Andalusia Journal 2004
Málaga
We arrived outside of Antequera pretty quickly, but the fairly charming old town was overshadowed by the industrial area upwind, which was casting a haze of pollution over the city. We might have stayed if the town had been very charming, but it wasn't very special, and we were only staying there to avoid Málaga and the whole Costa del Sol. We had in fact accomplished everything in Spain we had intended to (except that we forewent Jaen, Baeza, and Úbeda) – so what to do? We didn't really care to stay in Antequera anymore, our only criteria was that we would stay there two nights.
Eric and Susanne read through the guidebooks, and we considered a number of options, and ultimately said, well, why not Málaga? The guidebook description was of a pretty nice city, largely ignored by the hordes of tourists who pass through its airport, which is on the verge of being discovered. Sure! Let's go there. And so we did.
Like most Spanish towns, Málaga is hard to navigate once you get off the big boulevards. Many streets are pedestrian only, and the rest are one-way. The central boulevard had a Christmas market, and when we arrived it was paseo time and the streets were teeming with Spaniards. We drove in circles a bit trying to get to the hotel we had selected: the Carlos V, a pretty nice 2-star hotel with a garage. It was maddening – at one point we were trapped behind a car stopped to let out a remarkable quantity of skinny young women from the back, rather like some sort of postmodern clown-car – I referred to this as the "disgorgement of the niñas".
We finally found an illegal spot half a block from the hotel (we could not drive by the place, because the street was one-way in the wrong direction), and we went and got rooms. They didn't have a single room available for two nights, so we decided that on the second night, Susanne would stay in a cot in our room (rather than pay an inflated rate to stay in a double by herself). The young man at the counter was a funny site – young and sullen, hair gelled up in the air, the sort of tragic thing who lives on coffee and cigarettes. He was not entirely helpful – when I asked where the garage was, he just said "en frente" (which I translated to myself as "in front", forgetting that it equally means "across from"). In fact (as he later told Susanne while Eric and I moved the car) it was slightly down the street, and slightly up an alley. It also required a key, which he gave to Susanne when he showed it to her. The question is, why didn't he show me? I said, OK, I'm going to get the car, and he nodded (I'm sure I used a strange expression, perhaps the English equivalent of "I'm going to catch the car"), but he didn't give me the necessary additional information. He did, when asked, give me a reasonably good map of the city – had it indicated one way streets and pedestrian streets, it would have been even better.
Susanne stayed behind, and Eric and I went to the car, armed with a map. We drove back to the boulevard, and tried to figure out how to get to the other end of our street. The large street you'd expect to use to get to that part of town was pedestrianized, though it is apparently not pedestrianized all the time – so when we to a turn, saw a sign for our hotel, and began following it to get there, we were ultimately shunted back onto the same boulevard. Curses, foiled again! So we went back, to the same turn, but this time went the opposite direction from where the hotel sign told us to go, and made a long large loop around the old section. We had to stop twice to figure out where we were, and somewhat miraculously arrived at the hotel (looking at a better map later, we determined that our long circuitous route had been in fact about the most direct way to get there). Susanne flagged us down and directed us to the garage, a tight and warreny underground job that would have been murder to navigate if there hadn't been so few cars in it.
Back at the hotel, Eric and I had to switch rooms to a slightly larger room that would accommodate a cot the following night. The room was barely larger, and didn't fit the cot any better (without moving beds) – but it was on the first, rather than third, floor and so we could hear the rather loud front desk phone through our door when it rang, all night long (though it didn't really wake us up).
We headed into the warren of tiny old streets to have dinner at a place called at La Posada de Antonio that was famous for charred meats, rather like a Brazilian churrascaria. We had a little trouble deciding what to order, so when our waiter said "I'll bring you a selection of meats", we said "OK". He also said he'd bring us eggplant – but he brought us not the eggplant with honey dish I'd requested, but a fried eggplant dish, which was pretty good anyway, but much less interesting. (Our waiter's name was Antonio, and it seemed that the "Antonio" of the restaurant's title was him, and not Antonio Banderas, whose photo and autograph was printed inside the first page of every menu.) We began by sharing an ensalada "La Posada" (a sort of chef's salad, fairly similar to the ensaladas mixtas that we'd been eating everywhere), and then came the eggplant and the three-meat selection. There was a white veal chop, some kind of ibérico cutlet, and entrecot. It was all really delicious, but ultimately we did not linger because the restaurant was so smokey (like most Spanish restaurants, actually – but the man at the next table was smoking in a way that sent a trail of smoke across Susanne's face and our table, and Susanne had to leave and meet us outside after we'd paid).
