Spain

I can´t write much because we have to be back at our hostal in fifteen minutes to get ready to leave Granada and fly to Barcelona. Last time I wrote we were in Cordoba about to go and see the Mezquita which is absolutely mesmerising, the architecture is like living Escher. I have many more things to say about it but I don´t have time. After spending many hours there (and the Alcazaba) we left the next day on a bus for Granada. Granada has been very kind to us, although it´s a much grittier and slightly more epic city than Cordoba, covered in graffiti and very political. We keep hearing claims that there´s only 200,000 people living here, but it has the feel of a million plus city, and in fact I find that very hard to believe. The day after arriving we queued for four hours to get tickets to see the Alhambra. This was mostly a bad thing except that we met a Czech girl named Teresa who was very friendly and excited for us (she started talking to us because K was reading my copy of ¨Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia¨. The funny thing about all this was that after queueing for four hours Mum and I almost didn´t get to see the Nasrid Palaces (the Alhambra´s crowning glory) because you only get a half hour time window to get in, and it was very badly signposted. We originally thought another castle was it and when we finally realised our half hour time period was over. So then we had to feign, well actually not feign at all, the stupid and confused tourist syndrome. It was well worth the adrenalin rush. I will post about 1000 pictures when I get the chance.

The last two days we have been driving around Andalusia in a rented Fiat. The first day we went to cave country north east of Granada, and yesterday we went to Las Alpujarras, all little towns in the skirt of the Sierra Nevada. It has been spectacular, though cold. My favourite thing about Granada is the roof on top of our hostal, from which we can see the swallows circling over the rooftops of Granada with the Sierra Nevada shimmering behind.

Dear Friends,

The moment I got onto the plane from Paris to Madrid, I knew Spain was going to be different. Firstly, the people are all beautiful here. While France has this mythology of being a place of beautiful and sophisticated people, I found it to be untrue. People dressed down and daudy in Paris, except for one or two.

In Spain, so far everyone dresses with style. The young people are confident, attractive and full of energy. The old people all seem quite the opposite! It seems there are no young and uglies here.

My experience of Madrid consisted of a air terminal, a faux up-market hotel and many miles of underground metro. I don´t know if it was just the part we were in or not, but the whole place seemed fresh and clean.

We´re in Cordoba now, after a high speed train ride from Madrid. Cordoba is wonderful, it is swamped with tourists, mainly Spanish, but tourists nonetheless. Despite this it is wonderful. The old town is like nothing I could imagine!

And everything is so cheap, unlike in Paris where we were over budget every day, in Cordoba we´ve balanced the budget in one day. 9 Euros purchased us a veritable feast for dinner, with wine and chocolate and breakfast for the next day.

Umm, have to cut this short!

Bye!

We went into a burger king in Cordoba last night (they don´t have a vegeburger so it was no use to us) and there´s a burger called the Frances. I think that´s because it´s meant to be French style. My name means French in Spain.

We arrived in Spain the night before last, at midnight, in the rain. We´d spent the day in the Jardin de Tiuleries minding bags after we checked out of our hotel, and ate sugar crepes.

We finally got to sleep at 1.30am, in a big ugly hotel in Madrid near the airport. In the morning we were relieved to find it cold and rainy, because the heat in Paris had frankly been too much for us. We didn´t end up seeing much more of Madrid than the inside of railway stations and trains, but what wonderful railway stations and trains they were! So much for the stereotype of Spaniards being inefficient. We liked it in Spain. Everyone is beautiful and happy, the kids are cool, and it seems to be a very prosperous and happy place. The train journey to Cordoba was very beautiful, I got tears in my eyes looking out the window at all the rolling mountains and rolling clouds and little buildings that looked like castles and towns with statues looking over them. Kristian claimed it was just like California.

And so we got to Cordoba in the middle of the afternoon yesterday, and by the time we arrived it was sunshiney and hot again. Cordoba seems like a place that belongs in the sun, it is all the right colours for a bright day, all mosaic blues and grey white patterned cobblestones and yellows and red flowers. Even the pigeons/doves are white and grey and bright. People are very talkative here, which is wonderful except that we don´t understand them. At least French I could vaguely understand even if I couldn´t speak it very well. Spanish is a mystery to me.

I have been taking a lot of photographs of Cordoba, it´s the kind of place where you can´t put away your camera or you´ll just have to take it out again. It´s got a lot of very quaint little alleyways, but the bits that interest me the most are the broken bits, the crumbling walls and windows through which you can see the sky.