Alhambra Days

Alhambra Days

Welcome to the new site!

Blogging is something I’d more or less stopped doing. But lately I’ve been looking around my adopted home with new eyes  – something to do with Spring, maybe – and realizing just how extraordinarily beautiful it is.

When I first returned here from Australia just over a month ago, it snowed.  Really came down.  Big fat white flakes that settled on the orange tree over my balcony, and decorated the ochre walls of the Alhambra in a fairytale covering.  It looked like a postcard; but then again, the Alhambra always does, no matter what the weather or time of day.  Times are I look at it and wonder how on earth I got so lucky as to be able to stare at it out of my window every day.  Then, I think that luck is only ever about buying a plane ticket.

It’s been more than a year since I moved to Granada, and now I find it hard to imagine living anywhere else.  I like swapping crude jokes with the gitano women up in the Plaza Larga, or taking a quiet tapa over in the cave barrio of the Sacromonte.  I love looking at the dreamy mountains folding into the distant valley, or sitting up on my terrace at sunset watching the Kasborahs grooming the ski slopes of the Sierra Nevada.  Most days I pinch myself that this is life, and not a dream.

It seems to me that it is an easy thing to live one’s whole life wondering if there is something better out there.  Something more rewarding, easier, or somehow more satisfying.  And I think there is nothing wrong in looking at your life and saying: this simply isn’t good enough for me.

The question is what you do about that, and I suppose each of us has to decide which road to take, sometime.

There are days when I wonder if I’ve made the right choice.  I’ve left behind family, friends, close personal relationships.  I’ve left behind a country I love, although we don’t seem to have so much in common anymore.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it?  Maybe I have, and maybe I haven’t.  Perhaps in a few years from now I’ll tire of trying to speak in a slurred Granadino accent, and never seeing a man who stands taller than five feet.  I might get tired of the extra pounds I can’t move thanks to the free tapas and ridiculously cheap wine.  I may even get fed up with looking at the Alhambra.

No.  Actually, that last one will never happen.

In the meantime, it was the right place for me to come.  I can breathe here, I can write.  I open my window to a chorus of birdsong and oranges hanging against a white washed wall.  Late at night I sit on my terrace and hear flamenco drifting over from the Peña la Plateria in the next alley, and my feet tap, because since I’ve been learning to dance flamenco they seem to tap all the time.

I research the things I need to and I take my time writing what I truly believe in, because I spent far too much time thinking I needed to churn out a book in order to survive financially.  I still need to survive financially, but somehow time and pressure cease to exist in Granada, and all that matters is that I do what I do with integrity and passion.

And that is what I came for, in the end, I think.  To live a life I believed in.  And it feels right, here.

It feels like home.

So I plan on ‘blogging’ a lot more, now.  I like sharing where I live.  It helps me remember that although I miss the people and landscape I left behind, I’ve come back to where I’m meant to be, for now, at least.

And since the sun is dipping behind the horizon, and the lights are beginning to come on at the base of the beautiful palaces on the hill, I shall have to leave you, and head up to my terrace, to watch the moonrise light the last of the winter snow on the mountains.

Till next time.