Córdoba to Granada, Spain, Thursday December 11th

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It was Rohan’s birthday and as on each of our children’s birthdays, I thought of the time of expecting him, of his birth and of his growing up years, as well as of the young man who we would be speaking to on the phone. When my parents died I felt like an orphan even though I was grown up, because what I had lost was the knowledge of me from the very beginning that I could source at any time. Suddenly all that was gone. Children’s birthdays are always very special to their parents, and so we were eager to give Ro our greetings and to hear his voice. He was fine, working and enjoying life with Kerry in Sydney, and our birthday present had not yet arrived. We wished him a happy day and turned to the more pressing task of packing up.
The walk up through the park took longer than I remembered when we arrived, but maybe being tired had something to do with it. We do walk faster with our packs than we used to at the start of the year. Workmen were planting a Christmas display of red leafed plants, the same ones that they used in pots to make an instant bright red Christmas tree on a wire frame. We did not feel at all Christmassy but the new city was changing its clothes for the festive season.
We had a little wait for the bus to Granada; a place we had visited with our friends thirty years ago, a place that we could remember to some degree. If I felt tired occasionally now, it was nothing like how I felt on that trip, when we would sometimes have full days and night life as well. We both really loved those days with our friends, being together and experiencing so many new things. The bus trip took us out of Cordoba and its few suburbs. Rugged hills patterned with olive trees were interspersed with little villages sitting as if in the crook of the arm of some giant of a mountain. Nearly every larger group of houses had the ruins of a castle or fort on the highest point, and every one would have made an ideal setting for a medieval story. Wind farms and solar panels were modern notes using ancient forms of power.

We arrived at the Granada bus station and took a local bus into the part of town where we would be staying. It was easy to find our hostel, and the people there were wonderfully helpful, with a map and advice and they had noted that we wanted a room where the wifi would work. We dumped our bags and set off on the Lonely Planet Guide orientation walk.
The hostel was only about a ten minute walk from the centre of town. We had spent all our time in the old quarters of Cordoba and so this walk through a modern city with consumer goods of high quality at high prices, street lights and streams of traffic was a reminder that this is our time and we can only be voyeurs of and learners from the past. In order to fit in as much as possible in this first walk, we were not visiting sites but only planning to gain a sense of the place. We couldn’t find a tourist information office, and the one marked with an ‘i’ in the place it should have been was now giving information only on the Christmas craft stalls. As we walked past the square with the statue of Queen Isabella and Columbus forever together, and the cathedral, and a multitude of beckoning lanes, I did feel that I was not the person for the walk.
A little further on we came to the part where the river is sent through a drain under the city. Beyond that we had the sense of being in the country on one side with the river bubbling along below in its little gully, and in an old city with the densely packed grey old quarter on the other. The hill on the river side rose steeply, with houses leading up to the Alhambra which runs along the length of the hill top.
We stayed on the town side, and tried some of the narrow streets looking for a convent to visit. A nun at the convent was just farewelling a man carrying two guitars, but the visiting times were over so we could not enter. A ginger cat mewed and curled around our legs as if to tell us something. Was the man with the two guitars teaching music? Was he a guitar salesman? Options ran through my mind as we carefully walked back down the steep cobble stones to the road below.
We passed the Archaeological Museum promising Roman treasures, but stopped at a door with a sign simply saying ‘Dulces’. These were the sweets that we had been told about in Zafra, which are made in convents to raise money. We went in to a completely empty room with a revolving cupboard built into the wall in one corner. A sign told the prices of different types of dulces by the kilogram, while another listed religious items and their prices. Purchasers presumably placed their money in the revolving cupboard and pressed the button.

It would revolve and out would come the goods and the change. There did not seem to be any way for the two parties to communicate so perhaps a note was included with the money. The prices seemed to be very high for dulces and we certainly did not want a kilogram or more. No-one came in to buy so we weren’t able to see what happened. Another day we saw dulces being sold in a street stall by lay people on behalf of the nuns and everything looked so sweet that I think a kilogram might kill you.
Memories were flooding back with the Alhambra seeming the same and yet different to our last visit. As we rounded the end of the town and climbed up a hill, we looked out over the shaded buildings to where the sun was high lighting a patch of rough and fairly barren hillside with a few shanty houses on it in the distance. We instantly knew it as a place that we had been before. It was like looking through a window at a familiar scene from the interior of a dingy room. The way to reach that patch of hillside was through an archway where a statue of a short, stocky man holding a stick – enigmatic and with no clues for us about his significance - stood guard.

Clearly this gate way was to a different world to the twenty-first century Granada streets that we initially walked through, and even to the old city and its maze of grey buildings, lanes, steps and squares. We remembered walking through it in sunshine, that winter so long ago. We did not have time before darkness fell to follow that road now, but it was a must for another day.
Back on our walk, we passed a myriad of signs that said ‘Carmen …’, and we speculated on Carmen meaning convent, however if that was so, nearly all the women of Granada must have been nuns in the past. We later found out that if means ‘house’, the sort of house that has a courtyard and a garden rather than being just a part of a building. Higher up we came to the church of Colelgiata del Salvador.

It was a large building with a tiny old man on the door collecting the entry fee. The church was full of brightly coloured statues such as the one of an archangel triumphant over a devil and another of Mary all set up ready for being taken on a procession.
This was a beautiful church with a calm atmosphere, something that some very ornate churches seem somehow to have lost. We looked through the little museum of treasures with its beautiful embroideries and the cloisters with their key hole arches and the newly replanted orange trees. The cloisters remain from the mosque that was on this site before the church was built in the 16th century. The church has been restored and we saw photos of what it had looked like after a fire – it is amazing that anything was saved.
Dusk was falling and we had read that the area we would be walking through was not one for the lonely siesta hour or at night. I had actually thought when we went up to the convent that it would be easy to commit a crime here against a tourist and to disappear, since there are long escapeless stretches and then mazes of lanes. A very pleasant square of top of the hill was busy with the hustle and bustle of shopping and so unlike the stereotype of a crime area that we forgot the warnings until we passed through a gate in the old defensive walls and turned back down towards the city. Once again we were in the web of streets with only an occasional person eying us, or probably just looking in our direction. It was the place for a bit of dramatic imagining but we only saw people making their way home or meeting friends. Gradually we made our way down the hill back towards the city, coming down steps to an area where the shops and restaurants sold Moroccan goods and food.

A row of trees was the roosting place for a million birds with their screeching as they landed and rearranged themselves so loud as to be unpleasant.
Back in the city centre, now glowing with street lights and full of people shopping and carrying bags, we followed the main road back to our hostel district. The supermarket had a fruit and vegetable section where it was not even possible to handle the goods with gloves on, as required in some Spanish supermarkets. Here we had to wait for the attendant to choose our items and place them in a bag. We decided to patronise a tiny fruit shop further up the street where it was friendlier and where we bought the most delicious olives ever.
After dinner at our hostel, we couldn’t get the wifi to work. The lady on the desk tried to help Keith and eventually they decided that it might be a software problem. Keith went over to the internet café and downloaded a program from the internet to try to fix the wifi problems. Unfortunately after that the computer would display a blue screen then suddenly close down after random amounts of time. Sometimes we could use it for five minutes and sometimes for an hour, but at some stage the blue screen and an ominous message would appear. It was all pretty alarming but Keith thought that he would be able to sort it out by taking off the program. He stayed up very late trying to locate the program and solve our problems. At about eleven o’clock we went over to email my reply to my school to their offer of leave without pay.