Fortress of the Alhambra

Last week we did a little road trip to Granada more or less to see the Alhambra, but also the city of Granada itself.  Better still I finally set eyes and feet upon the province of Spain sung of in one of my favorite Yo La Tengo songs.  That album, Fakebook, is part of my graduate student thesis-crunchtime memories (along with takeout from the Chinese restaurant that’s cheap eats by today’s standards but was very dear gourmet fare when getting by on a teaching assistantship.)

For whatever stupid reason we sometimes want these things, I’ve always wanted to be able to say, if asked, “Why Yes, I have been to Andalucia.  And you?”  So, now I can answer in the affirmative, although I think that I can dispense with the verbal italics.  Because, I suppose, it’s the grown-up thing to do.

Inside the Nasrid Palace.

The Alhambra is best experienced firsthand rather than left to the firsthand accounts of others.  It is…magnificent.  The way the early evening sun softens the hard walls of the fortress, the snow-tipped Sierra Nevada mountains in the distance, the lily pads in the reflecting pools, the fretwork adorning every arch of the Nasrid palace.  Put it on your bucket list.  And when you finally make it there, don’t get a brain wedgie about the abundance of tour buses and tour groups.  It’s entirely possible to breathe in the smell of roses and fountain spray and old, old stone and forget the people clutter that’s part of the scene.

We stayed at the Hotel Guadalupe that’s just across from the Alhambra entrance.  Nice room with A/C (very important in the warm weather season) and a good rate.  Also, they allow pets so Rufus was able to come with.  The walk down from the hotel to the historic quarters of the city takes you through a cool, shaded park.  Of course, you then have a steep return trip to look forward to.  Or not, depending upon how you feel about steepness.  Your glutes will whine about their ordeal while it’s happening but will no doubt appreciate the workout after a warm bath that helps them unclench and you’ve offered them an ice cream as a condolence prize.  If you’re not into glute firming, there’s a tourist bus with stops throughout the city that will do the huffing and puffing for you.

The first night we just ate at the hotel because we had tickets to do a night tour of the Nasrid Palace.  (It was fine but nothing exceptional.)  The second night we devoured some hummus with Moroccan bread and tajines at a little place in the El Albaicín quarter.  If you’re into tea that’s where you’ll find a number of tearooms, complete with hookahs on the inlay tables for decoration.

In and around the tourist attractions and places where people congregate you’ll find women holding sprigs of rosemary.  Some will try to stuff a sprig into your hand against your will and then launch into some sort of a story for which they will expect to be paid.  While most of them won’t hound you even after you’ve said no in no uncertain terms and completely avoided eye contact, a few always opt to be pesky and persistent.  Just saying…like the tour groups and steep climbs, they’re part of the package, too.  Moreover there are plenty of street musicians and fire breathers and living statue people to take your mind off the Spring ladies.

It sounded like a call to prayer.  Or a guy with a chest cold who been given access to a loudspeaker.  But since I was in Moraira and not Mecca, my bets were on the man with a cold rather than a muezzin.  While wending my way around Moraira on Friday, I noticed a lot of bustle around the Lonja de Pescado where a fish auction is held in the mornings six days out of seven.  That’s when I did a little a happy dance (to myself, mind you), because for once I was in town early enough to see the goings-on.

We’d heard about the auction not because of the perfection of the fish to be had but because it’s conducted in Valencian which is a version of Catalan which is different from Spanish.  So, unless they know Catalan apparently even Spanish speakers don’t have an advantage.

Despite observing from different points in the room for a good half hour, the how-to’s of this auction remained a mystery.  The auctioneer droned some words that sounded like, “datadatadatadatadatacuetacuetacuetadatadtadatadatdatadatacuetacuetacueta…”, never pausing for breath.  When he stopped, a man in rubber boots emptied trays of fish into plastic bags and handed the bags to someone in the room who had made no visible signs that they wanted that particular lot of fish.  Maybe it’s a system of blinks or gestures so subtle if you blink you miss them. I stayed very still, just in case.

