Summer in the City

In the winter, swathed in blankets and layered clothes, it's easy to forget that Granada is in one of Europe's southernmost regions. But then May rolls around, and the meters-thick snow on the Sierra begins to disappear, the scarves are packed up, and short sleeves and sandals make their first appearances. By June, the heat has come to stay. From nine in the morning until nine in the evening, temperatures hover above 30 degrees (85 F), and even at night the heat can still seem stifling. In the afternoon, the city is dead, the true utility of the siesta finally apparent: when it's close to 40 (100 F), all you can do is sprawl sweating on the sofa, hoping that the open window will catch a breeze. The few people who are out cling to the shadows like vampires, cooling themselves with fans and lingering before the air conditioned storefronts. All is quiet; all is still.


In the heat, social taboo fades. Bare legs make an appearance (and not just among the teenage crowd), young men sweat shirtless on balconies, and flip-flops (once relegated to the beach) become the default footwear. Among females, attire can perhaps be best summarized by the Regina Spektor lyric: "Summer in the city / means cleavage, cleavage, cleavage." Propriety is a word gathering cobwebs in the back of granadino brains, to be pulled out and dusted off in mid-September.

Until then, there's not much to do but sit back, sip a cold drink, and, when the sun starts making its downward slope toward the horizon, take a leisurely stroll to the nearest ice cream shop and get yourself a scoop. You'll be in good company.

Art for all

Once there was a small, lost boy. He searched under rocks and beyond his shadow, but he never found himself. He played with the stars and whispered secrets to the clouds, kept by the wind. He called out to the tallest mountains and the oldest elders, but no one answered.

One day he was leaping planet to planet collecting dreams when he tripped over a can that rang like a bell. He took it and pressed its head, and a big flame of color flooded everything, and the ground was no longer the ground, nor the sky the sky, everything was color, color was everything. He looked at it and went blind from it. The boy was amazed. Suddenly a brightness made him close his eyes, and when he opened them again he saw a small boy in front of him, watching him.

"Who are you?" he asked. The small boy smiled and touched his hand.
"I'm your smile," he said gently, becoming light and melting into his arm, his shoulder, into him. The small, lost boy took a breath and looked up, smiled, and heard the wind tell him something beautiful.

Ever since that day, the boy has leaped from planet to planet hunting dreams and painting his path, and in this way reflects himself
searches for himself
finds himself.

The modern little prince in question is not a storybook character, but rather Granada-based graffiti artist Raúl Ruiz, commonly known by his nom de plume, el niño de las pinturas (the boy of the paintings). The niño, or Sex, as he also signs his name, is responsible for much of the graffiti in and around Granada.

Walk anywhere in the city, and you're likely to notice the art in the unlikeliest of places... beside the windows on gray stone shops, on the sides of houses, along roadside walls, among the winding streets of the ancient Albaicín neighborhood...

The city as museum.

Graffiti art is, by its very nature, ephemeral, fragile. The scrawled names of urban travelers, messages waiting to be deciphered, drawings, paintings, portraits, there one day, the next painted over with a fresh coat of paint, washed away with rain, faded by pollution.

It is subversive, challenging traditional definitions of public and private space, and how we use them. Its artists, urban guerrillas painting the city under the cover of night, fleeing policeman and thousand euro fines.

But if the city is a gallery, it's one with no explanatory labels and no artist biographies. The art must speak for itself ... not as a monologue, but in dialogue with those who view it. Perhaps it is for this reason that el niño has said that "it is the onlooker who makes the painting." After all, urban spaces are not static nor uniform: they are constructed by each individual as he experiences them. An artist can paint the city with his lived experiences, but once he has gone, it is up to the passerby to interpret what he sees, through a worldview that's his own.

Now it's your turn: take a digital stroll through some of el niño's art, and if you have the chance, come to Granada to make your own path through the museum.

"Making things I break, to put them together again, and to break them again, that's how I spend my time... and time runs out ... and life doesn't wait."

"Time doesn't exist."

Is it art, a social project, an act of rebellion...?
It's up to us to decide.

