Granada

This weekend I went to Granada because some friends, who are teaching English in Madrid, came to see Andalucía. We met in Buenos Aires when we studied abroad. They arrived Friday evening and only stayed 24 hours. I also arrived Friday evening, but I went first to my friend's apartment. He lives overlooking Parque Garcia Lorca, which is a tiny park just outside the center of the city. I got there late because the lovely bus left 30 minutes late and got stuck in traffic.

We met up for tapas in the center. I took them to a bar where we were given an open-faced sandwich of tortilla (egg omelet with potato and onion) and roasted red pepper. The bar was full and everyone in there seemed to be Spanish. We were happy to be in a tourist-free bar. Granada is full of tourists and foreign students. It's hard to go anywhere without hearing English being spoken.


After our drinks (most of us had seltzer) we decided to go for Mexican food instead of more tapas. I had chips and guacamole, which was pretty good, but not spicy enough. It had jalapeños in it, which I ate whole because I was so excited about the presence of flavor. The service at dinner was awful. The waitress actually admitted to us that she had forgotten about us. Then she forgot to bring us more water. Then they brought us the wrong food (two of the same entree, when we only ordered one). After dinner, we split up: the girls went off to their hostel to get some sleep before heading up to the Alahambra Saturday morning and I went to the apartment.



Saturday morning, I slept late and then went to the Corte Inglés, a department store with a great food store in the basement. I'm pretty sure it's British owned because it carries many imported foods (from the US, UK and Asia). I was going to check out the gluten-free options they sell, which are numerous. I bought some papaya for breakfast on Sunday as well as chocolate soy milkboxes for my trip home.


Saturday afternoon I met up with the girls and we went for tea. Tea houses are very popular in Granada because of the Moroccan influence on the city. There is one street which is full of tea houses. They're all the same, so we picked a random one, which wound up to be a bad one. The place was crowded, but it still took 30 minutes to get a crepe and three cups of tea. They didn't serve us anything we had ordered. Amy wanted a cinnamon and sugar crepe; they brought a crepe with honey. (We made them change this one). Meagan's tea was supposed to be mint with sugar. What came was bitter and didn't have any mint in it at all. Andrea (Amy's coworker) ordered ginger tea. I tasted hers and it was basically a bowl of sugar. I'm not really sure if there were any other flavors. I ordered mint green tea with rose and sugar. Mine was not sweet and did not have any mint in it at all. Instead it was fruity and floral (and tasted the best out of the three). We left, angrily, and I walked the girls to their hostel where they got their stuff and headed to Córdoba.


I went back to the apartment and took a nap before tapas. Saturday night, Vicente and I went out for tapas. First we went to Poe, where the owner is British. He speaks Spanish (sort of) and English. Vicente refused to order in English even though he knows how. We were speaking a mix of English and Spanish which probably sounded ridiculous to anyone within earshot (yet made perfect sense to us). We got to pick tapas at the first place, so we had chicken in coconut sauce, bacalao, and veggies in Italian spice. (Vicente also had a pork plate.) I really like Poe, but more than half the crowd was speaking English. So we decided to go find a place where there would be no tourists.

We went to the most Spanish of Spanish bars. It was actually a restaurant/bar/cold cut store. Legs of ham hung from the ceiling. Entire sides of pork hung alongside chorizo on the walls. Our tapas here were meat, meat and more meat. We didn't get to choose. I had bread (to get some gluten into me) and left the pig products to Vicente, who, being Spanish, ate them happily.


Sunday morning, I woke up and went out to the part to edit part of his doctoral thesis (he almost done studying geology). It was so warm in the park that I didn't want to leave to come back to Priego. The weather has been pretty nice here, but nothing like in Granada. Then we went for lunch - more Mexican! I, again, had chips and guac, but I wasn't really able to eat much because I just wasn't hungry. My body was pretty much rejecting the idea of food because it was afraid food would make me sick. So, Vicente ate and then took me to the bus station, where I barely caught my bus. I came back to Priego and didn't do much for the rest of the day.