españa

Katherine and I were in Spain for most of the past week, from the night of Thursday the 18th to the night of Wednesday the 24th -- really, almost a full week. It wasn't meant to be quite that long, but around midnight on the 18th we realized that there wasn't any way to get to the Freiburg train station to catch a bus or a train to Basel, Switzerland between the hours of 12:47 a.m. and 5:17 a.m., and we needed to leave somewhere in between there -- so between the choices of being hours early for our train or bus and being too late to catch it and therefore miss our flight, we chose to be hours early, and spent the night in the Freiburg train station, in the middle of what Joanna from IES described as a hurricane, no less. And then coming back from Málaga our flight was delayed for something like six hours -- because it snowed so hard in Basel, Switzerland on the morning of the 24th that the airport was closed for a few hours!

This all sounds much more dramatic than it really was. In between there, we were in Spain, which is the important thing here. We flew into Málaga, spent two nights there, then took a very early morning bus to Cádiz, where we spent two nights (and most of three days) and then caught the bus back to Málaga for the last night so we could catch our flight in the morning. (That flight ended up leaving at five p.m. rather than eleven a.m., so in retrospect we really could have just left Cádiz in the morning, but we had no way of knowing that . . .)

Málaga was gorgeous. Water! The Mediterranean Sea! Palm trees! The Alcazaba, which is a Muslim fortress overlooking the whole city and sea -- awesome. It's up on a high hill and filled with fountains and gardens. There's another castle on the same hill, the Gibralfaro, which we didn't go into, but from the beach side of the hill there's a public path/set of gardens you can walk through that goes straight up to the top of the Gibralfaro section of the hill, which Katherine and I did walk up. The best view was from an overlook near the top of this path, I'd say, or from the Mirador of the Alcazaba.

Other highlights of Málaga included taking the #11 bus to a stretch of beach that wasn't right near the harbor and eating unidentified crazy seafood; Katherine developing an insatiable craving for oranges after seeing all the orange trees all over the city (all of which are Seville oranges, as it turns out, which are bitter and purely decorational); eating tapas; not going to the Picasso Museum, even though Málaga is Picasso's birthplace and we were staying in a hostel called Picasso's Corner; and meeting up with Emily Pelton, Katherine's friend since the third grade, who was in Spain on a three-week choir tour. We took a bus with her way down the coast to her hotel and picnicked on the beach outside her hotel until it was pitch-black and freezing.

We caught the 6:45 a.m. bus to Cádiz on the morning of the 21st and discovered that the bus we'd been planning on staying in, Quo Qádis, was closed. Kind of a bummer. We'd found it in Europe on a Shoestring, and it was kind of the reason we'd picked Cádiz: we were lured by its promise of cheap beds and cheaper vegetarian dinners (€6 and €2 respectively). Luckily we had both a backup hostel (Casa Caracol) and other reasons for wanting to visit Cádiz (it's on the beach, and it's rumored to be the oldest city in Europe).

Casa Caracol was lovely. They were still serving breakfast when we arrived -- delicious granola -- so we ate some of that and set off to explore the city. Everyone seemed to be outdoors, near the beach, and eating what looked like sea urchins down by this crazy tidal area that looked like something out of the Lord of the Rings. We were intrigued, so after exploring the crazy tidal area we paid far too much money (okay, €3,50, but you just know the locals weren't paying that much) for a plate of sea urchins. We weren't really sure how you go about eating them, but slurping out the orange innards seemed to work . . . They weren't all that tasty, but it was cool to try them anyway. Later we learned that it was the sea urchin festival that day, and not something the locals do all the time -- we weren't sure. Also apparently lots of people get sick from them. Luckily, we didn't.

Cádiz has a crazy cathedral with a yellow dome. It's also got high sea walls that go right up to the water, barricaded with enormous concrete blocks that cats seem to like to live in/on. The Atlantic around Cádiz turns shades of teal I didn't know existed in nature. Old Cádiz, where we spent nearly all of our time, has tiny winding streets that always seem to be covered in dog poop. I guess nobody makes you pick up after your dog there. We made it to the beach all three days we were there, although on the second day, when we were going to spend all day on the beach, the sky opened up on us . . . kind of cancelled our picnic. Cádiz made up for it by being beautiful on the last day, though. We also tried the tortilla con camarones (shrimp omelette) while we were there, which was delicious.

We never quite got on the Spanish schedule properly. Staying up all night partying and sleeping in late, followed by a siesta, seems to be the way to do things in Spain, whereas we were on more of an "early to bed, early to rise" schedule. This led to unhappy circumstances like us trying to go to lunch at noon and discovering that restaurants in Málaga didn't even reopen for lunch till 1:00 or later. We'll do better next time, we swear!