Day 15 & 16 Granada

So I arrived at the hostel in Granada around 2:30 pm and had just enough time to put my stuff in the room and eat a quick snack before the free walking tour started. The guide was a guy from Poland, who had been living in the UK for 9 years like many others, but then emigrated to Spain to get some sun. He was totally into street art, so we got to see a lot of paintings by "El Niño", a famous street artist from Granada. I didn't feel like taking many pictures though but just enjoyed the incredible weather. It was super sunny, and although a bit cold when the wind was blowing, it just felt so good.

We also went into the "Jewish District", which is still called like that in spite of the fact that ever since their eviction from Spain in 1492, not many Jews have been living here or anywhere else in the country.

Granada is a very hilly city, which I enjoyed a lot. Two guys from the US had been drinking the night before though, and they didn't find the endless up and down funny at all.

The above pictures show Sacromonte, an area mostly inhabited by gypsies who live in cave houses. It is now a part of the city, but wasn't in the Middle Ages, because gypsies weren't allowed to live within the city walls back then. We also visited a cave house of an old man, who has been living there all his life. It was interesting to see, but I didn't really want to take pictures of another persons house.

A bit further up on Sacromonte, there are  cave houses who have been squatted by all kinds of people, but mostly hippies. It all looked pretty organized though, and many even had solar panels on their walls.

As we climbed higher and higher, the Sierra Nevada came into view again. I know I've said this many times now but it was just breathtaking (and not because I was out of breath ;)).

After the tour we were all really hungry and went to some bar around the corner. Being used to just choosing whichever tapas I want from a counter at the bar and paying between 0,80€ and 1,50€ for each of them, this was quite a frustrating experience for me. In Granada, you get a "free" tapa with every (cheap) drink you order, and all the other tapas (a la carte so to say) are much more expensive. So when we got our first round (I got orange juice), the waiter tossed over some small plates with a kind of mashed potatoes on it, but there was olives inside, so I didn't really like it. The next round was a small piece of bread with a little bit of ham on it...

In the end I just went home and ate some cookies. Then I chilled on the rooftop for a bit, and had a great time with a guy from the UK, who's been living in Órgiva for the last two months, and another far-travelled one from Australia. But it was freezing, and when I went into my room to get another jacket, the bed looked so tempting that I just went to sleep. At 9 pm. 

The next day it was all grey and rainy again, and I thought when in already in Granada I might as well visit Al Hambra on a day like this. 14€ for the ticket was a lot, but everyone had been so amazed by it, so I went anyway. For me it wasn't that much of a miracle, because I have seen places like this in India already, and also it was just really really cold so that one wouldn't linger around longer than necessary, but in the end I'm glad I went. It was just amazing to see all the little details that were preserved until today.  

Especially great I found carvings like these, where you can see different levels of decoration that all fit together just perfectly.

The most amazing thing was the views across the city though. The foggy atmosphere gave the whole surroundings such a unrealistic atmosphere that not only I had to stop walking for some moments and breathe in deeply to check if I was still alive or in some translucent state of mind.

On the way back I got a bit lost, but apparently for a reason: around the corner I stumbled across a privately owned museum on the history of Sefardi Jews. The entrance fee was 5€ though, and as the place didn't look very big, I decided to rather spend that money on some nice tapas. Sometimes you have to set your priorities...

Went out for dinner with a cute Argentinian guy who just arrived at the hostel when I came back. We ordered a beer each, which cost 1,50€ and came with a huge plate of rather crapy stuff (fries and a small burger), but it was food after all. Then we wanted to have another serving of tapas, but I didn't drink my beer anyway, and he didn't want another one either, so we asked the waiter to just bring us the tapa without the beer, for 1,50€. But he told us that wasn't possible, the offer would work only with the beer. In spite of our explanation that we wouldn't drink the beer after all, he insisted on us ordering the beer in order to get the tapa. And then brought us beer and tapa - the latter we ate, the former we gave to some girls sitting at the next table. In the end we paid 3€ each, for two tapas we ate and two beers we didn't drink but got served anyway. Strange world huh?