At least a couple
evenings per week we would travel to one or more of the other barrios in
Granada (Realejo or Centro for example) and visit some of our other favorite
places.
We had specifically budgeted for
the breakfast “fry up” offered by Hannigans in Centro and we have rarely missed
these weekly or bi-weekly events even though we really feel like we’re cheating
on the cultural experience when we do.
Rationalization: the Irish culture, in Spain, is still a new and
different culture….yeah sure.
Our friend from TEFL,
Tony, had a birthday during our second week in Granada and we met up at the Mirador San Nicolas
then the party moved to Taberna 22 in the lower Albaicyn and soon ended up in one of our
favorite places in Realejo, the restaurant Casa Lopez de Correa.
This restaurant is run by a British couple,
Miles and Sue and features, among other great things, a tapas menu of seven or
eight items that you can choose your tapa from when you order a drink. All of them are great as Sue is a fabulous
chef and Mike insists that they serve the best lasagna in Granada.
The party moved on as first one bar then
another closed for the evening until we found ourselves in the lower part of
Realejo in the wee small hours of the morning….a forty minute uphill hike home
for us.
On another evening, with
Tony not long after we again went “a tapeo” and during our wandering on this
special evening we picked up a few more people at every stop until we were a
group of nearly twenty people.
Two of
the people that joined us were Chessa and Renee, both lovely ladies from New
York traveling in southern Spain for a few weeks. Before we knew it we had adopted them both
and Chessa, after completing the TEFL course, is still in Granada and has been
in a relationship with our dear friend Tony.
We loved being able to see them both on a regular basis.
A few days later we
passed through the Puerta de las Pesas with Diana and Jose called to us by
name, remembering where we were from and inquiring how are classes were
going.
Wow…we were very surprised and impressed
that he remembered us from our brief and difficult conversation a few days
before. We decided to stop again and
after our meal he brought out a brochure they had just produced and asked us to
check the English, it was a Google translate version and was terrible.
We offered to try to translate it for them in
order to get the practice with the Spanish, so he gave us a copy in the
original Spanish. This was the beginning
of a friendship that we treasure.
Knowing that we would
need to work through the translation over several days we decided to bring it
back the following week after we found a new place to live and got
settled. We had been talking with a
wonderful couple from California, Allie and Andrew, friends that Diana had made
previously, who were actually living in Spain, and had an apartment that they
wanted to sublet for the summer. They
were going home to get married in June and would not be back until September or
October, perfect for us! There was only
one catch, they had four cats. The cats
were part of the deal; we thought long and hard and came to the difficult
decision that part of our whole process had been to free ourselves of that type
of responsibility, so we would have to find somewhere else.
We got a call from
another friend, a teacher at the TEFL school who suggested that we get in touch
with some friends of hers. They had been
renting a small house and were scheduled to leave sometime “soon” and possibly
their house would be available. Sadly,
we discovered that they were out of town for a few days so we could not talk to
them until after the weekend.
It was Friday and by
Saturday our stay at the residencia was scheduled to end so instead of
stressing out and working diligently to find a place to live like we would have
a few short weeks earlier, we decided to embrace the southern Mediterranean
lifestyle, refused to worry, extended our stay at the residencia for a few days
and went to the beach with Diana and Kelsey for the weekend.
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