Granada, granada, Alhambra

When my alarm clock went off in the complete darkness that was 6:30 this morning, I almost didn't get out of bed. This is jut an overnight trip to Granada, so I thought I wouldn't have missed too much... I couldn't have been more wrong. Granada is amazing, as I should have assumed from it's name: pomegranate! I wish I had pictures to post here, but since I'm writing from my phone, I'll have to add the pictures from my camera to another blog post once I'm back in Cordoba. 

I slept most of the way here on the bus, but woke up just in time to watch our bus ascend the mountain on which the Alhambra sits and see the city of Granada below. The Alhambra is one of the world's most popular tourist attractions; tickets sell out online days in advance. Luckily we already had ours, so we got to hop of the bus and walk right in.

The Alhambra, to put it frankly, is an architectural and artistic wonder. It was built in the mid 14th century by Moorish rulers, who were also the last Muslim Emits in al-Andalus. The court of this Nasrid dynasty used the Alhambra, which is Arabic for "the red fort," for both palace and government functions until the Christian reconquista (re-conquest) of the Iberian peninsula in 1527 under the reign of Charles V. 

The clash of the two cultures is evident in the bizarre mixture of architectural styles. Most of the buildings are from the Islamic tradition, and have inscriptions and traditional tiling on the floors ad walls, and even though the site was neglected for centuries, a lot of the buildings are in decent condition and have been restored to a more original state. It's hard to summarize and categorize the Alhambra as castle or court, or Christian or Muslim, though; the site is so huge and varied that one category of anything does not suffice. 

At the end of the tour I bought a plate from a store on the street by the Alhambra entrance. I'm buying a plate from every city I visit while I'm in Spain so that when I go home, I have a cool collection and a nice set of dishes for my first apartment some day in the distant future. 

Anyways, now we are in our hotel relaxing for a bit before we tour the cathedral and have the evening free. I'm going to meet up with some fiends for the night and go to clubs and enjoy tapas. Every drink here comes with a free tapa! Onda!