Granada

Arriving in Granada, I had no plans, no reservations, no contacts. But as is the case all over the world, the like minded travelers emerge, in a bus, a taxi, in a shelter from the rain... In this case, I met a couple of Australian girls who haqd found a small hostal with some space, and I asked them if they minded if I stayed there. After they said no, and we got off the bus, in the midst of the granadinian Saturday night, flocks and pageants of peoples cruising by.
They had no directions, and the holstal was somewhere in the old Moorish market, the lower Albacin, so we stopped on calle de los reyes and they called the place and the owner came down and led us back. The door was painted with a simple Arabic name, but other then that there were no markings as we entered in the house-like dorm and climbed the spiral staircase.
there was a group of people hanging out at he dining room table, bags of tobacco and a bottle of wine as the guests concentrated on their books and poetry even as we checked in for two nights and were shown to our shared room upstairs.
We went out for tapas as my head was reeling from the journey, marveling at the fact that I was here, in Granda, after 5 years of distant journeys and lives imagined, lived and passed by, now, eating tapas of cous-cous and vegetales in a small streetside bar in the winding cobbled streets of the albacin.
We had met a couple in the room, a British woman and her Mexican boyfriend, from Sevilla, and gone to get some food and beverage, and I continued out with them after the Australians had returned to the hostel. We went to a packed Irish pub, and talked about flamenco and the latin vibe over cups of Riojan wine from the north-east of the country.
Afterwards, as they tried to fall asleep in the bunk beds upstairs, I went to the private hostal bar and enjoyed a few cold beers with the manager from Barcelona, his Mexican assistant and the bartender who was a cute girl from Minnesota who reminded me of the girl from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Arc. As we danced to Gnarles Barkley's "Crazy", a Spaniard named Carlos, a 60 year old man, outdid us all, bouncing around the room in a eyes-closed reverie...