granada

oi vey. what a weekend. well, we never made it up into the mountains with the gypsies, because we came across a small case of wrong place wrong time, except that we happened to be in a very bad place at a very bad time. so we booked it out of there as fast as our legs could carry us and spent the rest of the day jumping at shadows from the comfort of our hostel rooms.

sunday was much better. we went up to the alhambra, which is one of the 7 wonders of the world. for the record, if you ever decide to go to the alhambra from the downtown area, take the bus. otherwise you will get to do what we did--hoof it for at least a mile up hill. woo! lemme tell ya, today i am stiff from it. lovely. and this place is not built for tourists, so we had to do a lot of guess work as to what was where (like the ticket office) and the bus would have dropped us off right there. oh well. now we know.

once we finally got in the place it was gorgeous. seriously, how they did all that detail work so long ago with primitive tools halfway up a mountain is beyond me. there are 7 palaces and the generalife (hen-er-a-LEEF-ay), which contains all the gardens. thier use of water is quite impressive--not just because water was rare, but because they utilized a hydraulic system that was sooo far ahead of its time. here are some pictures of granada. this is the palacio de los leones, which is the most famous palace. unfortunately like i said, a lot was under restauration, including the 12 famous lions and the fountain that they support. this part was still very pretty though:

one of the views from one of the palaces overlooking granada:

one of the views from la generalife of la alhambra:

and from ronda. this is the bridge:

and this is la real maestranza bull ring in sevilla:

this is one side of la giralda:

this is the roof of la giralda from about half way up the 35 ramps of the tower:

and finally, the gardens of the alcázar:

¡que bonita! that´s all the time i´ve got now... until next time!

-kl