It's All About the Alhambra

From Granada

Well, I'll have to eat crow about Granada. There IS something nice about this city and it isn't the total cesspool of despair as I had originally made it out to be. Granada is home to the world famous Alhambra (must have named it after the beer I had the other night). But like the early invaders trying to infiltrate its walls, La Alhambra is hard to get into. Tickets are sold out up to a year in advance, so you have to wake up at the crack of dawn and line up (or "queue" as they like to say around here) outside La Alhambra to get the limited day-of-sale tickets. The line of people starts wrapping around on itself, making you feel as if you're trying to get tickets for U2 concert.

We woke up early and then headed on up to La Alhambra, but I didn't have my good map on me, and I thought we could take a short cut, so we ended up lost for 30 minutes in the back alley ways of Granada. This city has the worst street layout of any city I've seen (and that says a lot, considering every European city I've been to so far looks as if someone used a plate of spaghetti to plan the streets. Makes me yearn to be back in Chicago with their easy-to-use grid system. Oh, John Burnham, architect and city planner of Chicago, Europe could have used your talents). So I finally ended up just following the shuttle buses hauling tourists up to La Alhambra, because obviously they knew where they were going. It's a steep walk getting up to the La Alhambra since it's built as a fortress on the highest spot of town. When we arrived, there were already 200 people lined up in front of us. If this was a concert, we would have been screwed, but since they sell 2000 day-of tickets, we were fine.

The La Alhambra was pretty impressive, I do have to admit. The size of it is hard to imagine until you get there. It just goes on and on...and on. The buildings are beautiful. Originally it was a Moorish stronghold, then like everywhere else here in Spain, it was taken over by the Spanish, then Napoleon, then it was abandoned until Washington Irving came along and wrote a book about it. Then Spain woke up and realized "Oh shoot! We can make money off of this!" and lo and behold, La Alhambra the Tourist Trap was born. I can see now why the rest of Granada looks like an urban disaster zone...because they pump all the city's money into maintaining La Alhambra and have nothing left for the city below. They have over 2 million people visit this each year, and they have a staff of over 300 gardeners and maintenance workers keeping it going. All the sultans and royalty lived here and added their two cents worth into the design of the palace. For 10 Euros, it was completely worth it, but after not having breakfast all morning just to secure a ticket, and wandering around 4 hours in the heat, it was quite draining. Around noontime, my favorite Spanish word suddenly became "Salida."

Whoops...gotta go catch a bus to make it to the next town on our journey: Alicante. I'll finish this later. See ya on the beach!