Speechless in Granada

More days off, more cheap airline tix, blah, blah, blah. But that’s where the blah blah ends. I was rejoined by my traveling sidekick, Shawn after a 2 month absence and for a change as of late, I was actually prepared (read: pre-booked tickets in my grubby little hands) for this latest adventure. Well, at least as prepared as anyone can be for something as majestic as Granada’s Alhambra. I knew that this Moorish fort turned palace on a hilltop would be grand, but I had no idea just how “holy crap, this is amazing” grand it was going to be. I spent close to five hours wandering around the complex, torn between open-mouthed gaping and the futile desire to try to capture it all on camera. I watched as fellow traveler’s attempted the same balancing act, some armed with professional looking cameras attached to lenses the size of medieval cannons, others waving around their cell phone cams, even some with disposable cardboard cameras (which, really, why bother? If you are over the age of five and you can’t make the effort to get/ borrow a real camera for the Alhambra, maybe buying the postcards is a better option for you), yet the one thing we all had in common was the hopelessness of knowing that there is no way to do justice to this remarkable place. I could have filled up my 2 gig memory card five times over and still not been able to express the sense of awe that washed over me upon entering the Nazaries Palace. The delicate, intricate geometric patterns, the ever-present reflecting pools, the sensuous curves of the doorway arches, the carved wooden ceilings, which manage to be both extravagant and subtle at the same time…it is almost too much to behold all at once. Even trying to put it into words feels pointless. It is precisely the kind of place that one thinks about upon hearing the words “wonder of the world”, which made it that much more annoying when I heard that it had been in the running for the “new” 7 world wonders, yet got beat out by something as unimaginative as Rio’s Big-Ass Jesus. I mean really, talk about blah…