The marvellous hostel had a cheap breakfast that you could opt for.
Most mornings we either went without breakfast or finished some bread or whatever from the night before, so it was great to be able to come down to cereal and crispy toastbreads. And another thing: coffee was an unheard-of treat in the mornings. We made no habit of going into cafés, nor buying expensive breakfasts...but at the hostel they served coffee in bowls.
Bowls!
Viva Espańa!
We walked the half mile or so from the hostel into the older area of the town and found the streets packed, busy, and writhing with people...there were a few people who stood out as tourist, certainly, but there were far too many grandma-types with severe hair and handbags for them to all be tourists. A parade started, and confusion began to reign between Gemma and I. In rudimentary Spanish, and not being adept enought to insert the 'the hell' or even 'the fuck' that I really wanted, I settled for directing "What's going on?" to the nearest Spaniard.
The procession was a festival - Corpus Christi.
That accounted for the proud marching town figures and the poor fellows walking along sweltering in Dick Whittington-style costumes.
Then things started to go a little awry of the dignified religious celebration that I had in my imagination.
Shortly after this picture was taken, I was hit over the head with an inflated bladder on a stick.
Ours is not to reason why...ours is to stand and be hit with blown up bits of animals. I love the facial expressions of the women in the background...
The fiesta atmosphere lasted all day. Gemma and I wandered around the town, and in the evening we went back to the little café on the curving road on the way up to the Alhambra and ate the fixed price meal again, rolling down to the barrio and standing in the manically hot and busy streets drinking beer and eating tapas as scooters shot through impossibly tight groups of loudly conversing people and music seemed to come from everywhere - the bar we were outside of, the pub towards the road and the square with the round fountain, further into the maze of streets of the barrio and spontaneously from the group of guys with drums sitting outside a tiny shop selling rugs and trinkets while dogs ran around everywhere, smoke rolled up into a black sky from all quarters and with a little jinking and ducking, you could make out the yellow-lit walls of the Alhambra on the hill, the cypress trees silhouetted.
Granada is one of my favourite places on Earth.
your parade experience in spain seems a bit less scary than mine - when i was in valencia there was some kind of church celebration that involved people walking down in full hooded regalia, i.e. looking like the klu klux klan - freaky!