Oh Alhambra!

We've just left Granada and are on our way to Seville for a couple of days. Granada was a beautiful city and we had a great time, largely because of the generocity of Wendy and Hicham, who we stayed with. They have a pretty special setup where they're living in a flat in Spain for the winter, while Wendy's working remotely from the states and Hicham is putting together a mountain biking guide of the area. Their flat's just south of the center of town and the town is small enough that it's really easy to get everywhere on foot. Then, if you want to be outdoors, it's quick and easy to get out of town in a few minutes and just a little farther away, you hit the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The original ones :-)

We arrived in Granada early in the morning because we had taken the overnight train from Valencia. That train left at 1am and we got to Granada at 8:30. The way the trains work in Spain, you can't really get directly from Valencia and Catalonia to Andalucia. You have to go back almost all the way to Madrid. This night train is the one exception as far as I can tell. Each night one train leaves Granada and another leaves Barcelona. It worked pretty well except that it was an old coach and there were some bugs that bit Matilda and she had a serious allergic reaction. This meant we had to stop into the hospital in Granada and they just gave her some steriods to handle the reaction. Seems like it's working, but not fun. I sure as hell hope the bugs were some crazy Spanish bug and not bedbugs, but just in case, when I get back home, everything's being sealed up and put directly into the washing machine while I hop in the shower. I do not want to risk those little bastards!

Aside from that major setback, Grenada was a lot of fun. We went exploring with Hicham at first. He took us up by the Alhambra first and gave us a quick overview of town and then we split off. The Alhambra is a big castle that overlooks the town. It was originally built by the Moors, but when the Christians came in, they built their castle partly on top of the old Moorish one. It's the most famous site in Granada.

Anyway, after we split off from Hicham, we were hungry, so we had lunch at a place downtown with a daily menu for 9 euros and it was excellent. For an appetizer, we had a chicken soup with crumbled eggs and mint. Then for the main, I had some salmon with a cream sauce and Matilda had chicken with a creamy pepper sauce. Very well done. For desert, I had a flan (the first that wasn't from a box!) and Matilda had some pineapple.

After lunch, we wandered through the Albacin, the old Moorish quarter. It's up a hill with a ton of windy, squirrelly streets. At the top of a hill, there's a church and a ton of people were just hanging out sitting on the wall, playing guitar etc with a great view of the Alhambra. It's a fun little neighbourhood. After than, we went back to the center of town and explored all the shops and then made our way back to the flat.

For dinner, we started with some tapas and wine at the flat. Then we took Wendy and Hicham out to a traditional Andalucian restaurant. It was fantastic. We shared an appetizer of chocolate and oxtail croquettes, then for the main, Wendy had wild boar, Hicham had oxtail and Matilda and I had some seared Iberian pork. All of it was perfectly done and super tasty. We had a sampler of deserts to try before we finished. They were all incredibly rich and to be honest, I'm not sure what my favourite was. There was a fudgey chocolate thing doused in rum, and a coconut flan that were definitely memorable. This being Spain, we left the restaurant at 12:30am and it was still jammed.

The next morning we went to check out an English langugage bookshop, but it was too expensive to justify buying anything. Then, we were on our way to a gourmet food shop that's known for doing olive oil tastings among other things. Unfortunately, this is when we decided it would be a good idea to take Matilda to the hospital because the allergic reaction wasn't going down. We were there for a while and Wendy came to help since she could translate, and well, because she's super nice.

We also had a reservation to go into the palace of the Alhambra at 3:30, but the hospital nixed that. As soon as we could we made our way up the hill, but they refused to let us in at a later time because the papers from the hospital didn't say when we left, only when we got there. So we couldn't prove that we had to miss our time because of the hospital. Complete crap. They just didn't want to deal with it, but there wasn't much time before they were closing everything else up there so it wasn't worth fighting. So, we just got to enjoy the Genrelife, which was where they did the agriculture for the fort. It was pretty spectacular since it's all flower gardens now and completely gorgeous. Especially at sunset.

After they booted us out, we went back to the flat. The plan was to do a tapas crawl. Granada has kept this great tradition where if you order a drink, you get a free tapas. Well to start off, we just had some tapas at the flat. Wendy made a lentil salad with wild thyme, bay and green olives, as well as a Moroccan cauliflower dish. On top of that Wendy got some local cheese and hams. In Andalusia, they don't have many different kinds of cheese, just "not aged, partially aged, and aged", but they do it well. They were all hardish cheeses kind of like a Manchego. As for the hams, well, that was an experience. She brought back some of the gold star andalucian ham called Jamon Iberia Bellota. The pig had to have eaten acorns all of its life, even for finishing and then the ham had to age 36 months. It's super expensive (~700 euros for a full ham), but it is absolutely incredible. The marbling is mixed well throughout the meat and when sliced, the meat almost glistens with a light layer of pork fat covering the maroon meat. The flavour is hard to describe but it's sweet and salty and sumptuous all put together. Fantatistic!

After tapas at the flat, we went out in search of some restuarants for a little more tapas. There was enough at the flat that we weren't too hungry. This was about 10-10:30, so just late enough to start reasonably doing dinner. We started off near the center of town at a place with a giant bronze bull in the middle of a relatively quiet courtyard. We sat around a barrel and ordered small beers and got tapas of bread and an herbed iberian ham. Just for context, the beers cost 1.20 euros and you get a free tapas. I like it. After that, we decided to go to Sacramonte. It was a long walk since it's on the other side of Albacin, but that's where all the Flamenco is and since it was Friday night, we figured it would be pretty lively. Turns out that it wasn't. It was very quiet up there, but we got to see the neighbourhood, which was quite interesting. The houses are built right into the hill to the point that there's actually some caves which are now museums, but they used to be used by the Moors way back when. On the way to Sacramonte, we also went by this street which was pretty hilarious. At one point it's so narrow, we saw a cab go through and he had to fold in is mirrors. At the end of the street is a sight that reads "Passage Physically Impossible 1.6m". We think it's to stop the tourists from getting stuck down the street :-)

We eventually walked back to the center of town and stopped in at second place. It was after midnight at this point. We had another round of drinks to finish off the evening and then went back to the flat.

We didn't see Wendy or Hicham in the morning since they had a 9am group ride, but it was definitely a fun and refreshing couple of days and great to see them again.