Mr. Jones strikes up a conversation

The word fabulous really isn´t part of my everyday vernacular, but right now I can think of nothing more fabulous than the Alhambra. It´s architecture and art and views and fountains and history and flowers and cats. There were cats all over, it was great. But here´s my problem with trying to be a travel writer. I could try to write about the architecture or the water transport system or how beautiful the gardens are but it probably wouldn´t work. And even if it did, what would be the point exactly? People who are into travel want to travel, not read about travel, right?

Well, ignore that issue for now, I guess. There are roses growing everywhere here. I don´t know what the face-masked crowd was protesting yesterday, but Granada smells really good to me. It´s hard not to drink too much here: The tapas are free if you buy a drink, but they´re not that big. So you have to have a lot of drinks to get a free dinner. This British guy in my hostel was emptying out his locker today: half a bottle of wine, three beers, big bottle of Jaegermeister, and half a can of Limonata. Someone asked him how old he was and he said eighteen. Eighteen. I´m crashing with people ten years younger than me. Whoa. Alcoholic British boy aside, the hostel is full of Americans. But all the tourists I see in the city seem to be British. I wonder what the Americans do all day, and where the British sleep.

It´s hard to find good blues in Spain, but really who needs blues when you´ve got flamenco? There´s this thing with flamenco that it´s sort of supposed to happen spontaneously and that the really hard core flamenco-doers won´t really perform if they think tourists are in the audience. Or something. If that´s the case then what I saw last night probably wasn´t the real thing; it didn´t feel touristy but there were definitely tourists there. Whatever. It was really, really good. Flamenco guitar blows my mind; it sounds like five different instruments are being played, all from six strings and two hands. And. Forget statistics, forget travel writing, forget saving the world. I wanna be a flamenco dancer.