We took a long walk around town, vaguely looking for ice cream, but we didn't find any. Instead, we went to a tea place on the way to our hotel. Eric and I had chamomile tea, and Susanne had milk tea, which is rather like chai, and is something Ivan has gotten her into. Eric and I tasted it, and it was very nice.
After tea, we turned in.
12/7
We got up and set out for breakfast, which turned out to be difficult – we had pinpointed a couple of places the night before, but they were closed. One place was next to the hotel, and looked like a chain. It advertised breakfast – but weekdays only, I suppose (it was Saturday). The place on the corner next to the cathedral was open, so we went there – what an odd place that was. It was a bit overdecorated, in a sort of frilly way. We ordered tostadas con jamón and got toasted squares of white bread with jamón York – in other words, the kind of American ham sandwich you'd get in a diner if you said "hold the mayo". Still, as breakfasts go, it wasn't terrible.
We left and began to walk around town. We went to that central boulevard – part of it is known as the Almeida, or maybe Alameida, but then there is a portion which runs alongside the park that more or less abuts the giant bight that serves cruise ships, and there the boulevard has a different name, though it appears to be the same street. We walked in that part, and found a little duck pond. There were several kinds of ducks, including the very large ones which look like geese; there were also two swans, and of course hordes of pigeons. An old woman was selling, among other things, bird food ("por los pavos y las palomitas"), for very little money, so we bought two bags. It was millet or barley or something like that. The feeding was a lot of fun, but it was hard to feed the swans, because they never came out of the water (there was a bank rising out of the pond at one end, behind a fence, where we fed the ducks). Neither Susanne nor I had the nerve to feed to swans directly from our hands (I had seen swans fight before, and they are big mean birds when they want to be), so we put the food on the cement at the edge of the water, just under the fence – having neither lips nor long tongues the swans were not well-equipped to retrieve it, but they did pretty well with their hard serrated beaks turned sideways, grasping at the seeds.
We continued on to the beach, in the eastern part of Málaga, known as Malagueta. This area is where the English cemetery was, which didn't visit. (Before the cemetery was built, English and other non-Catholics who had the misfortune to die in Málaga were buried in sand up to their necks at low tide, to be, if lucky, swept away at high tide.) The beach was very beautiful, and in the sun it was pretty warm. I pulled my sleeves up, but didn't pull off my shirt as some men had (it was really only in the low 60's, not quite beach weather). Some people had actually stripped down to trunks, and were lying in the sun – but lying down gets a person out of the wind, and I imagine that would be warm enough.
From there we headed to the shopping area (which is just north of the Alameida). We looked around but didn't buy anything, though I did identify an "artisan" ice cream shop, Marques de Larios, which we could return to later.
We had lunch in an outdoor café called Yovi. The waiter was a bit odd – he encouraged us to get a mixed meats plate rather than a tapa of chorizo, and when I ordered tortilla de alcachofa y esparragos, he didn't know what I was talking about and tried to bring me the revueltos de alcachofa con champignones. I had to point to where it said "tortilla de alcachofa y esparragos" right on the menu, and then he said "ah" (and brought me tortilla de alcachofa, no esparragos alas). I also ordered a tapa of Manchego (feeling a little regretful that I hadn't ordered Manchego and quince paste at a restaurant a couple of nights earlier, though that's something you can buy in Chicago). The cheese was delicious, as well as the meats (it was a surtido ibérico, consisting of tomato bread, jamón, caña de lomo, and three types of sausage: a light one, a dark one, and a pimiento-spiced one). Susanne tried to order croquetas, but the waiter said they were out and suggested a flamenquín (not as good as the one I had in Écija), which came with fries. Eric had a yummy tuna-stuffed piquillo pepper.
I had some postcards to mail, and I had begun to think I wouldn't get them mailed – it was my observation that Spain had no mailboxes, just post offices (and only one per town). My cards were stamped (all but one), I just needed to send then on their way, but it seemed we would need to go to the post office. (For that last card, I kept my eye open for an open tobacco store, since they also sell stamps, but with no luck.) So we headed down the Alameida to cross the river to the post office.
