A few notes about Granada and phones

Sometimes Granada feels like a labrynth. The streets are narrow, mostly cobblestoned and can vere off at a 45 degree angle without much notice. The buildings on every street are built deliberately high to block out the sun and wind and everything stretches out like wild ivy from a series of plazas and fountains, each street bisected and intersected dozens of smaller alleys and side streets.
In addition to this, there are no street signs. Sometimes you can find the name of an alley on a plaque posted on the side of a building at an intersection, but it´s hard from a set-rule. On major streets there might be Disneylandesque colored signs pointing to major plazas or landmarks, but most of the time they´re just there to direct tourists back to their hotel.
Again, not terribly helpful.
In some ways this system is cool; it makes just finding the door to a resturant or musem feel like stumbling onto a secret passage or clandestine hideout. It also seems appropriate that a roaming minetaur wouldn´t feel out of place here in Picasso´s homeland (the labryth-dwelling man-beast was a favorite symbol of the famous painter).
But for someone like myself who frequently got lost in the town I lived in for 14 years, it can also be sublimely frustrating. There is apparently one store in the city that sells international phone cards that can be used easily with my cell phone for three days in a row before our trip to the beach I spent over an hour seeking out this hidden shoppe. I never once found it. This is more remarkable when you realize that I had been there TWICE before and HAD DIRECTIONS.
I even had a friend walk me there (after it was closed, unfortunatly) and show me how to get home and I had no idea where we were. "See, it´s right by the Salsa place we were last night," he told me. And I saw the Salsa place, recognized the area, recognized that I had been there before, had walked there only last night, and was mesmerized. "I thought this was on the other side of the city!" It was not. Or maybe it was. I really had no idea what side of the city we were on anyway.
So basically, I´ve had to just use the phone in my house for calling home. This is not a terrible thing, just difficult, since the one phone in the house is in the TV room and someone is almost always watching TV in there and I don´t want to interrupt them.
So today I got up in the morning and made a late-night phone call to my girlfriend in the American Midwest. We talked for a little over an hour and my Señora later informed me that she had to go down to the street to use a payphone for a call she needed to make.
I felt bad and insisted she let me know when she needed to use the phone if I was on it. "It´s your phone, not mine," I told her in Spanish. "No," she smiled at me and said (also in Spanish), "you live in this house and the phone belongs to whoever lives in this house."
So Granada may be easy to be lost in, hard not to feel at home here.