5.13.11 Welcome to Granada

A few pics (only 50 today)

On Friday people started waking up incredibly early and weren’t making any great effort to be quiet about it. Two new girls had charged in like they owned the place at 1 in the morning, waking everyone up, and then charged out again at 7. Two other girls had come in at midnight, although much more quietly, but they were packed up and gone by 8 as well. It turns out that out of the 14 beds, only 1 person would be staying that night.

We planned to walk over to the bus station and find a bus to Granada. After showering and packing and breakfast and checking out and the walk, it was after 11 when we arrived at the bus station and so we bought tickets for the 12:00 bus. We asked a woman in Spanish what time the bus would arrive in Granada, and she answered us in Spanish. I should have caught the “a las tres”, but her sentence was long and my brain didn’t interpret it, so we stared at her blankly and she switched to English. It would be a 3 hour bus ride.

We’re getting good at tossing our bags under the bus, finding our seats, working on our laptops for a while, and then napping and/or listening to music. When we pulled into the Granada station, we loaded ourselves up like pack mules and found the correct bus stop without having to ask for directions (go us!). The bus let us off near the Alhambra, and then we were supposed to take a second bus to our hostel. It didn’t seem that much farter though, and not worth an additional $2, so we set off in the direction of our place. We were only staying there one night - we had booked late and since it was a Friday, all the better hostels were full already.

The walk towards the Alhambra was slightly uphill, and we soon came to the entrance of the park where it was located. The road took a turn for the seriously steep. We actually had two choices: the road, which wound up the hill, or the “pedestrian path”, which cut unabashedly straight up the hill. We chose the road. After about 20 minutes of huffing and puffing, I made Tricia sit with me on a park bench, and we ate apples leftover from a shopping trip in Seville. And then I drank all my water. And then we continued - onward and upward!

Finally, we arrived at the entrance to the Alhambra, and the hostel directly across the street. We walked in the door, and there were already about 8 people waiting at reception, but the receptionist was no where to be found. Six people were Spanish, and they take this sort of thing much more in stride than much of the rest of the world. They were lounging around on their bags and talking. There were two women who spoke French (I somehow got the impression that they were Dutch, but I may be crazy) pacing around annoyedly. I also do not have a whole lot of patience for this sort of thing.

Let me here explain the lobby to you: It looked sort of like an abandoned cafeteria or schoolroom. There were warming trays pushed to one side, as if they had once served food there. There was a foozball table that dipped in the middle like someone had sat on it and looked as if it hadn’t been played in years. There were a bunch of tables set up and strewn with school papers. A little blond boy about 9 years old was sitting at one doing homework. There were no overhead lights. There was a tiny little desk - the type you stand behind, like a hostess at a restaurant - with a desk lamp clipped to it.

Ten minutes or so later, the receptionist finished walking her dog and came in. The dog sniffed around my backpack which I had tossed off in the lobby while the receptionist started with the Spanish crowd. They didn’t give her a hard time, although they took a while as there were a lot of them. The receptionist pulled out a giant pill bottle (like for vitamins) and opened it. It was full of bills and change - this was the cash register.

The French/Dutch ladies were up next. They were not thrilled about the whole situation. They had seen one of the rooms, and were apparently refusing to stay. The receptionist, for her part, was refusing to let them cancel less than 48 hours in advance. So, they ended up staying 2 nights and cancelling the rest of their stay. This conversation was a mix of French and English, and took quite a while.

Let me now interject something else - this hostel has the worst reviews ever. It’s only saving grace is it’s good location, which I actually don’t think is that good since it’s at the top of a freaking mountain. I’d rather leave my stuff at the bottom of the mountain and hike to the top of the mountain with nothing on my back. But I digress - the two women should not have been expecting, well, anything but clean sheets and hot water. Which is basically what we got.

I think our turn went fairly quickly - we had our receipt for the reservation, paid the lady, asked if she had a map, was told she didn’t, asked if the pool was open (okay, it had 2 saving graces), was told it wasn’t (so much for that one), and we went up to our room. It had a bunk bed, a sink, and a bathroom. Here’s how you should picture the bathroom: take a bathroom stall from McDonalds. Shrink it down a bit. Turn the toilet sideways. Add a shower. Seriously. If you sat all the way back on the toilet, the door would just barely close touching your knees (although it didn’t close all the way, so you had to be careful not to bump it or the door would open giving your roommate a free show). The shower was miniscule, and if you raised your arms to wash your hair, one elbow hit the wall and one went out the shower curtain. If you turned a little, your elbow would run into the faucet handle.

Luckily, we take these things in stride. We decided to walk down the mountain and look for some food. We accidentally ended up on the nearly-vertical pedestrian path, and had to inch our way down. Near the bottom, I came up with the most brilliant-beyond-brilliant idea. When we got off the city bus, it was right near our second hostel. We should have gone in, left our bags, and hiked up with just our day-packs. Completely, absolutely, amazingly brilliant! Too bad I had it 2 hours too late.

Down in the city, we saw a Kebab place that advertised free Crepes if you spent 3 Euros, so we went in and sat down and asked if we could split a meal that included a Kebab pita sandwich, fries, and a drink. And the Crepe? Turns out you only get that if you order 3 Euros worth of tea. This took us a while to get: in Spanish, it’s pronounced TAY, which is how the owner pronounced it even though we were speaking English, so this was hard for our brains to translate. However, we quite enjoyed our Orange Fanta, fries, and yummy yummy sandwich, even though we didn’t get a free Crepe.

We wandered around the city a bit longer, but in the end decided to return up the mountain (we didn’t want to be climbing in the dark) and go back to our tiny tiny room. We needed to get up at 6:30 in the morning to get in line at the Alhambra to get tickets. They sell most tickets to tour groups online, and you can’t buy tickets in advance at the door (as we learned when we stopped by before returning to our hostel). So every morning they have only a limited amount of tickets left, and they go to the people who line up at 7 to wait for the ticket office to open at 8. So that was our plan. We also stopped at a grocery store to pick up breakfast and lunch - pastries, apples, and nuts to tide us over for the day. And then we curled up in our little bunk beds and went to sleep.