A por ello
There’s a joke about the Andalusian accent… that the alphabet in Southern Spain has five letters: A, B, TH, D, E, E, E, E… It definitely doesn’t get anywhere near S, and with Euro Cup football fever at full pitch, I lost my voice cheering for ‘Epana a por ello’. With five minutes left in the semi-final, when it was obvious Russia weren’t going to recover from a 3-0 deficit we started singing ‘adio’, then, to the German fans who were scoping the competition for Sunday night’s final, ‘podemo’. I certainly think ‘we can’ and timed my departure from Spain perfectly with an early morning flight to Paris after the scheduled final. After the semi-final victory, Granada was awash in red and gold as people partied in the fountains, and danced through the streets, their wringing wet bodies writhing emphatically to impromptu music, car horns and war cries. Drums, cardboard tubes, tin pots, firecrackers - if it made a noise, and the more the better, it was anything goes. I’m planning on going all out guiri for the grand-final, buying a Sergio Ramos jersey (I also vowed to join in the public bathing should Spain win). The motos, dog shit, narrow streets, cobble stones, incessant calls of ‘guapa’ and ‘rubia’, the tourists, the pig, the plumbing, sounding like a half-wit, the cigarette smoke – are all things I can live without. But the vino tinto, café con leche, tostadas, botellon*, being flanked by the Sierra Nevada to one side, and the Alhambra to the other and of course the people** I’ve met, will all be sorely missed.
*Botellon is one of the strangest things I encountered in Granada. On the town’s outskirts in front of the Hipercor (like a Coles or Woolworths) around 500 people congregate between 11pm-3am with bottled drinks in plastic bags, plastic cups and of course an array of musical instruments. It’s incredibly relaxed and social and friendly and even our professors encouraged attendance (in moderation), as there are probably colloquialisms in circulation at Botellon that they don’t know.
**One of the most interesting people I met at Botellon was the founder of the Spanish Metallica Fan Club. He fit the profile - black t-shirt, long hair, IT employee, phone filled with clips from Electric Weekend in Getafe, and he pulled up his top to reveal an enormous Unforgiven tattoo – Que Guay!. And at my last Botellon, I met someone called Nacho. And I couldn’t leave Spain before meeting someone called Nacho.
Granada up close, and at a distance... 'F*** me, Pakito's getting married!'