Granada, Spain -- night

I sit now by a fountain just down the hill from the Alhambra. The air is pleasant, now that the sun has set after a hot, dry day.

Before writing this entry, I looked back in this journal to realize that it was a little over a year ago that I was in Granada, Nicaragua, the other Granada on the other side of the Atlantic.

It's really peaceful here now, with the sound of water flowing gently behind me. This is exactly what I need right now after a tiring day. Cherise and I got up early, after a late night last night, to walk with backpacks to the Gran Via of Madrid to pick-up the rental car. Unfortunately, it took us a while to locate the place to pick-up the car. Once we got going, it was already 9:30 a.m. Four and a half hours later and we were eating lunch at a diner on the outskirts of Granada.

As an aside, in case I didn't mention earlier, we decided to rent a car to meet our transportation needs for the rest of the trip in Spain, first for financial reasons as a rental car is actually cheaper, and second, to avoid another mess like the one in the bus station at Barcelona.

So getting back to today, we drove into the city after leaving the diner. We stopped and parked near a small building that was marked as tourist information. When we arrived, though, we realized it was closed for siesta. But as luck would have it, there was a young man sitting at a bus stop across the street from the closed tourist building. We approached him and asked for directions to the area of hostels. Since he was waiting for a bus to go into town, he offerred to come with us to give directions into the city. He was very nice and helped us with a brief tour of the city. When we parted ways in the center of town, he invited us to his bocadilleria, called Piccadilly Circus.

Cherise and I drove back on to la Gran Via of Granada, parked, and compared four different hostels to eventually choose one for 25 euros total per night, with parking included. After checking in and dropping off our backpacks, we walked down into town. We stopped in a few souvenir shops, then saw a double-decker sightseeing bus. Since we were both tired, we decided this would be a good option to see the city. Towards the end of the tour, I began to feel really exhausted. After a night of little sleep then driving for nearly five hours, I needed a nap. We went back to the room and slept for almost three hours, longer than we expected.

We left to go out at about 10 p.m., dinner time. We walked back on to the street behind the hostel and randomly I saw a sign for Piccadilly Circus. Of course we went in and we saw our friend Mohammed, who hooked us up with a falafel for Cherise and a shawarma de pollo for me. It was so coincidental. The food was great and Mohammed was once again very nice. I ordered another shawarma for the road, we walked back to the Gran Via to catch a mini-bus up to the Alhambra and here we are. And here I am writing, finishing this entry.