. As Rihanna played in the background Dana geniusly decided that the nights theme should be “Please Don’t Stop the Tapas.” We drank and enjoyed the free food that came with it, cursing the fact that we would never get drunk, but loving the fact that we were eating tapas! We moved onto another bar and kept on going, drinking and eating far too much but heading home early so we’d actually catch our train to Sevilla the next day.
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