Granada cont.

vogueing cat

In the evenings, todo el mundo seems to go for a walk and find a seat at a cafe, chatting, laughing, having a beer and snack. Near where I stayed, there was a plaza with at least five of them. As the sun sets, pseudo flamenco dancers/ guitarists perform for tips, or someone plays some instrument. . . perhaps an accordion. If you go to a place more than once, the waiters know you and make suggestions and exchange pleasantries. Last night, there was also a cat, a kitten really, investigating things in the cutest, cattest possible way. Just one of the crowd.

conspicuous consumption

There was a walking tour of Albaicin including the cave houses, wonderful views of the Alhambra, walking up, up, up and down, down, down the hills and peeking into the gardens. Here, the walls are festooned with not only pots of geraniums as in Cordoba, but also fancily decorated ceramic plates in a show of conspicuous consumption. I found that my co-walkers were a chubby Egyptian woman of a certain age who was living in Berlin, and who remarked that the best thing about a vacation was that you could get away from everyone and didn't have to talk to anyone. So I backed off; but she spent much of her time chatting and texting on her phone and having pictures taken of herself and immediately uploading them. Also an Indian family: a retired engineer, his wife who spent the whole time griping about her feet (uphill again?) but who at least had found an acceptable Indian restaurant in Granada. Her complaints occasioned a number of stops during which I could look around at things in more detail; and their son, gangly with an underslung jaw, who had an aspect of an irritated 15 year old being made to travel with his parents although he looked at least 30. And the guide, a bronzed beauty who had been a scuba instructor in Belize the summer before back home doing this tour gig. 
There were many flamenco studios (the main consumers of flamenco lessons are Japanese, who say flamenco speaks to their souls; and who learn flamenco and then take it home and open their own flamenco schools.)  We passed a tableau of an old gypsy playing guitar and singing the equivalent of the blues and a few young women who would clap in a desultory way at times: this music seems like the blues, only Spanish style.  (Not the keys and rhythms, of course, but the idea, and the function in the cultural context.) The guitarist was reminiscent of the Picasso Old Guitarist, but slier. It was just as well, perhaps, that I did not catch all his words as the tourists tramped by. The cave houses look like houses from the front but back up into the hillside so that most of the roof is actually the hill, and is where the roof would be, not much higher.They stay a steady comfortable (well, a bit cool) temperature year-round. But the thing I found most charming, but that was incidental to the tour, was a town square shaded with oak trees, the requisite cafes, but also a library, health clinic, school, hardware store: suddenly, it was a real place where people went about their daily routines. The shadiness made it reminiscent of the downtown mall here in Charlottesville, in a Granada-ish way. At one point, we turned a corner and looked down an alleyway, and I had a spooky, very definite feeling that I had been in that place before, but I couldn't have. Nothing special about the place except the frisson of recognition. After the walk, I drew a picture of the scene near Santa Ana Cathedral and snacked.

least interesting view at Plaza Santa Ana

view from my room

The place I was staying in was an ok house, a bit rundown, several of whose rooms were being rented as airbnb properties. I did not meet the owner until the last morning: she had been out of town on business. But as I prepared to leave, she made an appearance to check that all was well and wish me buen viaje. The best part of this place was the view from the window, and the sounds of the living neighborhood, and cooking smells. I felt less like a tourist in an artificial environment. But Granada was finished for this time, and I clattered down the cobblestones with my Moroccan suitcase (who knows who it had belonged to, where it had traveled before me-- and for that matter, the future of  the one I had abandoned there?) to the taxi, to the station, back to Madrid.