The moral of the story is: In Granada, One Walks

I have been a terrible blogger.  For this, I beg your pardon.  In desperate search for an excuse, even a weak one, I’ll say that walking in Granada has been taking up a much larger chunk of my time recently… and walking just so happens to be the subject of this post.  Read on.

Granada is made up of many different kinds of streets.  Some look like this:

 (this is the street I live on, view from the balcony)

Others look like this:

Still others look more like this:

(the girls being silly are other IES students, including my lovely housemate Emily, second from left)

And some even go through 11^th century, 4-foot-thick city walls like this:

As you can imagine, depending on where you want to go in the city you may need to go through something that looks more like the last two.  A car, obviously, would be impossible.  Even in situation number two a car would be impractical; hence the motorcycles.  In situation number one, cars can drive… but not always park.

To this potential problem, granadinos have a very simple solution – and a very un-American one:  WALK!

The street in Spain is a public space.  Instead of being taken up by angry car-drivers constantly trying to claim “their” space on the road, or even by rushed pedestrians with iPods who ooze “leave me alone” vibes, the streets, sidewalks and plazas in Spain have an incredibly important social function.  You want to get together with friends?  Meet in a plaza or on a street corner and not in someone’s house.  Is there a small street where there is no sidewalk?  Well, then you walk in the street and if a car or a motorcycle comes by they’ll just have to be patient.  Is it between the hours of 8 and 11 pm?  That means it’s time to go for a paseo with your family or friends.  (Paseo is a daily event that consists of ambling around on the street, stopping to talk with everyone you know, eating an ice cream, doing some leisurely shopping, linking arms with friends, pushing baby carriages, kids carrying balloons…)

Granada is also a very small city – or a very large town, whichever way you’d like to look at it.  This means that EVERYTHING is within walking distance.  (“Walking distance” may mean something different in Granada than in North America, but we’re talking in Granada terms here.)  Walking is therefore the main means of transportation.  You walk to get your groceries (there are even tall baskets on wheels that many people use to put their groceries in for the walk home).  You walk to school (children in uniforms are particularly predominant on the streets at certain times of day).  You walk to work.  You walk to get to places to be social and you walk to be social.

So I walk, too.  This is a good thing.  I like walking.  It gives me time to think, gives my brain a break and gets my body going, especially in the chilly early mornings.  I also now have killer calf muscles.

In the beginning of my stay in Granada most of my activities were centered around the IES study abroad center, where I take the majority of my classes, a 20-minute walk from my apartment.  Because I have both morning and afternoon classes, I made and continue to make that walk every week day at least four times a day: going to IES in the morning, returning home for lunch and siesta, going to IES again, returning home for the night.  Most nights, paseo and tapeo (the act of going to get tapas) form part of the routine, which means leisurely walking and exploring the city and may include going to a tapas bar, ice cream place, or kabob vendor (pronounced and spelled “kebap” here) clear on the other side of the city.  Here is a map of the areas I frequent in Granada.  The yellow dots are my favorite places to eat, the green dots are where some friends live, and the orange lines mark areas that are best for paseo and walking exploration.

Two weeks ago, however, university classes began.  This changed things a bit.  University of Granada buildings are spread all over the city, and each building represents a different department, called a facultad.  As an anthropology and Spanish major, I now take some of my classes in the Facultad de Letras y Filosofía – literally translated, “The Faculty of Letters and Philosophy”; in a more comprehensive fashion, “the place where you study a whole lot of theory”.  I am enrolled in an Economic Anthropology class in the late morning at the Facultad and am auditing an art history class about Mudéjar art in the evenings; each class meets twice a week.  La Facultad de Letras y Filosofía is an enormous cement building into which all of the academic buildings on Bryn Mawr’s campus would easily fit.  It is also located on the largest of the University campuses, called La Cartuja.  From Cartuja there is a great view of the city of Granada:

…which means it’s up a large hill.  It also happens to be about as far from the city center as you can possibly get.  From the IES study abroad center it is a 30-minute walk, if I walk fast.  From my apartment, a 40-minute walk, bookin’ it.  So far I have come to every single one of my university classes panting, drenched in sweat, and a number of minutes late.

In the end, my most regular daily route around the city looks like this:

Or maybe better represented like this:

Yesterday, I timed the amount of walking I did over the course of the day – a normal week day with classes.  My final, non-exaggerated calculation: just a little over 3 hours.  That was 3 hours not spent writing for this blog.  My excuse being made, I now hope to remedy the recent lack of blogging by very soon posting about concerts of many types, awesome architecture, classes, my trips to Sevilla, Ronda, Nerja, and the towns near Granada where the poet/playwright Federico Garcia Lorca was born and grew up, and other details about life in Spain and Granada in general.  For now, saludos.