On to Granada

It is really not so hard for us to agree to hiring a car with a driver for the 2+ hour trip to Granada. After all, we tell each other, if you compute the taxis between hotels and stations plus the train fare, there's a good argument for saving ourselves the hassle of having to leave early in function of the train time, and so on. Thus we take our time over the fabulous hotel breakfast, the packing of our things in our sultanesque apartment, and finally step out to, as it turns out, the white Mercedes waiting for us, with José, our driver, nattily dressed in a red cashmere vest. José likes classical music and is listening to a choral piece, which I remember singing with my choir, "Long Live the King" with a long hard aria part, which I never really mastered . There are water bottles set out for us in the car as well as some candies. Very comfortable. José used to be a truck driver, drove big gasoline tankers, but seems to have adapted well to this life. A couple of hours later we're in Granada, where our university housing, on a hill across from the Alhambra,

 is situated in an old Arabian quarter, the Albaicin. The narrow road up the hill runs along a river and broadens into squares here and there filled with young hippie-type people, this is a university town, with creative rastafi hairdo's and often trailing a dog or two. 

The Carmen de la Victoria is an old house set in a beautiful gardens

with many stairs, up which one must carry the luggage. A stern lady at the gatehouse urges us to catch the (free included) lunch NOW, and thus we find ourselves faced with the sole choice of a breaded and fried piece of chicken, which we gamely wash down with a cold beer.

When we later struggle up to our assigned room, the ubiquitous smell of sewer? mold? bothers us and it is also present in our new monastic quarters, where two narrow beds pretty much fill the room. We have, however, a very nice and warm bathroom.
As we leave to explore the town we run into Carlota and Abel arriving from Seville. They, too, are urged to run for the lunch and we arrange to meet later. Oswaldo and I walk down the hill watching all the young people, like a colder version of Berkeley in the 60s, and their shivering dogs. We end at a statue of Isabel la Católica listening and agreeing to Christopher Columbus' plans,

without which we would not be standing there! Then we meet up with our friends for a coffee and shared comments about our accomodations. When we get back to the Carmen, we forego dinner and relax with the TV showing back to back American series, while Oswaldo goes over his talk.