Authentic Canarian Food

The sign said, "Authentic Canarian Food".  What exactly is that, bird seed?

The reality is that, here in Playa Del Ingles, Gran Canaria, all the restaurants serve pretty much the same thing.  It's somewhat odd... a seafood restaurant, steakhouse, and Italian restaurant will all have paella, pizzas, steaks and fish... why bother?

That being said, all the food was great!  This is a bungalow-lifestyle: small living spaces surrounding pools and gardens.  At first glance, the island itself is a foreboding and inhospitable rock, windy and desolate with dramatic desert landscapes and high mountains.  It is the top of a volcano after all, so this is not a surprise.

The beaches and sand dunes are great.  This is a place to relax, get some sleep in the sun, and enjoy nightlife until dawn.

You might think that there are canaries here.  The name actually means "Island of the Dogs", so named for the seals that barked along the shore.

Onto the Beach

The Spanish beach resort of Sitges is located southwest of Barcelona, about 45 minutes by train, and a thousand miles in attitude.  Where Barcelona is hip, happening, and bustling, Sitges is relaxed and laid back, like any beach resort town should be.  There is very little auto traffic.  People walk in the streets.  The town is clean and well maintained, with a fine Malecon (beachfront promenade), many restaurants and shops, and some of the nicer beaches lining the Mediterranean.

Our hotel rooms were not ready when we arrived, so we plopped down in one of several small public squares.  A dutch national owned the adjacent beer bar and we enjoyed Paulaner and late summer weather while watching the parade of people and pets as they returned from a day of beach-ing.  The evening was later filled with fine food at the Santa Maria restaurant, which fronts the beach promenade, where we feated on lamb, paella, and fine Spanish wine.

The following day we took advantage of five of several thousand chaise lounges that line the several beaches in town.  Sitges also has a lively and varied nightlife, but Americans are not used to staying up until 5am!

Sitges is highly recommended for a relaxing pause to any Spainsh vacaation.

Bacelona Bites

Down any alley or sidestreet in Barcelona, you will find restaruants.  Most of them are tapas bars, the 'little plates' of Spain.  We have eaten a lot of tapas here in Barcelona, all unique, all inviting, all quite tasty.  You start with a huge selection of cold tapas that are usually spread out on the top of the bar.  These are usually on toasted french bread, and could be tuna, sardines, iberian ham, pimentos, olives, or some other spread.   A waiter will occasionally  bring around a tray of hot tapas.  Each tapa has a toothpick in it.  At the end of the meal, the waiter counts the toothpicks and bills you for the number of tapa consumed.

Barcelona

What can I say.  There simply are not enough superlatives to describe one of Europe's largest, most fashionable cities.  Paris is nice... but I'll take Barcelona.

We rented a flat in El Born, very close to the James I cathederal.  This is the best neighborhood in Barcelona, as it is close to everything a tourist wants to visit, as well as having a huge selection of restaurants and nightlife that attract tourists and locals alike.  We were three blocks from La Rambla, two blocks from the Picasso museum, a block from the Gothic quarter, and steps away from dozens of tapas bars.  The bus touristic and the subway stopped within the block; who could ask for more?

Barcelona is not a great tourist destination if you want to see stuff, however.  There are of course several things to visit: the sagrada familia, the Gaudi architecture, the Picasso, Miro, and vanderRohe art museums; the real attraction of Barcelona is its lifestyle.  Its excellent tapa, wines, and late night dinners.  Its friendliness and sophistication.  Its relative cleanliness and ease of mobility.  Its distinctly Euro-Spanish charm.  Don't go for the attractions, go for the experience.  Spend a couple of euros and have a cafe on the Placa Catalunya.  Enjoy a stroll on La Rambla, and visit the Mercado St Josep.  Have some black iberian ham and tempranillo wine.  Take your time, savor the moments.  La Dulce de Vive!

A pair of Matching Souks

Hamed arrived promptly at ten, just as promised.  Today we will walk the souks of Marrakech, the little shops that you see in every travel show.

