After a nap and my falafelling about, I walked up through the Albacin, a medeival neighborhood full of tiny, windy, undrivable streets that my guidbook warned me was kinda sketchy. It turned out to be anything but. I got up to a square that overlooked the city. People were hanging out watching the sun slowly set, hippies were selling trinkets and crap, and after I spent as much time as I felt necessary overlooking the Alhambra, the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains and the city, I decided to continue on when I was followed by a friendly gitano dude wearing sweat pants who told me that the way I was going was closed. Oh, really? I asked. Yeah, he said. As so as I walked back towards him he asked me if I liked marijuana and I was all, no thanks, brah. And walked back down the hill to the falafel row where another dude, this time looking more like your dad than a hippie gypsy.
Earlier that day, Pablo had asked me if I¨d be ok with a German gal couchsurfing the living room with me (there was a couch and a bed) and I said sure (obviously). I met Pablo at his place after work and he went and picked her up at the hostel her mom, sis, and bro were staying at. She wanted to get away for a minute and meet a local. Katy, 25, kinda reminded me of a my wide eyed and curious French/Belgian/American cousin who looks like a certain Portland trumpet playing hottie (she kept her shirt on). She was from my favourite, the Black Forest, real friendly and spoke very little English, but her Spanish was a good bit better than was mine. So, we communicated, the three of us, in Spanish which was nice, because for someone of my level, It´s a lot easier to communicate with someone whose knowledge of Spanish is limited, and speaks more slowly than someone who´s been speaking it for 30 years. She had a slight German accent when she spoke and claimed that I had no American accent, but I was all, yeah, I guess, but sometimes it slips out when I´m tired. She was real curious about all kinds of shit and never left me feeling awkward as she usually had another question or comment. We got along real well.
We went to meet her mom and sis at the hostel and then go for tapas and a flamenco show. Her mom spoke almost no English or Spanish so there was some translating going on. Her lil sis, Andrea, was studying in Sevilla and was the most fluent of us foreigners, but had a fairly strong German accent which was pretty confusing for me at times, but we managed. As was sat there eating patatas bravas, and some pork on top of mashed potatoes, we spoke completely in Spanish, yet it wasn´t tiring or draining for me, probably due to the level and the speed of communication being so much lower than in Barcelona with my Catalan and Galician homies.
After the tapas we went to a bar where there was a flamenco show that was decent, I suppose and then headed back to our hood. Katy decided to stay at the hostel, but said that we should meet up tomorrow for breakfast.
Put that in your gypsy-enchanted skull-bong and smoke it.
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