On Friday 23 August, we had a very
important appointment. Back in spring, when I put this trip together, I bought
some tickets for the Alhambra. You have to book them well in advance if you
want a choice of time and date. But to me what is pretty disturbing is that
they also want your ID card or passport. I understand the need to keep fraud
low, but other places have systems in place that don’t require such
far-reaching measures. In any case, I don’t have anything to hide, but it’s the
principle of the thing.
I was a little worried about driving out of
the urbanisation up the mountain, what with a rock festival due to start today.
I was in no mood to return and find all the spaces usurped by out-of-towners.
But that was the risk we took. Forty-five minutes later, we arrived at the vast
tree-covered parking area behind the Alhambra and were directed to the first
section, the furthest from the entrance. I explained about the kids and that
they can’t walk too far in this heat, but the guy said it was already full all
the way out to here. An ominous start.
We walked towards the gate, a good ten
minutes away, to be greeted by a line of tourists jostling for position to be permitted
entrance. It was one of those disorganised queuing systems with three lines and
you have to guess which line is going to go the fastest. We had to produce our
IDs and put our belongings in a scanner to get in, plus the tickets on my
smartphone needed to be validated. It was a fairly impersonal experience, but
it got us in the door. As someone with an ADHD personality, all this completely
scrambled my brain. And the sheer number of pushy tourists everywhere sent me
into a spiral of bad-temperedness that would need some time to deal with. Livia
was also suffering from a similar experience and had started acting impulsively,
so she needed some guiding.
We moved gradually towards the entrance of the Palace of the Nazaries – we had access at 12:30 and were required to be there on time – but firstly we negotiated the cypress-lined pathway through the grounds to the other end of the complex. Be mindful that it is going to be impossible to capture a picture without another visitor in it. Anywhere. To get to the Nazaries, you have to actually leave the main Alhambra complex and queue up again to go through the same bureaucratic process over there. Just before you enter, there is a building that has been turned into a toilet and refreshment centre, based over three floors. I was incredibly irritated by all these people standing around, sitting on parapets and benches, hanging around in groups.
Let me take you inside my world a little:
when you go into a railway station in the middle of the rush hour, and you have
just a few minutes to locate the platform of your train before it leaves, you
are faced with a number of obstacles that you see everywhere. These include
luggage placed indiscriminately in the middle of the passageways; gormless
individuals exiting outlets eating food or checking their phones and not
looking where they are going; teenage dirtbags sitting on the floor in a circle
ignoring each other as they bash the screens of their smartphones; old people
dawdling in narrow walkways unaware you want to get past.
The list goes on, and the overload of noise
from announcements or random music or other people’s conversations or those
large cleaning vehicles with the round brushes whirring through makes the whole
experience miserable. Because when you’re in a hurry and you are confronted by
all this commotion, you make mistakes and you become more and more stressed and
more and more likely to cause yourself to miss your train. Your ability to
think straight is compromised, and you see everyone else as guilty of conspiring
to ruin your peace.
This is what it can be like when we go to a place like this.
It is so hard to cope, so difficult to
concentrate and focus on viewing the place, the actual reason for my visit,
that I constantly need to reset my internal thought process. The best way to
deal with all this is to just block everything and everyone out. But… add into
that three self-obsessed toddlers and their mother who has delegated
responsibility for the excursion to me, and I am a walking time bomb. This
place was different to a railway station, but no less awful. There were the
same gormless tourists around, and a few Instagram bozos all vying for
position, pushing each other out of the way to get the best picture. If the
flamenco performance in Seville the other evening was awful, this was by a very
long margin worse.
This was the central square in the capital of the land of Pandemonium; the painting of crowds even Brueghel would have had trouble completing; there was not a moment that I wanted to stay there. But I did, because we had paid to go in and we needed to make the most out of it.
Being confronted with this torturously
tiresome shower of cretins is the greatest distress we can face. We think we
see injustice, spitefulness, intentional disregard for others everywhere, even
though it is most probably just a random configuration of events. From the
young people monopolising the few seats around the place, to the guy standing
in front of the main object of the area while his partner takes a photo of him;
from the three people walking side-by-side very slowly so nobody can get past,
to the treacherous rat who steps in front of you as you are trying to take a
photo, we see injustice and malice everywhere, even if none is in fact intended.
And we also make our feelings known: being passive-aggressive and handing out a few barbs is a way of letting people know we aren’t coping very well. Children like Livia tend to do weird things like licking arbitrary objects or splashing in water, throwing stuff, eating leaves, punching something or someone, shouting random words in inappropriate places, taking off clothes, scratching, pushing, lying on the ground and cackling, and other things. As we get older, the ways of handling these things becomes more streamlined and less haphazard, but the notion that you are in an inhospitable place full of those who would harm you rarely dissipates, even if others around you don’t share your impressions.
The effort it takes to walk into a public
space on our own is extraordinary; courageous even. The feeling you have is the
equivalent of entering a wedding reception while the father of the bride is
giving a speech to the silently attentive guests, and everyone looks round at
you in disdain for disturbing the vibe. So the whole experience was really just
Bonny Bee and I trying to keep Livia from flipping her lid and at the same time
making sure Dainoris and Milda didn’t have any bright ideas. The fact we were
in one of Spain’s most prestigious buildings was secondary and the day was more
like an out-of-body experience.
As you can see from the photos, it was a
lovely place, despite the crowds, but most of it went past in a fug of irritation
and stress. Before we went to the Generalife, a more spacious and relaxed
section of the complex, we had lunch at one of the inns, in a delightfully
shady courtyard. I do like a place with character, and the fact we were on our
own table meant I didn’t feel threatened by other guests.
The Generalife was an oasis of calm after
the would-be outdoor airport departure terminal we had been in earlier. The
gardens, spilling over with flowers and shady trees, made everything
worthwhile. I had recovered some semblance of a good mood, and we had a better
time there. Livia and I walked together through the gardens and had much more
pleasure than earlier.
We left the place in a better frame of mind than we arrived, although Bonny Bee was pretty frazzled by it all. I had coped by trying to block out all the nastiness around me, but she had been at the brunt of several blows to her sanity and strength. We took the road back to Sierra Nevada (after a few GPS mindfarts) and had a decent rest after the upheavals of the day.
In the evening, I visited a supermarket to
get something to eat but there was hardly anything left. I still managed to
spend 24 euro on a few bits, which I found outrageous. This is really a captive
market here, where the shops and restaurants are conspiring to rip the gullible
visitors off. Put it this way: I won’t be coming here again any time soon.
Instead, we went to one of the few restaurants that deign to open in the summer
months and had what we thought was a small and rather plain meal, but
nevertheless cost one and a half times more than our banquet in Antequera.
The children were still coming down off
their plane of tension, and it showed, to the extent that their mother needed
to return to the apartment for a break before the coffee had arrived. She was
exhausted and overwhelmed, and I totally understood. It had been a most demanding
day.
The following day, we did absolutely
nothing at all. We went out for an expensive lunch and a short walk, but most
of it was spent trying to process the events of the previous day and regaining
our strength ready to tackle a daytrip to Granada on Sunday.
EXTRA PHOTOS:
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