Katy cracking up over Plaza Nueva. The Alhambra is in the top right corner.
Katy looking out at the Generalife Gardens at the Alhambra
On a pier near my flat
In Sevilla during Semana SantaCold rain fell on the Alhambra the day it was our turn to go. This produced both rapid water flow for the fountains in the Nasrid Palace and a cacophony of bad manners in motley languages. Unlike the other tourists, my sister Katy was in no hurry to snap photos and see the Patio of the Lions. To her, the Alhambra was nothing more than the place I’d talked about seeing all week long. Instead of blending into the antsy crowd, she stayed on the periphery and howled with laughter, somehow finding everything from my makeshift headscarf/rain shield to German chatter hysterical. Nobody at the Alhambra would have guessed how much she had been suffering judging by the jokes and laughter belting out of her tiny frame.
As many of you know, Katy’s boyfriend Danny and good friend Warren died last January. Thank goodness for simultaneous spring breaks because she got to escape familiarity (except for me) and delve into a refreshing panorama of olives, Holy Week processions, and men who hiss obscenely at women walking down the street. I say the latter is refreshing because it made her laugh.
Katy stands at barely 5 feet, 2 inches and has the messiest hair I’ve ever seen on a girl. She’s notorious in our family for rarely brushing it, a habit she started around age 10 when she was a true blue tomboy. She’s always been “the funny one” between the two of us, famous for her impersonations of Mr. Young, the neighborhood tailor, and Betsy, her Theta house mother. She says that her recent trip to Spain was the first time she had felt like herself again, and I believe it.
Shopping with Dad´s money, wooo hoooo!As soon as she walked off the airplane, she went into a 20 minute imitation of an acquaintance she met on her flight, a 22-year-old surfer from California who ordered a Bacardi and Coke at 7 am in honor of his mantra to “Live it up in Spain.” This commenced 7 days of nonstop laughter and jokes, which culminated at the end of the week in Granada. This city is a treasure chest for medieval Muslim architecture, the Alhambra its most dazzling jewel.
Before roaring up a steep, cobblestone hill in a crowded mini bus to enter the Alhambra, we ate a gourmet lunch and went shopping. This was all done outside in steady rain. We hunched over our plates and ate under an umbrella in Plaza Nueva because Katy refused to go inside. “I like the rain, I think it’s nice,” she said. “It’s her vacation,” I thought, “What the heck.” We paid the check and entered a milieu of Moroccan scarf and chotchky shops, laughingly fighting over who got to hold the umbrella. The Sierra Nevada rain fell harder and harder, and our 4 Euro umbrella bent inside-out every time we walked against the wind.
It’s needless to say our shoes were squirting out water with each step by the time we arrived at the Alhambra gates. We looked like haggard twin hobos with too many scarves. Our main goal was to see the Nasrid Palace, the heart of the Alhambra and the section that causes my coworkers’ eyes to widen every time they talk about it.
Into the Nasrid Palace we sloshed, relieved to finally see what all the fuss was about. As it turned out, the real “fuss” inside was impatient tourists vying for space to take photos of sparkling artwork they probably knew very little about. Not to say that Katy and I knew much about it, either. In fact, earlier in the day Katy asked, “What time are going to the Olly Ambra?”
Before roaring up a steep, cobblestone hill in a crowded mini bus to enter the Alhambra, we ate a gourmet lunch and went shopping. This was all done outside in steady rain. We hunched over our plates and ate under an umbrella in Plaza Nueva because Katy refused to go inside. “I like the rain, I think it’s nice,” she said. “It’s her vacation,” I thought, “What the heck.” We paid the check and entered a milieu of Moroccan scarf and chotchky shops, laughingly fighting over who got to hold the umbrella. The Sierra Nevada rain fell harder and harder, and our 4 Euro umbrella bent inside-out every time we walked against the wind.
It’s needless to say our shoes were squirting out water with each step by the time we arrived at the Alhambra gates. We looked like haggard twin hobos with too many scarves. Our main goal was to see the Nasrid Palace, the heart of the Alhambra and the section that causes my coworkers’ eyes to widen every time they talk about it.
Into the Nasrid Palace we sloshed, relieved to finally see what all the fuss was about. As it turned out, the real “fuss” inside was impatient tourists vying for space to take photos of sparkling artwork they probably knew very little about. Not to say that Katy and I knew much about it, either. In fact, earlier in the day Katy asked, “What time are going to the Olly Ambra?”
Posing in the "Sala de Las Dos Hermanas"
Every chamber, atrium and corridor in the palace is precisely proportioned and breezy with scented air from towering pine trees and sweet orange blossoms. According to my Andalucia Lonely Planet, “This is the place in the Alhambra that will stir the desire to own beauty even in the most unpossessive of people.” I’m afraid this sentence was extremely true for many visitors who hogged coveted views and greedily videoed for what seemed to be longer than January. Instead of filling our memory cards with a plethora of stalactite vaulting and Arabic engravings that were stunning but meant very little to us, we took funny pictures of each other in a colorful array of newly bought, sopping wet scarves. The Patio del Cuatro Dorado and the Palacio de Comares felt like majestic playgrounds, and Katy and I were their most devoutly playful patrons.
Somehow we missed out on the mint rain ponchos in the background
We finally stumbled into the Patio de los Leones, a courtyard I was excited to see since I had spent hours studying in an art history class several years ago. As our rainy day luck would have it, the famous 12 lion statues were on vacation for repairs, the fountain was off, and the bowl of the fountain was surrounded by a nouveau, wood-framed glass casing. It actually reminded me of the industrial-hip interior decoration at Chipotle. Sometimes pictures on postcards are better. So Katy and I continued posing for each other in our bag lady outfits. We sauntered into the chambers surrounding the courtyard, and finally turned our giggles into quiet “ooohhs and aaahhhs.” To the naked eye, ignoring the gaudy box around the poor lion fountain, the Nasrid palace seems perfect. The intricate geometric engravings from floor to ceiling, the lighting techniques, the refreshing alliance between tiny detail and airy spaciousness (unlike other sites I’ve visited, like cathedrals) – it’s a feel-good place to be, even in the rain.
But it also holds many secrets. Its Muslim architects left flaws in the artwork and design to recognize that they as humans can only seek to create perfection since, according to the Quran, God alone is perfection’s true source. I wonder if the artists and builders cringed while creating flaws in their masterpiece, or if they did so sincerely believing they weren’t making mistakes in the conventional sense, but rather lovely tokens of respect. Either way, they truly believed that perfect peace and harmony were hiding in a sealed envelope not even they could open. And yet they still managed to create sheer beauty despite their deep awareness of mortal imperfection.
As the Nasrid Palace creators accepted the fact that perfection was a secret, my little sister is sore from trying to accept that perfection’s opposites, chaos and death, are secret, too. At least for the short time we spent in the Alhambra, she accepted this secret and just laughed.
We got lost trying to find the palace exit. Getting lost in the cold rain usually isn’t fun, but it is when you walk in on a couple photographing their own make-out session. At least, it was for us. Unused to such unabashed PDA, Katy quaked with laughter, grabbed my face to pretend to kiss me, and took a picture of it. Then after immediately playing back the picture, a very unflattering close-up of our chubby cheeks squished together, she reeled over and laughed so hard tears of joy rolled down her cheeks. Now that’s beauty in imperfection.
Ultimate scarf moment
