Over the past seven years I may have done this trip, the one that takes you from Granada to Seville in the train, about a hundred times or possibly more. I've done it in all kinds of weather except for, I'd say,a heavily snowed one. But every single time the beauty of the Andalusian landscape strucks me with its tapestry of olive trees over the smooth domes with some rocky mountains, nothing of proper height, in the background. Here and there you get some wind turbines which some may argue are not beautiful, but here, even those are. That tapestry it's a very peculiar mixture of nature and human work, as the regular pattern used for the trees makes it look, from a certain distance, like a dotted portrait. Of course, this is much older than that concept by possibly some hundreds years.
Today was a lovely late december day in Granada. It was a very sunny september like day, indeed I think it burnt my cheeks a bit. By a lovely sun I mean that which warms your skin everywhere within photon reach and makes you take layers off. I ended up walking just on my t-shirt and accidentally my hat, but that's only because I had been swimming and I had wet hair. Of course, that's mainly due to the cosine of theta factor on top of the square of the distance from the sun to the earth in the equation that, approximately but very accurately, describes how the power of that our nearest star reaches the surface of this, our home planet(times a constant which depends on the units). It's that cosine of theta as I say, that makes the sun a bit of a bizarre joke up north in the Perfidious Albion, where you can only enjoy it from behind a window glass and only if you are inside a heated room. It does not happen to me anymore but in the beginning, not only one or two but many times I've seen the luminosity of a bright day from the inside of a not as often as I'd have liked heated room and I have gone outside just to catch some photons only to be slapped by a freezing air and having to convince myself that it is indeed a sunny day because my eyes are more sensitive to luminosity and if I look nearly straightforwardly at the direction of the sun, I have to close them.
From the balcony of a friend's apartment you can see, as if you had just gone there to enjoy the views, the city of Granada in all its charm. The cathedral towers on the bottom, with the Alhambra in the middle and the fractal snowed mountains of Sierra Nevada with their cake like frost on top. The everytime recognizable shape of Mulhacen, which appears sketched in plenty of touristic references to the city, in its whitest version with the bluest and cleanest sky on top. That was not the best thing there, of course. That's just the place, a framework made of a conglomerate of naturally formed mountains with some human additions, but it's the human side of it that it's most amazing. I say that because I consider myself a very lucky person as it seems that when counted, the number of good people I've met in my life outnumbers that of whoresons by a lot. And in Granada I've met a lot of them, good people I mean. Not all of them are still there as life has shuffled them around the globe but visiting the ones, even though I've not seen all of them as my trip was very short, reminds me that I'm a very lucky self-conscious tad of atoms.
No comments:
Post a Comment