Slush Pile #4: A Spanish Schedule

Granada is exactly like its demographic- half over 60, half under 30, and an extra tenth tourist. I know. Math doesn’t make sense in Spain. Ordering a drink = +1 free tapa, families of old people and children file in for dinner around 9 or 10 at night, a ridiculous amount of beautifully poised White women have ass, the economy has improved substantially without a functioning government, nobody eats vegetables but doesn’t get fat… 

Perhaps Southern Spain is a Neverland suspended from disbelief since touching the ground can never happen when the sun is so bright, the rabo de toro so tender, and Tinto de Verano so sure a cure to all moods. Here, it makes sense. Is that my excuse for abandoning my blog schedule? Well, reality is more mundane and nearly bores me with its romance. I got distracted by a boy. That’s all. Ya le extraño. 

Granada is sunshine and laughter caught in constance by solid Moorish walls and cathedrals. Buildings here are serious structures, the last resort and major attempt at being serious. The city borrows its narrow streets and high walls from Moroccan architecture, and the streets are designed in the Moorish way to have walls facing the hot sun and cool the city down in the summer. Patches of geometric mosaics and walls flower through Catholic sinew threaded round an Arabic carcass. As the most pagan branch of Christianity, Catholicism is about deity worship and negotiation. Catholics who moved to the Mid West where I grew up were all too austere to need to negotiate with God. Without the crushing guilt and capitalistic resolution, they might have been Methodists. F. Scott Fitzgerald was the last true Minnesotan Catholic. Protestants would never have had the architectural good taste to build upon the unparalleled geometry of mosques. 

I spend a lot of time here sipping vermut and scrolling for freelance gigs in what my friend terms “the neighborhood old man pub.” Every good bar in Spain should have at least two or three ancient, sweater-clad grandfathers who yell at each other over beers because their hearing left with their hair a decade ago. Everybody calls the oldest octogenarian by a childhood diminutive of their name (“Juanito” is what Juan’s mother would’ve called him about 60 years ago) and the latest football match is always on and passionately debated as complimentary bar snacks are steadily shoved into dentures. The hipster bars in the hills of la Universidad de Granada are better at night, before hitting massive temples of drunken dancing. But I still haven’t figured out how they go out to clubs at 2 am and come back at 7, without drugs. Math doesn’t make sense in Spain. 

GRANADA BITCHES