Ordinary Outside, Extraordinary Inside

You don't need a fancy facade: Lessons from the Alhambra as we close out a year.

“They made them ordinary on the outside, beautiful on the inside.”

So said the tour guide about the multiple palaces of the ginormous Alhambra—me, wandering after him, mouth agape over this place.

If you look really close, you can see that the original walls of the Alhambra extend to the hills to the left in this picture. I told you—ginormous.

My friend Angela had recommended this magical place,¹ and I planned my Spain experiences around visiting it. She has recommended a number of things and is usually spot-on with her endorsements, but I’d never heard her speak so…meaningfully…of a place. Full disclosure: I didn’t know until that moment that the Alhambra wasn’t made-up. In my mind, it existed only in Washington Irving’s book, Tales of the Alhambra. Maybe this is why we travel—something about making places, history, peoples, and ideas real to us?

Speaking of travel, “recommendation travel” is my favorite type of travel. As in, a friend or a stranger gets that look in their eyes and says,…