Check out more of el niño's graffiti on the obras section of his website, and don't miss the neat panoramas.

Flamenco and Fiction

Having a house guest has made my life busy this week; it also has sent me on adventures around Granada rather than sitting around on someone's sofa eating chocolate and immersing myself in the fictional lives of the characters on the American TV shows we watch on DVD.

Last night, I went to a flamenco show with my out of town guest, LL. The venue was cave-like, in one of the oldest areas of the city, and there were under 15 people in the audience, all perched on little stools. LL and I nursed our complimentary drinks and waited for the show to start. As we chatted about post-college life, I wondered what to expect from the performance. Most of my knowledge of flamenco came from television specials featuring dramatically made-up women, an Andalusian exchange student in high school, and a strange Lorca play I'd seen in DC.

When the artists came out, they weren't any different than the ordinary Spaniards I see on the street: a youngish man with dark spiked hair, skinny jeans, and sleek track shoes; a guitarist with hair tied back in a ponytail, a hoop earring in one ear. The performance was unpretentious, but the musicians were skilled and the music impressive, filling up the tiny room with elaborate finger-picked patterns, vocal trills, and nostalgic poetry that didn't strike me as so different from the dolorous tango lyrics I'd heard in Buenos Aires. Every time the music crescendoed suddenly, the British lady sitting next to me got a startled look on her face.

After the opening number, two other men (the rhythm section) and a young woman (the dancer) went to the stage, and the five of them arranged themselves to fit in the small space. The performance continued, now with intricate clapped, stomped, and snapped rhythms. The lyrics slid together into a string of sounds, but I could still interpret the emotion they expressed: raw, despairing, occasionally hopeful. I found myself staring at the faces of the performers: the dancer with her rigid, anguished expression; the guitarist, his face lit from time to time with a goofy, delighted smile; and the singer, his mouth in a perpetual smirk, his eyes fixed on the dancer. You know that expression: "eating someone up with your eyes"? Yeah, it was kind of like that. Despite the lack of rings on the appropriate fingers, I imagined that both were in committed relationships with other people, but were sleeping together.

After the show, I asked LL what she had thought of the performance, and whether she'd noticed the charge between the singer and dancer. She hadn't. I admitted that I wasn't sure what the narrative of flamenco is, whether that tension was part of the performance or the private lives of the performers, and she nodded, mumbling a polite response. We moved on to other topics.

Nevertheless, the impression has stuck with me, and I'm still thinking about those strangers on stage -- not my invented story, but that act of creation we take part in every day in every one of our interactions. It's the haziness between acting and reality, fiction and truth, following me around even when I'm not studying literature.

Let it snow(ish)

I’m writing this from my living room in Granada, the electric heater blowing warm air down on me as I sit on the sofa, bundled up with tights under my jeans and a heavy sweatshirt. Our table wears its three layers of winter tablecloths, and underneath the space heater is chugging away. The windows are fogged up, but if I get up close or crack one open—as my flatmate did just moments ago—I can see the sleet, yes, sleet falling outside.

Welcome to southern Spain in the winter.

The other day I received an email from my best friend’s father, and he said, and I quote: “Baltimore is rainy and cold today-I’m picturing [you] warm and sunny in the south of Spain. You needn’t correct me if that’s wrong.”

I won’t correct him (though he may be reading this, and if so, I offer my apologies), but I think that you all have the right to know the truth: Granada in the winter is not warm, nor exclusively sunny. This city, located in a valley surrounded by the Sierra Nevada, is known for the most extreme temperatures in Spain, according to my flatmate. In the summer, I’m told, the heat is often unbearable, and in the winter, it’s not uncommon for temperatures to dip below freezing.

Though the weather here is positively mild when compared to the Midwest or northern Europe, the almost universal lack of central heating does require some rather creative solutions to the cold. One is the use of long, heavy tablecloths, under which hide legs and space heaters. Sometimes, the heater is built into the table. I’m also a fan of the electric blanket (perfect when switched on fifteen minutes before bedtime), and have taken to going for a run when I need to get the blood running to my frozen hands and feet. When you add to these the ordinary techniques—coats worn inside, tights or leggings layered under pants, laptops lying on one’s lap, cramming onto small sofas with three of your closest friends, imbibing a constant stream of hot beverages—it makes for a rather comfortable winter, overall. Still, waiting while the laundry hangs to dry is a rather long and laborious process.