I loved the mix of solemnity and hilarity of the auction goers.  It was serious business before they landed their bags of fish and congratulations all around afterwards.  Kind of like an anunciation for the every day.

Last weekend we flew to Ireland for a rugby match and a christening.  The christening was on the agenda way before the rugby game became a twinkle in a fan’s eyes, in case anyone wonders which warranted the buying of plane tickets.  I always enjoy our visits there, especially the short ones.  Speaking of short, this post is not.  But if you hang in to the end, there’s a video of my fave 80’s song du jour that mentions the TV show, Dallas.

Assertiveness training Irish Pub style.

On Saturday we joined 82,494 other people at Croke Park for the Leinster-Muenster Heineken Cup semi-final.  Before the game a group of us met up at a pub, of course.  When it was my turn to buy a round, I learned the hard way that getting a pint order made isn’t as easy as laying a couple of 20 euro notes on the counter.  And don’t even bother with trying to make eye contact to get the bartender’s attention.  Nothing doing.  So then I stood on my tippy toes, just in case being short was somehow a factor.  Behind me those in the know simply called out their requests over my head and had their pint requests sorted.  Finally, someone took pity on the idiot who’d been standing with her euros on the bar for fifteen minutes, and made the bartender aware that I was next in line.  Back at the table, the boys panted, faint because it had been a whole five minutes since they finished off their last glass!  One of them gave me the lowdown on how to not be that idiot who waits their turn and isn’t rewarded for it.  Now they tell me.  It’s not as if an American of Polish-French-Canadian-Czech descent is born knowing that information.  {forehead slap}

Wait, why are we eating this takeaway in the rain?

After the game, we found a pub with some standing room at which we enjoyed a few celebratory rounds.  But then we needed to catch a train to Bray, so that everyone could get their beauty sleep before the christening the next day.  By 10:30, the train rolled into the station.  It had begun to rain, and we were famished.  Across from the station was a chip shop open late, so before catching a cab for the next leg of the journey home we ran in there and placed urgent orders.  There’s no place to eat inside the shop, so then we ran back to the station.  Meanwhile several waiting cabs were filled and gone.  Tim and I thought the plan was that we’d get the grub, grab a cab, and take our fried spoils home to eat.  But no…the rest of the crew huddled outside the station and wolfed down their takeaway.  Because you can’t eat it in the cab, and it would be cold by the time we walked through the door, and you can’t it cold chips and burgers.  You just can’t.  So Tim and I huddled and wolfed with the rest of them.  Have to say, despite the awkwardness of juggling a burger and fries and rain showers, the food was piping hot and delicious in its deep-fried way.

Baptism by bedlam.

Four babies were on the baptism docket last Sunday.  They whimpered as babies do when spritzed with the cold holy water, but they were perfect cherubs compared to their sibs, all of whom seemed hellbent on raising Cain. It was bedlam in the church. Kiddies running up and down the aisles, in and around the altar, through the choir area. Now and again a parent would sheepishly step forward to calm a little stinker who would sit quiet for maybe 30 seconds before tearing off again  The priest conducting the service did his level best to stick with the whole script.  As the din level rose, he tried to outmatch it with volume and speed.  Didn’t matter.  No one sitting farther than four rows from him could hear a thing.  There’s a pub just down the lane from the church, which must be terribly convenient for that priest.  If it were me, and if I’d gotten through officiating that service without pausing to exact physical retribution or at least a fierce scolding, I’d reward myself with a few stiff ones the moment I got out of my robes. But that’s just me.

Will these retreats be held at a spa,  father?

