Our new neighborhood: the Albayzin

The Albayzin 


"Wine Gate" entrance to the Alhambra

Our new neighborhood in Granada, the Albayzin (al-ba-theen), is a magical place full of crooked alleyways, secret passages, and a labyrinth of restaurants, shops and houses. It has a mixture of Spanish and Moroccan influences and a host of international characters. We’re figuring out how to buy fresh fruits and vegetables at the market up the hill, get fresh bread every morning, and shop at the local fish store and butcher. Believe it or not, it is also possible to buy groceries online (this makes sense because you can’t actually drive to our house, nearest drop-off is several blocks away) but we haven’t quite figured that out yet.

Biking to the Alhambra

We’ve been to the local pool (on the campus of the University of Granada), biked over to the Alhambra (http://www.alhambradegranada.org/), the beautiful Moorish Palace we can see from our house (it’s about a 15- 20 minute walk to the gardens and surrounds and is truly an amazing structure) and taken myriad walks out and around the town.

Good



Colin with his favorite getato: chocolate

 The boys are making friends. The 2 Icelandic girls upstairs are very sweet and keep our rowdies calm. Gelato is our new obsession – favorite flavors thus far are “After Eight,” “Kit Kat,” “Oreo” and “Fresa“ (strawberry) and the boys are getting comfortable ordering in Spanish.

 They seem to be taking the changes in stride, and are open to exploring, trying new foods (hamburguesas are not the same here and were NOT a hit) but are a bit cranky at times, mostly for our benefit I'm sure.

Our house is in the background

Bad

We sent a small shipment to ourselves via FedEx but our winter clothes and computers are currently stuck in customs and I’m wondering if this may trigger a visa inquiry. Perhaps this is good in that we actually spent the time and money to do every damn step correctly and no one seems to care.

Setting up a Spanish bank account has been a little tricky. Although I set up an account in May when I was over on my own, my plan was to open a Citibank account in our town as soon as we arrived and in anticipation I spent a bunch of time opening a US account before my departure. As luck would have it, they are closing the Granada branch in a few months time so it now won't do us any good. Plan B is to use the account I opened in May and I wired myself some $$ as a test today. Hopefully it will get here and I will be able to access.


Ugly

Skiing is only 40 minutes away

Our Spanish sucks. I guess we knew this coming in but it really makes a difference when most folks we need to communicate with don’t speak English. Yes, it is easy to get by without speaking Spanish here but that wasn’t the point. There are plenty of international folks living here and English is definitely a universal language but we clearly need to start hanging out with Spanish folks. Unfortunately we can’t communicate with them.  But we just started with a tutor who we plan to work with daily and have made arrangements to do several “intercambios” (trades or exchanges with people who speak Spanish and want to learn English).