A big small town - Brian
We’ve been here a little over a year now and I think the jury is in – we love it here in Granada. The other day I picked up some friends at the airport who were returning from a 5 week trip and I was really reminded of what a great community there is here.
Granada has about 300,000 residents and is dense but not overly so; the buildings are typically 2-5 stories tall with retail shops on the ground floor and apartments above, making it very pedestrian friendly and compact enough that you can walk most places you want to go. Its big enough to have a wide variety of art, music and other things to keep you from getting bored most of the time.
The funny thing is it can feel very small too. We have friends here but I wouldn’t say we know hundreds of people, yet we run into our friends and friends of friends on a weekly basis throughout the city. Its nice, but can be a little spooky and causes us to put a little more care into our actions – we’re not anonymous like we assumed we were in Seattle. If we go out, perhaps drink too much and do something silly chances are stories of our actions will get back to us in a day or two from the unlikeliest of people. Sometime this is more embarrassing than we might like, but today fortunately was not.
When I returned the rental car I used to pick up our friends at the airport, Eduardo (he works at the rental car office) asked if I got everything I needed; he’d seen me all over town running errands yet he works all day long too. Hopefully he didn’t see me take a shortcut down a one way street the wrong way….