The sun’s supposed to reemerge tomorrow, and by midweek the temperature’s predicted to reach fifty again: more normal weather for December in Granada. Until then, however, I’ll keep layering on the clothes and tablecloths, and hope that the freezing rain doesn’t make the paving stones too slippery. You can bet they’re not salting the pavement.

Living in a place as inspiring as Granada....

...it's really no wonder how Sarah is drawn to participate in the 50,000 word novel writing contest this month.

I myself, like Paige before me, went down to the heart of Andalusia this past weekend to visit Sarah, see Laura as well (who was also visiting that weekend -- come to think of it, I think it was due to some well placed peer pressure on Paige's part), and of course to take in the wonderful sights of the city and the immediate surrounding area. Thus I can say with certainty that if just touring its many elegant avenues, the even more numerous smaller passages, and its near countless winding alleyways and narrow cooridors compelled me to write as many pages in my personal journal as I did-- not to mention take as many photos of my surroundings as I did-- imagine, then, what it would do to live there for a far more extended period of time!

I came down by bus on Friday and came back to Ciudad Real by train on Sunday night. Both traveling experiences served to give me a more solid idea of the difference in efficiency and facility of each mode of transportation, but more importantly-- at least for my ever-hungry traveler's spirit-- it gave me time to pause, look, and reflect on the gorgeous and multi-faceted terrain of the Spanish landscape. Especially coming in by bus.

To come into an Andalusian town by bus is to be given a long, warm, and disarming welcome to, for my knowledge, the most beautiful region of all of Spain, which furthermore captivates the traveler in such a way as to not ever want to leave. Picture multitudes of rolling green hills, orchards of olive trees in every direction, as well as the rough but elegant curve of desert sands and high rocky mountains-- ALL living together in peaceful, natural, symbiotic harmony. It is a magnificent treasure to behold. And completely encantador - charming - (though as wonderful a word as it is in Spanish, in English I don't find the translation is as strong a word as I'd like to employ. Bah, such is life.).

Then of course there's the trademark and emblematic impression of the white-washed housing communities, which are the start and nucleus of most every Andalusian town, big or small. They are themselves beautiful and precious to look upon. Or at least I, for one, was smitten.

But enough of glowing introductions. The town of Granada is itself a treasure, as I think I've already said, both cosmopolitan metropolis and renewed crossroad of diverse cultures and backgrounds. I stayed very close to city center and so was able to get a taste-- both literally and figuratively-- of these aspects which make Granada the veritable pomegranate of bursting color and flavor from which it draws its name in Spanish. Northern African and Middle Eastern flavors and delights-- vices, yes-- and traditions are quickly becoming treasured pasttimes of this once great Moorish city, and thus everywhere there is the smell of kabob, hookah, and the sounds of darbuka and tambourines and tiny cymbals.

The food: delicious. The tapas scene: stupendous. The ice cream: tremendous... but I'll spare you the juicy, delicious details... The main landmark attraction (the Alhambra): as Paige rightly put it, no wonder it was considered for the list of one of the great wonders of the world. Sweeping vistas, humble halls, elaborate detail in every column and wall facade, impressive gardens, and a plethora of fountains is how I will here sum up my trip to that venerable last stronghold of the old Moorish guard. Though to break it down by its individual features does no justice to the place that is truly made all the more mighty and majestic due to the sum of those parts.

I would write more about Granada here, but I do believe that over time Sarah will give all a sense of the place and its climate and so I do not need to say much more, except to add-- at no small aside, but rather as a means of giving thanks and gratitude to that same lady-- that I much enjoyed  my weekend there in large part due to her help, coordination, and recommendations.

