Acción de gracias y la Sierra Nevada

Happy Thanksgiving! It's been a busy week or so. I forgot to mention that two weekends ago I went to the Sierra Nevada (the mountain chain that surrounds Granada) to go skiing - yes, skiing during the third week in November when it was still 60 degrees in the city. It was phenomenal, and the best ski trip I'd ever been on. The ski station is just at the base of the tallest mountain on the Iberian peninsula, the Mulhacén, and I was up somewhere around 10,900 feet. Almost eleven-thousand feet! We were skiing above the clouds, until we skied through them, which was cold and a little scary, due to the lack of visibility. They say that, on a clear day from the top, you can see the Straight of Gibraltar and Africa. Very, very cool, but not too cold - it was only around 50 degrees the whole day. Besides the altitude sickness right when we got there, the day was perfect. The pistes even look like a James Bond set, complete with an enormous satellite dish control center, an observatory, and several concrete, man-made lakes. That night, the five of us who went bundled in for the night in an apartment which we rented, complete with kitchenette, and made plastic-tasting pizza, spaghetti, nachos, and hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps (this was a problem when the milk ran out and we started mixing peppermint schnapps with the cocoa powder and ice). All in all, not a bad trip.


The whole group.

Thanksgiving was also an adventure. It started out the night before the holiday, when one of my friends reminded me of a restaurant we had tried to eat at before based on the recommendation of a Scottish English professor who was in one of my Spanish classes at the beginning of the year, but which never seemed to be open when we were hungry. The restaurant (which everyone calls Sue's Place) is run by an English woman, expatriated to Spain to bring the joy of Sunday English roasts to all Granadinos. We figured, hey, if they do Sunday roasts, maybe she's doing something for Thanksgiving. She wasn't. However, we stalked Sue, begged her to help out our little group of homesick Americans, and she decided to see what she could do in the next 24 hours to find us a turkey. As it turned out, we had shrimp (a Spanish holiday staple), an electric-green and delicious soup, turkey, mashed potatoes, her attempt at stuffing, steamed vegetables(!!!), and homemade apple pie. Not entirely traditional, but wonderful just the same.



The day after Thanksgiving, my friend Curstin and I decided to be lazy and not to go skiing again like a large portion of the group - I counted it as a blessing that I didn't do some serious damage to myself the first time around - so we checked out the Science Park, practically just behind my house. This is a large science center, perfect for huge school groups. It was pretty unremarkable, though a great way to pass an afternoon. They are very excited about the recent opening of Spain's base in the Antarctic, and had a whole exhibit on the base station, complete with a walk in a blast freezer which reminded me a lot of Maine - I had forgotten what a pleasure it is to feel the inside of your nose seize up and freeze every time you take in a breath. It was also a pleasure to watch the 85 year-old Spanish abuelitas in their furs totter through. My two favorite parts were the butterfly jungle, and this great exhibition that they had going on which consisted of little mechanical dioramas made out of wood and metal which acted out a little scene powered by a hand crank - I spent about an hour in there.

Surgery on "Anatomy Jane," as Curstin put it. Does anyone get that reference? (Nicole? If you had access to a TV down there...)

This past weekend was when our program had decided to recreate Thanksgiving for us, in the mountains around Granada. We went to the Alpujarra, a beautiful region of lush green fields, olive groves, lemon trees, persimmons (which are great!), magical streams, and white villages. The goal was to go hiking the first day, stay in a beautiful country hotel whose chef we bribed to make three turkeys, visit three more towns the next day, hike around a bit more, and head home. It almost worked out.

The first day was great, if not a little chilly.

This first stream tasted like blood because of the insanely high iron content (look at the color of the rocks), but was apparently great for my liver and perhaps getting rid of evil spirits. Another one I tried I really liked, and was naturally carbonated by the rocks it passed through. Not quite Perrier, but...

More ham than I've ever cared to see in my life. This is a ham-drying center in the highest village in Europe (Trevélez, 4,900 feet) which is renowned for it's ham. Apparently, the place is so cold the whole year that they can dry ham naturally without using refrigerators. The ham was pretty good, but imagine the smell in there.

Thanksgiving (and a legit one at that, with homemade cranberry sauce!) before...

...and the aftermath.

The next morning, after going directly to bed after that disgustingly wonderful meal, we woke to find a fresh eight or nine inches of snow, no power, and no way to get the bus up the mountain. Instead, we all ate about five breakfasts, read, talked, played board games, and put our inadequate clothing on to go play in the snow. It reminded me of the storms during the summer that knock out the power just long enough for you to dig out the candles, be forced to turn the TV off, and reconnect with your family. It was great. The hotel itself was run by a warm family with a dog, had piles of books everywhere to read in about 12 languages, was immaculately clean, and just rustic enough. We finally got out of there around noon, but not before some good snowball fights and romps in the snow with the puppy.

A persimmon tree. Click on it - the colors are great.

If the ride up the mountain was bad, the ride down, on hairpin turns about which you usually read in motoring magazines which test Italian sports cars, in a bus which needed to put chains on its tires just to move a foot forward before starting a series of backwards slides, was hellish. But we made it. We were able only to hit up one of the towns on our itinerary, Pampaneira. Many of the towns in the Alpujarra have the -eira ending, which is really unusual in Spanish. This is a remnant of Gallego, the language of the Celtic/Spanish people from Spain's north Atlantic coastal region, Galicia, which itself was colonized by a combination of immigrants from the present day UK and Ireland and mainstream Roman-influenced Iberians. After the Catholic Kings kicked the Moors out of Granada in 1492, some Arabs retreated to the mountains around the city. After they were evicted from there as well, there was a massive, state-sponsored immigration in the 16th century of people from Galicia to the towns, which took on new names. At least I thought it was interesting.