We Probably Got Cursed.
So I missed a dedicated update because I was out for the count last night by 11:30, curled up in fetal position and nauseated, probably tracing back to one of the following causes: an angry Grenadian gypsy put a hex on me; I have had more ice cream in the past three days than I have in my whole life since my parents got smart to leaving me unattended with the snack shack ticket book at Hopmeadow; and/or I was so hungry before the 10:30 nighttime garden viewing at El Alhambra that I shoved a bunch of coins into a basement vending machine and ate the first thing that I saw, which was a mysterious package of crackers on whose package the only words were “Digestivo” and “Go!”. I can assure you that these cookies are falsely marketed.
Anyway, besides slowly convalescing after my near demise, things are great! Granada is a super whimsical little city and we literally spent the entire day except for a well-earned 7PM siesta walking around and exploring.
Two seconds into entering through the gates to the cathedral corridor, a gypsy shoved some herbs in my hand, vice-gripped it, and started to tell me my fortune which boils down to I will have two kids, my husband is/will be very handsome (I am rusty on my Spanish verb tenses), my family is nice, and something about a telephone. Apparently, the going rate for forecasting someone’s blithely unoriginal life even when they didn’t ask you to is 5€. Gypsy woman was not happy when I told her all I had was 20 cents she got very very angry and it took a good 2 minutes to shake her, at which point I was a terrible travel companion once again and ran down the street to escape and left Rebecca in the dust with they gypsy’s sidekick while she yelled, “wait, what’s happening! What’s happening!” Dad, ill have you know that I had a vice-grip myself on my purse the entire time and even though I was giggling uncontrollably I successfully guarded all of my belongings from potential pickpocketing. I just might be hexed.
We looked at a lot of cool lamps, there was awesome graffiti everywhere, I ate even more gelato, I went on a run that somehow was all uphill and terrible except that everything was cool to look at, and we ate a great lunch at a place called Oliver. An interesting thing about Granada was that street vendors seem to have free roam; they repeatedly would come up to our table outside and go inside of what was a pretty nice restaurant to try and sell stuff, get told to leave, and then just do it again. The restaurant staff never seemed to get angrier and the vendors never changed their patterns; it was just like in a Nintendo game where if you keep going into a store when you don’t have enough money to but something (I’m clearly thinking about River City Ransom here) and the only programmed command for the little merchant is to tell you “No.” You’d think after a while that either you’d get bored of going inside or the merchant gets mad and punches you, but neither thing happens.
El Alhambra was beautiful, especially at night, and the gardens smell really good, but to be honest I was having trouble focusing at this point with The Curse/Gelato OD/Weird 4-year-old digestive cookie kicking in.
The gypsy curse continues to manifest itself in that my stomach still hurts, we slept in this morning and missed our first bus to Nerja, and someone that wasn’t me fell really hard in the street but I’m not supposed to talk about it so I won’t. Except that it was amazing.
Nerja is very beautiful, very European, and very touristy, but in the nicest sense of the word. A bit of a run-down, beachy Disneyworld for adults. Hoping the weather warms up so we can actually go in the water tomorrow!
That’s all for now – more tomorrow. I’ll let you know if the curse continues.