The riverbed was a bit odd – it held very little water, even in December, and was made up of two cement troughs on either side of a flat lawn. Presumably, that could be a playing field in dry weather, while in very wet weather it would be flooded and keep the rest of town dry.
Across the river, we found an El Corte Inglés and decided to do some shopping. After all, we were still Christmas shopping, Susanne still wanted a bag, and Eric was thinking about buying himself some European underwear.
We spent quite a while in the store, looking at stuff, using the bathroom, etc. I used some of that time to call AmEx to find out what to do if the car rental company charged us for the damage we'd done to the fender. Then, to use up some of the calling card we'd bought, I called Laura and chatted. This was while Eric and Susanne were looking at bags in the suitcase department, and Eric had already bought himself some underwear (though not the brand he wanted – there were stacks and stacks of it, but none in his size). I returned to help Susanne decide not to buy a bag after all, which ended that particular quest.
On the way out, we realized that the department store had a grocery store in it, so we ran around there looking for last-minute food gifts and souvenirs (cocoa, tuna, etc.).
By the time we got outside the sun had set and it was twilight. Susanne and I felt a little chagrined to have spent the last daylight hours of our last day indoors, but we reasoned, hey, what else were we going to do?
The post office was across the street, and turned out to have been closed since about lunchtime. I mailed the cards that had stamps, but I had to hang on to that last one.
We walked back toward our hotel, and there, on a main street right near the cathedral, was a mailbox. So apparently Spain does have them, though that was the only one I saw. And we hadn't needed to go all the way to the post office after all – though the walk was nice and the shopping fun and hey, what else were we going to do?
We went to the teteria near our hotel that we'd been to the night before. I had a Moroccan tea (sweet mint), and Eric and Susanne both had milk tea–Eric's was "Pakistani" (very much like chai) and Susanne's was called something "del obispo" and contained verbena.
We went back to the room to pack, which took quite a while. Susanne had moved her bags to the room, and a folding cot had been wheeled in. We didn't bother unfolding it till later.
By the time we were ready for dinner it was pretty late, though not especially by Spanish standards. Wanting something that would be easy, I selected a nearby restaurant called Barraka, described as cheap and good.
It was fairly cheap, but lordy, it wasn't good. It was terrible. The olives we ordered were pretty good, but that's all. The ensalada de la casa, lettuce, tomato, olives, and tuna, was lackluster. The gambas a la plancha were also not great, though it didn't help that Susanne and Eric were more or less over peel-and-eat shrimp (I didn't eat any). The paella was not good but edible. The brocheta, a house specialty, was semi-inedible in the sense that two of the four meat chunks were so tough as to be inedible – and the other two were not real good either.
The last thing we ordered was our own fault, really: ensaladilla de huevas seemed like it would be egg salad – but a more detail-oriented, or at least more fluent, person would have remembered that "egg" is "huevo", not "hueva". "Hueva" turns out to mean roe. The roe was white and looked like strange sliced sausages.
We all stared at it for a moment, thinking, what the hell did they do to these eggs? And then, upon realizing that it was not eggs, what the hell IS this? I was the one who identified it out loud: oh my god, it's ROE. I checked the menu, and sure enough, it said "huevas" not "huevos". Eric very gamely ate some, and reported that it wasn't good.
It took a bit of doing to get out of there. The room was fairly big and I could never tell if I was making eye contact with the waiter – I was afraid it looked like I was making eyes at him. We got the check and paid, but still needed change. We waited and waited and finally decided to leave a big tip and split. To the waiter's credit, when he saw us, he waived to us and got us our change (the guy behind the counter, whose job it was, had not yet made change, even though it had been some ten minutes.
I still had a lot of money left over on my Spanish phone card, so I gave it to Susanne to use up on a phone call to Ivan. Ivan wasn't home, so I decided to call my dad on the grounds that he'd be especially sympathetic to my goal of using up something I'd already paid for. We had a nice conversation, but I didn't use up the whole card. Given that it was pretty late, and we had to get up in the morning, and we still wanted dessert, I decided not to worry about the rest of the money on the card. (Also, Eric and Susanne wouldn't let me – just as Eric and I then wouldn't let Susanne stop to check her email.)
