Sunday 13 December 2009

Gilmour's Log - Malaga 2009

At Gatwick airport, all excited about going away on holiday even if just for a few days. I was all full of beans. I'm not exactly a seasoned traveller compared to some folk, but I like to travel light and efficiently.

Nina got her bag and coat searched. She wasn't very happy, especially when the security chap identified that the problem was my can of deodorant that I'd snuck into her bag.

I'm just imagining the bag searching gentleman in the staff canteen later, high-fiving his colleagues, "Yeah, saved the world from terrorists again! No one gets cans of deodorant past me! Crikey, how many lives have I saved this week? Hundred probably! High Five!!"
There was this really fat chap sat next to Nina on the plane, mucho thrills and japes just after take off when he needed to go to the loo. Ooh, ooh, I took a cool photo as we were flying over the Isle of Wright, but Nina disagreed and said that it wasn't.

Ahh, Malaga. The airport was much like I remembered it from my last visit, a long trek through car parks to the train station.

We got on the train going the wrong way, should have remembered from last time. The landscape is all dusty, sandy even, red soil, with alien-looking trees. When we realised would transit mistake we alighted at a place called Plaza Mayor, which looked a bit wild-westy, but turned out to be Brent Cross. Same shops and stuff, just spelt differently, for example The Carphone Warehouse was The Phone House, but H&M was still H&M. Whilst we got our barings we had coffee and doughnuts from "Dunkin' Coffee" and took photies of the local wildlife.

They had orange trees, still with fruit. Like c'mon, it winter, what's that about? It's December out there.





All the shop servingy people we met for the first few hours seemed quite angry. I'm pretty sure it wasn't cos of my crap Spanish, cos I speak it almost fluently, mostly by limiting my vocabulary to 'Si!'

The top five nicest shop servingy people are as follows:-
1. The puppy dog eyes girl at the train station ticket office
2. The woman at the first tapas bar.
3. The "Dunkin' Coffee" woman.
4. The woman at the Subway kind of place
5. The woman at the Relay newsagenty place

Time passed at Plaza Mayor and Nina was getting tired, so we got back on the train, this time going the correct way and emerged blinking into the harsh artificial lighting of Malaga's main train station.

It wasn't my fault, the maps at the various stations all said the main Malaga station was closed, so we were at Malaga Marie Zambrano Station. There was a Relay shop selling cards, magazines and tourist guides. We got a map of Malaga and retreated to a table between two escalators to read it.

The map had no Marie Zambrano station so I assumed we were off the edge of the map. It took about eight minutes of pissing around before we discovered that our hotel was right outside where we were.

The hotel was well posh, the room bigger than Glasgow's TravelLodge, and a lot warmer too. Lots of sweeties spread around the room, on desks and bedside tables.

We swiftly got changed for the city awaited us.

So we set off walkingm I chose the way, right, down the street all the way to the river. Not the most exciting neighbourhood, most of the shops were closed and there were roadworks and dog poo.

The river was a wide one with a big grassy bit in the middle for people to walk their dogs on. Across the way was the Centre for Contemporary Art, and then Nina lead me through a small maze of streets to the Coronade Cafe for dos cerveza por favor, paella, mixed salad, fishballs, fried calamari and olives and bread. Nothing complicated, but well nice.

Hmm, warm fuzzy Spanish vibes, cheap too.

After lunch, we wandered though sex shop land, lots and lots of sex shops, Zodiac Mindwarp would be proud. Soon we emerged into the gardeny park place. Nina thought it would be nice if it wasn't for all the traffic.

I was still concerned by all the alien trees, impressive palm trees and these fat trees with big thorns and carpets of ants. Hundreds of orange trees. Wondering that the fat thorny tree was.



































































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