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Monday, July 07, 2008
another installment
7:23 AM
no, my i is not fixed....i am copying and pasting them in. it's a bitch, let me tell you! this week. this week it will be repaired because it has lost its charm on me!! alrighty, so....we stopped in cordoba and walked these ittty bitty streets and ate tapas and drank yummy concoctions and wandered through the mezquita built during islamic rein. when it was reclaimed by the spanish and transformed into a church, some of the architecture was replaced with bascilica and baroque. it is a bizarro combo, i'm jusss sayin. sidenote: through all of this, it was 500 degrees farenheit and i was a sweatin puppy even though i am from florida. we think we know heat...HA, i laugh at you, you puny sunshine state summer! back to our airconditioned rental and that whore carmen, we headed for chipiona to stay the night. arriving right at sunset, we got to see the water and sky glowing pink over the atlantic. the wind was strong and cool and i am ready to live right in that very spot. we stayed in the grand hotel al sur de chipiona it was heavenly. i felt heavenly. we walked to a local restaurant and sat outside in the breeze for a seafood feast. there was much ado about sports including adolescents waving flags, fog horns, yelling, singing and all around chaos. food was mediocre but company, weather and location was bliss! we were up to the usual the following day....a walk on the beach and then hittng the road with a plan to dine in morocco. (haha, the "usual", like lunching in morrocco happens all the time) ok, who here knows where morocco is....did you know it's in africa? i had no idea!!! we drove to tarifa (the very most southern tip of spain) and then ferried over to africa. no joke. morocco was everything! martha found us a local to take us around to all the good spots. the water was so blue and clear, i doubted it's authenticity; looked exactly like a movie set! the locals stood elegantly posed against walls and sat on stoops, just waiting for me to come along and snap their picture. we went into the casbah (yeh, you know that song was stuck in my head alllllll day!!) which is atop the highest point in algiers. also a movie set, it was a tangle of narrow streets that i could spread my arms across and touch both sides. every bend and twist led into another and went deeper and deeper until looking back there was no way to know from which way you had come. some of these twists led to dead ends. alice and i decided if we lost our tour guide, the thing to do would be to drop a ball and follow it from this city on the crest down to the sea. it was a holy day and food was hard to find but we finally landed in a restaurant where we walked through the kitchen to get to one of the 6 tables in the back. i had fish and french fries(although they call them something much sexier there). so much for fabulous herb based, spicy and rich moroccan food....maybe i can find a restaurant here in the states or maybe even i can whip up a box of couscous. we got back to spain very late and fell down hard into a hostel bed for 2 hours before we had to hit the road to madrid. through half mast eyelids and much cajolng and story telling, we were able to keep champion driver martha awake for the 6 hour trek. i love long road trips. i love learning new things about the people you think you already know. i do not on the other hand enjoy motion sickness which i contracted somewhere in southern spain and through my exhaustion, turned into a wimpering fool! i was crying for mint tea, alice medicated me with ginger and martha massaged my feet. remember that thing about being treated like a princess.... i was miraculously healed! or, mostly. at the airport in the nick of time and because alice's bladder was full, we had to say goodbyes quickly. after she left, i kept looking for her to come back. i wanted to cry. i enjoyed my time with her so much and it was too short. she was off to walk more camino and reunite with her son. i love her so!! martha and i boarded our plane to frankfurt and with bleary eyed relief to know we could allow our lids to close, we suddenly gained a second wind that we hoped would carry us through because our day was not hardly over. we still had an opera to attend. dagmar snatched us up from the airport, threw us in the car, shuttled us home, cooked for us while we showered and dragged our weary bodies to the opera haus. ;) we waited for the show to start and perked ourselves up a bit more wth some vino. i had never been to the opera before and i was excited to see it. the voices were amazing, martha's translation helped me follow the story and i was rapt. honestly though, i did fall asleep. only for short stints and only a few times. the bob of my 400 pound unrested head woke me each time. intermisson, i chugged some sparkling water and went back in with a new vibrancy that was able to push me through to the end. sparklng water has a kick, i'm juss sayin' 8 Comments |