At the post-christening party, the priest who done the pre-christening mass made an appearance.  He was a young guy.  Of an order, he said, that originated in the US and with whom he’d spent time in Mexico as a missionary.  As soon as he said that, the fear-of-being-proselytized atoms in the room became supercharged with mildly hostile anticipation.  We all knew what was coming next.  After that wind-up, sure as milk came the pitch. An invitation to participate in the retreats organized by his order. They wanted more ladies involved. That’s when Tim’s sister-in-law lobbed her quip about the spas.  All six women in the room roared with laughter.  The poor man turned red-purple. Then a plate of beef curry was put in his hands.  It was a melt-your-esophogus spicy curry, and you’ve never seen a man so grateful for that kind of kicky food.  Because if anyone should subsequently asked why he was red-purple, he could just point to his plate.

Driver!  Driver!  Look for the silver Bentley.  No, the Be-entley.

Then there were the two drunk ladies of a certain age with whom we shared a cab ride home from the christening.  The drunker of the two kept asking me if I was Canadian or American. Then she waxed on about the kiddies in the church needed a good slap, and about the hot Ukranian student renting a room in her house.  After that she switched to being obstreperous with the cab driver, accusing him of all sorts of roadwise misdeeds.  It took some doing to get rid of her because she kept directing the cabbie to look for the house with a silver Bentley.  Bentley, my ass.  Turns out that’s just her little ha-ha way of referring to her navy Volkswagon hatchback. Tim escorted her to her door, because his mother said so.  We all breathed a huge sigh of relief when she was gone. We also felt sorry for the Ukranian student, who we suspect has had to overlook propositions from his landlady when she’s shitfaced.

Sad news upon returning home.

A friend emailed to say her cat had died in a kind of freaky way.  That generated some pet mourning on both sides of the Atlantic, because I’m still a bit tender about losing my little cat, Wolfgang, last year.  I don’t actually know if he’s dead.  One day he left my sister’s house (she’d agreed to look after our cats while we were abroad) and decided to not come back. If I wasn’t the one putting food in his bowl, I guess, he didn’t have a reason to stick around.  We deliberately didn’t bring the cats to France, because we weren’t going to put them through that kind of move until we were settled and staying put somewhere.  But you can’t explain that to a cat, so I can only assume Wolfie went back to the wild from which I had originally rescued him as a kitten and that had never entirely left him. He was always kind of half-feral, anyway.  {Many sniffs.}

Credit reports – don’t avoid them like a plague.

Suck it up and get your free copies from all three of the main providers – Experian, Equifax, Transunion -  through http://www.annualcreditreport.com, an arrangement endorsed by the FTC.  I hadn’t done this kind of due diligence for a while, and only this week discovered a problem.  There’s a bum checking account attached to my name that’s news to me.  Never opened it.  You can also get the free reports through the sites of all three providers but they kind of set you up to get sucked into buying additional services you don’t want or need, especially via 30-day free trial mechanisms where you have to remember to cancel the service by then or you’ll be automatically charged for it.  Ugh. Getting the free reports and just the free reports through the above mentioned site is a little more transparent and a little less tricky.

An unexpected twofer.

Lately grocery shopping as a couple has become a weird power struggle of frugality vs. tastebud.  Example:  Much ado was made about paying 1.99 euros for the spinach tagliatelle as opposed to 1.25 for the plain.  (Spinach won out for it’s aesthetic qualities.)  Then there was the cooking butter debate: 1.79 euros for the Kerry Gold vs .98 for the Goldstück.  (Goldstück purchased to even out for the pasta.) Unforseen bonus with regard to the butter: opportunity to annoy a certain someone by saying Goldstück in a badly exaggerated German accent whenever possible.

Rediscovering Blancmange’s version of an ABBA song – The Day Before You Came.

From their Mange Tout album (Blancmange, not ABBA).  The lyrics build on a great sequence of the little details that depict the monotony of  “life within it’s usual frame”.  Yet somehow the banal becomes compelling and invokes wistful remembering.  Ultimately, romantic turmoil upends it all.  It’s inferred that the affair concludes sans bliss. To top it off, the song mentions the TV show, Dallas. Good stuff.