We went to get ice cream at the artisan place on Marques de Larios. It was nearly midnight, but they were open and happy to serve us. Both Eric and Susanne had chocolate ice cream; I had lemon sorbet (the only sorbet they had, but I was thrilled they had any). All of it was very good.
Back at the hotel, there was a bit of a ruckus while I was in the bathroom. While opening up the cot, Susanne discovered a large cockroach, shrieked, and leapt onto the now-open cot, apparently breaking it, as she now found herself standing on the floor, through the cot. Eric was still wearing his shoes and so was enlisted to kill the thing.
It was at that point that I emerged from the bathroom with a wad of toilet paper so that I could dispose of the eventual corpse. The eventual corpse, still all too animate, was hiding out somewhere under the desk in the far end of the room. Eric pulled out the small hassock that was under the desk, in order to see better, and then shrieked himself when he saw the roach on the side of the hassock an inch from his thumb. He knocked it to the ground and stomped on it, then scooped it up with the toilet paper, and I flushed it, and that was the end of the creepy-crawlies.
Or was it? The cot could have been hiding more. It wasn't actually broken; the plastic slats had merely popped out and Susanne managed to pop them back in. However, the task fell to me and Eric to strip it down and look for more bugs. Being a crappy mattress, it was split down the side, so we had to look in there for more bugs hiding among the springs and foam rubber. We didn't see any bugs, which was good, because our faces were right next to the hole, and if a cockroach had jumped out at the wrong time...
It became apparent to me that we just could not ask Susanne to sleep in that cot. Would you have slept there? So we folded it up again and slept three across two beds – with an 8-inch gap between the two beds, so that Susanne could get up in the middle of the night. The beds had a tendency to tip if you sat at the foot – Eric and I had each tipped a bed the night before, which made a very loud noise as it crashed back to the ground – so to avoid that we needed that gap.
I suppose we could have arranged the beds better. I didn't sleep well – I dreamt I was in a tiny Spanish hilltop town, in constant danger of falling off it.
12/8
We got up terribly early and walked, in the half-light of dawn, way down the street, off Plaza de la Constitución, to a place which was the first (and only) place we found open. They had churros and chocolate, so finally we had them (though I had café con leche instead of chocolate). It was pretty good, but it left me feeling not so good. Incidentally, note for the future: always get your churros with chocolate – they taste best dipped in something sweet, not coffee.
For whatever reason, the waiter wore a tuxedo. The other patrons were a combination of older Spanish men up early and young hipsters who hadn't been to bed yet – it was an odd thing to be eating breakfast with them, to be the only younger people in the room who'd been, until very recently, asleep.
We went back to the hotel to check out, and I managed to get the cost of the cot taken off the bill. The clerk was not particularly sympathetic when I said we hadn't used the cot. "The time to tell me that was last night." I explained about the roach – if not for the song, would I have known a word like cucaracha? It didn't seem to make much difference to him, so I took a cue from our guidebooks and phrase books and asked for the "libro de reclamaciones" – complaints book. That did the trick! No more cot charge. He didn't even show me the book, he just did some stuff on the computer, then explained that he'd taken the cot charge off the bill, and was that OK? ¡Sí!
We drove to the airport and returned the car. They didn't charge us for the damage! The inspector walked around the car, noting the previous damage, and when he got to the new damage, just noted it on the sheet as if it had always been there, but just hadn't been noticed. I was relieved, but felt a little bad. I justified it by telling myself that the car hadn't been in good condition anyway – but ethically speaking, I should have said something.
We were there early and couldn't check in, so we just sat around. I bought that last stamp and mailed that last post card. Yay! Success.
We checked in finally and went to the duty-free mall. Some 80% of the other people around us were British, and most flights were going to Britain. At the duty-free I bought a sausage and Eric bought a Swatch to give to Susanne for Christmas.
Our flight was delayed by hours, and we had to run to make our connection. (Actually, we had 1/2 hour, but Heathrow is huge, and it takes a long time to get from terminal to terminal – we got to the gate with no time to spare.) We'd been looking forward to a little English duty-free shopping, but it was not to be.
We made our connection, but our luggage did not. They delivered it to our homes the next day.