(no subject)
And here is the promised entry, exactly on time*
For anyone considering visiting, studying in, or running away to Granada, I will offer two warnings:
1. As the city is built between two mountains, everywhere you could possibly want to go will be uphill from where you are right then, no exceptions. In fact, in some strange defiance of known laws of physics, the walk will actually be uphill both ways.
2. The people of Granada speak (or so my professors assure me), very beautiful, grammatically: correct Spanish. However, they have a few unusual pronunciation habits: they tend to leave out the sounds at the end of words, the sounds at the beginning of worlds, and any syllables in the middle that they don't particularly care about. They just slur the rest. Now, I can hardly complain, as Americans do roughly the same thing to English. However, to the uninitiated, it can sound a bit as if the person speaking to you has opened their mouth and issued a few rapid-fire vowel sounds.
That said, the people of Granada are also the most friendly you will ever encounter. Everyone I have stopped in the street to ask for directions (and believe me, there have been a few) has been very helpful, the shopkeepers have been incredibly patient with my broken Spanish**
We have been on two excursions in the city, one to el Centro (to the center of the city) and another to Albaycin, the old Moorish quarter of the city; Granada was under Moorish control from the 8th to the 15th century. The area is a labyrinth. It was raining when we went, so the footing was treacherous. I hope to go back in clearer weather to see the outdoor markets. On our tour of el Centro, we saw a lot of historical buildings, including one monastery that has also served as a hospital since the 16th century. It is still a functioning hospital, though it certainly does not look like one. We also saw La Catedral, an imposing 400-year old church in the center of the city. It looks very pretty from the outside; I might go on a tour of the inside later.
We also went on a long, long hike up to Sacremonte (in Spanish, sacred mountain). The walk was straight up for about an hour; I thought I wasn't going to make it for a minute! At the top, we went to an old abbey. Now, it is a museum, but back in the day (the 15th to 19th centuries), it has an ecclesiastic college where priests studied. It was really quite beautiful. Unfortunately, I could not take pictures of the inside, but they had a lot of Renaissance and Medieval paintings, as well as a very interesting 16th century "libro de plomo," a lead book. The pages were small circles of lead with Arabic writing imprinted on them, stored in a circular depression in a rock. The place also had a series of underground caves and tunnels inside the mountain.
Pictures will come as soon as I manage to punch through the firewall on this connection.
*By Spanish standards, that is.
**While my Spanish is generally quite good, you hit a bit of a linguistic barrier when attempting to explain you are looking for a fingering weight wool/acrylic sock yarn in a self-striping colorway.
For anyone considering visiting, studying in, or running away to Granada, I will offer two warnings:
1. As the city is built between two mountains, everywhere you could possibly want to go will be uphill from where you are right then, no exceptions. In fact, in some strange defiance of known laws of physics, the walk will actually be uphill both ways.
2. The people of Granada speak (or so my professors assure me), very beautiful, grammatically: correct Spanish. However, they have a few unusual pronunciation habits: they tend to leave out the sounds at the end of words, the sounds at the beginning of worlds, and any syllables in the middle that they don't particularly care about. They just slur the rest. Now, I can hardly complain, as Americans do roughly the same thing to English. However, to the uninitiated, it can sound a bit as if the person speaking to you has opened their mouth and issued a few rapid-fire vowel sounds.
That said, the people of Granada are also the most friendly you will ever encounter. Everyone I have stopped in the street to ask for directions (and believe me, there have been a few) has been very helpful, the shopkeepers have been incredibly patient with my broken Spanish**
We have been on two excursions in the city, one to el Centro (to the center of the city) and another to Albaycin, the old Moorish quarter of the city; Granada was under Moorish control from the 8th to the 15th century. The area is a labyrinth. It was raining when we went, so the footing was treacherous. I hope to go back in clearer weather to see the outdoor markets. On our tour of el Centro, we saw a lot of historical buildings, including one monastery that has also served as a hospital since the 16th century. It is still a functioning hospital, though it certainly does not look like one. We also saw La Catedral, an imposing 400-year old church in the center of the city. It looks very pretty from the outside; I might go on a tour of the inside later.
We also went on a long, long hike up to Sacremonte (in Spanish, sacred mountain). The walk was straight up for about an hour; I thought I wasn't going to make it for a minute! At the top, we went to an old abbey. Now, it is a museum, but back in the day (the 15th to 19th centuries), it has an ecclesiastic college where priests studied. It was really quite beautiful. Unfortunately, I could not take pictures of the inside, but they had a lot of Renaissance and Medieval paintings, as well as a very interesting 16th century "libro de plomo," a lead book. The pages were small circles of lead with Arabic writing imprinted on them, stored in a circular depression in a rock. The place also had a series of underground caves and tunnels inside the mountain.
Pictures will come as soon as I manage to punch through the firewall on this connection.
*By Spanish standards, that is.
**While my Spanish is generally quite good, you hit a bit of a linguistic barrier when attempting to explain you are looking for a fingering weight wool/acrylic sock yarn in a self-striping colorway.