Finally I have time and bandwidth for another post. Going back a few days: Grenada! Our main tour on our first full day there was the Alhambra, which is a spectacular palace. If you like tiles, geometric shapes, water, and marble, this is the place for you. Also cats, because it's slopping over with cats who keep the murine population down (I got to pet one). I took a few pictures, but none that can do it justice, so I recommend you look it up online. I got a book with much better pictures. I can't even imagine the hours of work that went into this. We had an amazing lunch at a little place on top of a mountain. I would have never thought of tempura eggplant strips with honey, but it was epic. We are constantly goggling at the drivers who can maneuver on the narrow, winding streets. Our bus driver is a hero, but even he couldn't make the bus take those turns so we had a smaller van, and even then some of us gasped at the close shaves. People here seem to be totally blase about it and I can't understand why I don't see more scraped sides on cars.
After lunch we got on the bus for a two hour drive to the Costa Del Sol, which is basically their Jersey Shore, except with mountains behind you when you face the Mediterranean. I take some pictures with my camera and some with my phone, so the phone ones of the mountains and the shore are on Facebook, but if you have been to Wildwood you get the idea for the beach. We stopped at a little town where you could ride or be pulled in a cart by a donkey, eat, or shop for tschotskys or leather. Having found that almost every bathroom in Europe has air blowers to dry your hands, and many of them don't work or work poorly, I stopped in a store full of cheap stuff and bought a dish towel, which has proven to be a smart choice. A guy waved us into his chocolate store, showed us his machines for hand-making chocolate from roasting the beans to crushing them to wrapping, and tried to get us to make our own chocolate bars, but whatever we buy will not survive storage on the bus. I did have some chocolate-covered marzipan, mmmmm.
Dinner was in a restaurant on their equivalent of the boardwalk and started with plates of appetizers one after the other: tiny clams (or something like a clam) the size of a nickel, then fried fresh anchovies, then chunks of breaded and fried halibut, then calimari rings, and finally paella with more of the same, with good sangria, followed by meh ice cream. We rolled home full.
The next day was an optional trip to the Rock of Gibraltar, a 90 minute or so drive. There's a border to cross, and we all had our passports out, but on the Spanish side they were given a brief glance, and on the UK side there was nobody there to look. I probably can't tell you much that you couldn't find in any other account of the Rock, but it was cool to see it. There's an "international airport" there, although the only flights are to and from the UK. That runway crosses the main street into Gibraltar, and is built out into the water on reclaimed land. We and many pedestrians had to wait for flights coming and going before we could cross the runway. Again we left our big bus behind for a little bus that could negotiate narrow streets with tight turns. There were gulls all over the place and it occurred to me that I had seen none at the Costa Del Sol, which seems unusual for a beach.
Gibraltar tidbits: the guide told us about 4 main pillars of the economy, and one of them was online gaming! It provides revenue and jobs. The place is lousy with Barbary apes (macaques), which casually climb on everything. You know how you might sometimes find cat footprints on your windshield? I saw cars with monkey footprints. We toured a cave, but it was the first time I had been in a cave where they felt compelled to entertain us with constantly changing colored lights and pop music. I guess flowstone and the dripping from above are not enough for modern tourists.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono were married in Gibraltar, as was Sean Connery (twice). Long slanted alleys are named "ramps". The yacht "A", which I saw on my last Bob and Ruth's tour in Iceland, was supposed to be docked in the harbor - you should look up pictures of that. It's impressive.
We were on our own for lunch, so I happily ended up with felafel and hummus. They don't take euros or dollars, but if you change your money to Gibraltar pounds, you can't save them to use in the UK. Fortunately everybody seems to take cards.
For dinner that night we went back to the same part of town as for the night before, in the restaurant next door, and guess what we had? THE EXACT SAME MEAL. Even the salad ingredients were the same. Instead of paella we had salt-baked sea bass, and flan instead of ice cream, but it was kind of annoying. At least we were safely fed, if not satisfied.
More later, the wifi is iffy.
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