"You English. Me no English. Me Spanish. You no Spanish. You see?"

This was one of first encounters in Spain. On January 2, we flew from Edinburgh to Madrid and then took the train from Madrid to Granada. Since Edinburgh is in the United Kingdom, and since Madrid is the capital of Spain, most people in both places spoke English. However, this was not the case in Granada.


When Reid and I got off the train in Granada, we decided to go ahead and buy our Granada-Sevilla tickets for the next day. We asked the ticket agent for help, and he sent us to the information desk (apparently. What actually happened is he spoke in Spanish and pointed away from him, so we went to the information desk). So we went to the information desk, and, lo and behold (really, what does that phrase mean?), the information desk guy didn't speak English either! He got a panicky look on his face when I spoke to him in English, and said the above quote. Reid saved the day by speaking Spanish--yay Reid!--and we found out that we had to buy our tickets the next day.


After a long walk to our hostel during which we asked a guy on the street where we should go and he told us he was from Barcelona (which is not helpful if you're in Granada), we settled into our room for the night. The night in Granada was the only night we shared a room. It looked like this:


A guy snored so loudly Reid threatened to kick him.

Our plan for Granada was to go to the Alhambra Fortress. To get to the Alhambra Fortress, we had to hike up a mountain. Seriously. A mountain. Or at least a large hill. I nearly died. Here is a picture from the fortress from the bottom of the mountain:


And here is a picture of the steep deathwalk up the mountain (we were, by the way, lugging our backpacks again. That's one reason I nearly died):


And here is a picture from the top, sort of:


Granted, the view was nearly worth the hike. Unfortunately, the fortress had run out of admission tickets by the time we crawled to the ticket booth (okay, I crawled. Reid looked like he'd just woken up from a nice, refreshing nap. It was like a movie), so we didn't get to go into the fortress. Instead, we walked back down the mountain through some very pretty, misty woods. In the woods, we found...something. A door? A gate? You tell us:


Once we got back to town, we decided to go into Granada's cathedral. This decision was partly made because we'd heard it was cool, and partly made because we thought we could sit down in the cathedral. Both of these were true:

Then we ate lunch. Our lunch in Granada was apparently a defining moment for Reid's trip. You see, my mood is tied to my stomach. When my stomach is full, I am happy. When my stomach is empty, I am grumpy. I become irrational. I bite people's heads off (figuratively, although if it were literally then my stomach would be full again!). In Granada, we ate breakfast at 8:30ish, conquered a mountain, walked the length of Granada twice, AND it rained and got all of our stuff wet, all before we had lunch at 3ish! Pizza Hut has never tasted so good. At the Pizza Hut, they had some sort of Spanish MTV on, and we saw an amazing video. I tried to find it on YouTube, but couldn't. It's called "La Autorradio Canta" by Miguel Bose, if you want to try and find it yourself.

Then we took the train to Sevilla. Here is the landscape we saw:


Most of the landscape of southern Spain was covered in those lines of trees. I'm pretty sure they're olive trees.

During the train ride, we had our first encounter with people thinking Reid and I were Spanish. The Spanish conductor-guy came into our train, and spoke for a little while in...Spanish. He looked at the Spanish family in the car, who nodded like they understood (which they probably did), then he looked at Reid and me and nodded like he thought we understood (which...we didn't). Then he looked at another group of Americans, leaned down and spoke to them in Spanishy-English, and left. One of the other Americans leaned over to Reid and me and said, "Do you speak English?" We said yes. He said, "Oh good. What did the conductor say?" We told him we don't speak Spanish, and he was surprised.

That story is one of those that was funny at the time, but not so funny in the telling. But that's okay, the point of it was to say that a lot of people thought Reid and I were Spanish. We're not.

Reid and I both enjoyed Granada, even if I was grumpy for a little bit of it. It was the most Spanishy-Spanish city we visited; all the streets were tiny and twisty, and every other door was a shop trying to sell you souvenirs. It was a calm city, and their mid-day siesta lasts for hours.

Coming next: a trip in Kansas City's sister city, Sevilla! (Say that sentence three times fast.)