PrintI’m not good at object permanence when it comes to continents, or really any two places separated by anything longer than a train ride during which I can look out the window. So by the time I arrived in Granada via London and Madrid, all of New York, the East Coast, the United States ... seemed a little vague.
During my first couple of weeks here, I have tried to let my observations of bus routes, bars serving free tapas, Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee (no Starbucks!), meandering cobblestone streets, and frighteningly loud birdsong-filled plazas solidify through the haze of smoke and siestas into a vision of my for-now home. My hopeful supposition is that my understanding will creep along apace with my ability to eavesdrop on the quick and lisping Spanish.
When I got to Granada, I was given a sideways oriented map of the city, and I didn’t find the unobtrusive compass rose until it was too late. For a while I tried to compensate for my terrible sense of direction by using the Jewish-star-equals-swastika graffiti as my guide. I soon realized that finding my way based on something as ubiquitous as orange trees—beautiful even in this remarkably cold weather—would not be particularly successful.
As evidenced by the presence of the Alhambra, gorgeous and imposing on a hill above the city, Granada is a place created and complicated by its religious and cultural traditions. What is less obvious is that these issues do not belong entirely to the past. I very much doubt that the Turkish waiter who has offered to help me improve my Turkish and Spanish skills lives in Granada solely to capitalize on tourists’ yearning for something vaguely Islamic and Middle Eastern brought to life from centuries ago.
My program director warned us not to go to a “marginalized” neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. The Spanish roommate of a friend just said of this neighborhood: “New York. Harlem?” (Of my hometown, Philly, he knows cream cheese and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.) Andalucía still grapples with concerns surrounding immigration and cultural, racial, and religious tensions that I only begin to grasp. Yet they are not entirely foreign.
Having celebrated the United States’ answer to some of its own pressing issues, I returned to a friend’s house from an Irish bar, where we watched the inauguration just in time to catch a Spanish talk show featuring an array of Spaniards in afro wigs repeating in Spanish and English their requests for “Mr. Obama.” We lost patience, flipped to the news, to a dubbed Home Improvement, and eventually settled on Sin Tetas No Hay Paraíso. Colombian Catalina’s desire for breast enhancement spans continents, and then, as in other odd moments, I felt at home.
As the precise grid of New York recedes into a haze and the winding streets of Granada straighten themselves out in my mind, I am ready for surprises: on my first Saturday night here in a bar playing all reggae, I found myself swing-dancing with a silent Spanish man in orange and suspenders. And while I expect ever-increasing clarity, I am glad that everything in Granada thus far has been about as baffling and wonderful as that.
Tess Rankin is a Columbia College junior studying abroad in Granada.