We walked.  And Walked.  We walked some more.  We dodged donkeys and horse-drawn carriages, scooters and carts, buses and taxis and berbers and bedouin grandmas.  Americans look at this and say chaos.  Moroccans look at the same thing and say what's the problem?

The souks are arranged like a department store: there's a spice souk, a clothing souk, a carpet souk, and iron souk, and just about anything else you would needs souk.  We walked through most of them.  I think the most interesting one was the iron souk, where craftspeople were actually making things by hand, hammering copper and brass, turning wood on manual lathes, and shaping tin and iron into lamps and other implements.

Five hours of souking is enough.  We went back to the riad and slept until dinner, which consisted of tagines and kebobs and live Moroccan music.

Today is the 21st, and we are now back in the Casablanca airport awaiting our flight to Barcelona.

We be djammin

Wow.

Winston Churchill used to refer to Marrakech as the Paris of Africa.  He was right.  What a beautful, gracious, and interesting city!

Coming into town on the train, one notices immediately the garden quality of the city.  There are extensive gardens everywhere.  Horse drawn carriages are a common conveyance.  Our minivan-cab took us to a parking lot near the hotel. From there we had to walk three blocks, as the hotel is located inside the medina and the roads are too small for cars.

The Medina, built in the 12th century, is a maze of cobblestone pathways that are shared by pedestrians, carts, scooters, playing shildren, and lots of cats.  There is no grid system here, there are lots of dead ends, and everything is in Arabic.  Google maps does not have the pathways, you must find your way out to the main street in order to navigate.

And we did just that, with the help of several children that wanted the Coke I was carrying.  Cheaper than a GPS.

We wandered down to the Djemma al Fna, the largest public square in Africa.  Here you can find musicians, jugglers, vendors, snake charmers, acrobats, and dozens if not hundreds of food stalls.  The barbeque smoke fills the air with fragrance and fog.  There are 10,000 people here if there are two.  The whole thing is somewhat overwhelming, but alive and real.  While there are tourists here, mainly Europeans, most of the people are native.  This is a real place.

Enough for this evening, I'll grab another Coke in case I need directions back to the Riad.

Don't you know we're riding on the Marrakech Express?

Breakfast at the PRINCE was delighful this morning, with young Moroccan girls doing their best to try and understand such exotics as "croissant"and "coffee".  They were charming, although I cannot quite understand how a person that speaks fluent French (she corrected my gutter French several times) did not understand what a croissant was.  Not only do they have the pastry, but there's one on the top of every mosque in the world!

The Guarre de casa Voyegeurs is one of two train stations in Casa.  The Marrakech Express leaves track 2 every two hours.  Inspired by Steven Stills, we caught the 10:50 train going south.  After chasing some vagabonds out of our first class compartment, we settled in for the two+ hour journey into the Saharan plain.  We rolled through small towns with Arabic names that sounded like birdseed and puget sound, but of course we do not have Arabic-tuned ears.

Marrakech station is very pleasant and clean, and was a welcome introduction to this amazingly clean and well-maintained garden city.  We arranged a pickup from the station through our hotel, and thank God we did as no one would ever be able to find this place.  I cannot even describe where it is, except to tell you that it is in an alleyway somewhere behind the post office.  You make a left, a right, and a left past the parking lot and knock on the door with the awning.  There are also plenty of kids running around in the streets that will help you find it for a Coke (I know because I did it).

The Dar Limoun Amara, our digs for the next two days, is a converted private residence.  It is quiet and pleasant and on the edge of the Medina, a Arab term for old town.  Well, more like medivel town; this is something straight out of the Arabian knights, with moorish arches and dead-end walkways and crumbling bits of stuff all over the place.  These people live like their ancestors did a thousand years ago.

Tomorrow I will write about the Djmaa al Fna, the largest public square in Africa, which is about a quarter mile from here and loaded with just about anything you could imagine.  More photos forthcoming.