So for now I sign off with a few lines about this current week, a few photos of my past weekend, and a little more about what the outlook for the next few weeks holds in store. First off, this week is progressing beautifully. I feel that my ability to manage in the classroom, if not managing in my speech, is coming along smoothly, and I am feeling overall more comfortable with the situations that I am faced with. Yesterday I was acknowledged and complimented on my work by one teacher in particular whose opinion I respect and admire. It was after what I similarly felt had been my best in-class time to date in which I had both kept their attention for the majority of the time, and had more importantly explained and taught a good deal of material that they seemed to understand and comprehend.

In the weeks to come I've got some fun out of Ciudad Real travel planned. In two weeks it's off to a certain southeastern province of Spain to join in celebrating the birthday of fellow blogger Laura B, and then the last weekend of November I'm going to Barcelona to meet up with an old camp friend, see the sights as well as take in a Spanish fútbol game: Espanyol v. Sporting Gijon. Should be a blast.

Chau for now, and long live Granada,

-Nick

poetry like only the passage of a dozen centuries could have created

When you're working 12 hours a week...

How to Stay Busy in Spain, When You're Working 12 Hour Weeks
(Sarah's Version)

1. Get into an exercise routine

I go running about four times a week. I run along the Río Genil, where there's a bit of a long narrow park popular with strolling couples and dog owners. The other day I had a rather large dog chase and bark at me for half a length of the river, which was pretty fun.

2. Take public transport.

When I'm working, I probably spend about 1.5 hours per day getting myself from home to work and back again. This pales in comparison to my Buenos Aires commutes, but it's still a lovely, relaxing part of the day (except when I have to run to catch the bus). Though the actual bus ride is only 20 minutes each way, it is an excellent time for jotting down ideas in my notebook and grinning to myself because of the fabulous views of the snow-topped Sierra Nevada, which look something like this on my bus ride. Sometimes I have trouble not singing to myself as I rock out to my iPod, and I must look quite silly to my fellow travelers.

3. Go out for tapas.

This is a great way to spend hours and hours. Go for dinner, go for a late night drink and snack, go in the afternoon for lunch. Tapas are all-purpose, and come in many varieties. We have two favorite tapas bars so far in Granada: Café om Kalsum for Moroccan flavors; Poë for other international flavors, mostly Brazilian.

4. When you're not eating tapas, always eat home cooked meals.

I cook every day, except for frozen pizza days, which come around about once a week. I have lots of time to cook, so if you have any recipes that don't require more than 30 minutes of oven time (ours starts to act up after that), send them my way! I've become a big fan of making banana chocolate chip (cut from a chocolate bar) pancakes on weekends: that is, sometime between Thursday and Sunday. This weekend I'm giving scones a second Spanish go-round for a friend's birthday.

5. Read.

Okay, so my reading so far hasn't exactly been educational, other than the 100 pages or so I've read of Multitude, but I swear, I will go to the library to get a card one of these days. But, I did read the entire Twilight series in eBook form, courtesy of a friend. (Stop judging me.) I'm also a big fan of Samanta Schweblin's short stories, and I've downloaded several Very Important Foundational Texts of Latin American Literature to get cracking on. I'm trying to stay up to date on American news by reading the Washington Post and Slate (my favorite!), but I tend to prefer watching their election sketch videos... Sarah the Diva! The Anti-America America in Pro-America America! The Mainstream Media Needs a Hug!

6. ...And I guess I've strayed into the realm of video.

Sometimes I watch episodes of classy television shows, like Gossip Girl and Supernatural, illegally on the internet. One of my flatmates -- who's a student, not a language assistant -- is addicted to TV series (her words, not mine), and routinely watches entire seasons of television shows. Today, to reward myself for SENDING IN MY VOTE I watched a Real Movie, which I'd brought with me on DVD. It's called Me Without You, and it was just about as heartbreaking as I remembered.

7. Commit to do something completely insane.

I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short, a writing project in which crazy people like me attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in November. I've been busy planning and plotting, and am very excited to start. I'm in the process of compiling a grocery list of novel-writing snacks to buy, and I've already stocked up on coffee. Anyone crazy enough to join in?

Some other day I'll write a more serious list of things to do in Spain, but really, this pretty much sums up what I've been doing recently. Let the mocking begin.