If you fly right now to Granada, the oldest holdout of Moorish sovereignty and splendor in southern Spain, and walk across the street to have coffee in a coffee shop full of smartly dressed Spaniards drinking coffee before work, the music playing on shop speakers will be... MGMT. Down the street, past the statue of Columbus asking Isabella for money—a transaction that didn't actually happen in Granada, although Granada's past pivots at the point Isabella conquers Granada from the Moors, and flush from that success she green-lighted Columbus—if you walk past that statue and into one of those shops right there, full of tea and potpourri and local wine, the shop owner will be playing... Lady Gaga. Hail a cab driven by a local, a man born and educated in Granada, and he's listening to... Smash Mouth.

It's like a six-minute trip in his cab up to the Alhambra, the palace and citadel on a hill first erected as a battlement in the 9th century, then rebuilt in the 11th century by Jewish warrior-poet Shmuel HaNagid, then richly rebuilt by the Nasrid dynasty in the 13th century (see those columns and arches). You long for a story or two from the cab driver. Anything. The family massacred in the Court of Lions, the haunted chambers Washington Irving walked through with a candle, buried-treasure theories, three lovelorn princesses locked in posh isolation, an opinion on the tile work (that's the photo McHugh is taking in the polaroid), memories of earthquakes... whatever! But all the cab driver does is sing along softly to the radio: "I ain't the sharpest tool in the sheh-heddd./She was looking kind of dumb/with her fingers on her thumb/In the shape of an 'L' on her forehead..."

In defense of the cab driver, most of the tourists decorate themselves in goofy bland American stuff too. Waiting in the queue for our Alhambra appointment (you have to sign up months in advance for a time slot), I snapped a polaroid of this guy. Gap sweatshirt + crenellations built out of stone from the ochre earth + neighborhood in the distance where for centuries people have lived in hillside caves = distillation of the travel experience. It's weird what survives the trip to a famous-medieval-spot-plus-hundreds-of-years like Granada. It's unpredictable. Lady Gaga and Smash Mouth and the Gap are easy to come by, but I didn't see a single Starbucks all week.

More to come, including the food in Granada, the nightlife in Granada, and Heather McHugh's crush on Shmuel HaNagid.