Europe '17

Have I ever told you about my friends Unc and Mashie?  Of course I have, e.g. my 8/1/12 post.  They do not get much ink because they prefer to spend most of their time with their Belmont mafia. We just spent a couple weeks with them in Portugal, Spain and Morocco.  It was contentious from the get go but we made it work.

We arrived in Madrid and took a 20-euro half mile taxi ride to our hotel.  We were just there for the night, so this blog will begin as many others, boringly.  The other three met for drinks and dinner while I slept about 14 hours. We were then back to the airport for a quick TAP flight to Porto.  We did not understand the boarding process.  You bring your carry on to the gate, at which time they tell you it is too big to go on the plane.  Then one individual writes tags for it, while everyone else waits. But we had a cool boutique hotel waiting for us in Porto.  Mashie made all the reservations and did a bang-up job.  We had to call the desk staff at one point to show us how to turn off one of the lights at bedtime.  The trick was going into the electrical panel in the closet.  I should have known that.

Porto was cool, both temperature and otherwise. We had a lot of great outdoor meals, often within view of the Douro river.  We had a good meal but a bad stink at Café Lapin. I’m not clear where the effluvium was coming from but I’m sure Unc can recall. I’ve reviewed my blog notes and now realize they are quite sparse.  We did quite a lot of walking throughout the tour, so we got to see a lot of the town.  I took a taxi back to the hotel a few times by myself when I was worn out.  My Spanish worked well with the cab drivers.  I did them a solid by not making them take me the last 100 yards to my hotel, which was located right by the river on a narrow street populated with cafes.  My take was the hack would need at least 10 minutes to make his way out of that last block on the river that was swamped with tourist and local activity.

So, I guess this is just what you wanted to hear, how nice I was to the cab drivers.  But we did do other stuff, including a port tasting that I recall was pretty reasonably priced.  They gave us some tasty chocolate with that.  We met some Canadians and were invited to the wife’s birthday party in Dublin next year.  I’m not sure if we’ll make it.  After that we had the tourist menu which included a lot of chow and half bottle of wine for about 12 euros. If I took better notes, I could tell you the name. Mashie and the wife bought some stuff from the street vendors and Unc and I got some pics taken of us.  This was all on the other side of the river from our hotel. 

After Porto, it was a train ride to Lisboa, where the heat was turned up a notch, but still reasonable.  Uber did not appear to be an option at the station so we took a hack to the hotel, another boutique.  I call all smaller hotels boutique.  It was on another narrow street close to a square that was the focal point of the 1974 Carnation Revolution.  After settling in, we went out for lunch.  Our waiter’s English was not great, which proved what spoiled Americans we were.  We still managed to have a good meal.  I think I had a salmon salad.  I ate a lot of salmon on this trip.

We took a trip on the old streetcar, which was packed to the gills.  We abandoned the wait on the return trip and took a tuk tuk back to the hotel.  Fortunately, we did not reach speeds above 25mph or so.  That night was a gourmet meal at a place called Sacramento.  We had a great hostess whom we tipped well.  I was generally tip crazy throughout the trip. 

We had a great tour the next day with our driver João.  We were joined by a couple American women and a Hong Kong couple.  We went to Sintra, where we saw a castle and approximately 1 million tourists.  We stopped in at a place we were told the king used to get his pastries.  We were trying to figure if he went or just sent his staff there.  We had a tasty treat and then hopped in the van to Cascais, with a stop at Cabo da Roca, the westernmost point on the European continent. Cascais is difficult for an American to pronounce, but we had a good lunch there, where we met a couple Australian women.  I also went to the pharmacy for some athlete’s foot medicine.  I don’t like to leave out details. Unc is not a fan of crowded beach towns and I guess I’d join him in that. At one point in the tour the discussion veered to politics and the former Salazar dictatorship.  Someone asked if he was a good dictator or a bad dictator.  João diplomatically responded that he was a dictator.

As we rode to the airport the next day for our Sevilla flight, we had a lively discussion about the hotel.  We really had an excellent “guest experience”, but Unc was critical of the pillows, where as I had concerns about the bathroom layout and light switches, which I imagined turned on different things at different times.  But we quibble.

Sevilla was beautiful, but HOT.  We had a pretty lively conversation with the cab driver.  I think Unc understood about 10% whereas I expect I got about 30%.  He gave us a good place to get beer and told us Cruz Campo was the way to go.  He emphasized to get it COLD.  We agreed. The taxi managed to make it down the road to the hotel with about two inches to spare on each side.  Again, with the boutique. They gave us a beer while we checked in.  That’s service! Our young bellman spent a couple years in Kansas City during high school.  We learned from him that KC and Sevilla are sister cities.  I believe I made a crack somewhere in the blog about Foster City’s sister city, but there is really no reason to bring that up now.

Wifey had booked a tapas tour for that evening.  I really gotta give kudos to her and Mashie for all their planning.  I just went along for the ride.  I think the only thing Unc contributed was the idea for a Tangier trip.  More on that later.  A lovely young woman named Delia from Cadiz met us at the cathedral.  We ate and drank well, getting what I expected was an authentic tapas experience.  There was certainly enough food to call it dinner.

Sevilla was a one-night stop so we headed to the train station to get our rental car and it was off to Malaga, Club La Costa World in Fuengirola to be exact.  Unc and Mashie worked their time share magic for the condo we got there.  There was only one bathroom but by that time we had bonded so deeply that it was not a problem.  It was us and about 20,000 Brits.  I read some local news that the folks in Marbella were pissed by the drunken, shirtless tourists roaming their town.  We did not participate.

We had a little market right near us so we put together some good breakfasts as we lazed about.  One day was a beach day, but the rest of the time we were on the move.  We went to Granada to see The Alhambra.  I had caught it during my high school trip but was happy to see it again.  It was hot as hell but we enjoyed ourselves.  The worst part was our decision to have dinner at Estrella de Levante.  We should have known that a place on top of the parking garage was not for us.  The fried calamari were not bad but essentially the rest was a pile of shit.  Our only bad tasting meal on the trip.  We think the Tangier dinner, in the Casbah, was a bad meal, because we all ended up with campylobacter, but it tasted good.

Speaking of Tangier, we took a ferry there from Tarifa, the southernmost point in continental Europe.  We were met by Youssef, who brought us to our hotel.  We learned that his wife was about to give birth so his partner Hasan gave us our tour the following day.  The hotel was nice, what the average Moroccan would likely call unbelievably luxurious.  There was a good spread for breakfast the next day, as we had at all our places.  Hasan came at 10am with our driver Ali.  Hasan’s English was good, but whereas your average American might punctuate every other sentence with “you know”, Hasan used “yes, please”. We got a kick out of that, since we’re smug and ugly Americans.

We went to the beach and the Cave of Hercules.  An older man gave us a tour of the cave.  He remarked that he spent many a day there as a kid, before the tourists began to overrun it in the ‘70s. If you want more info about the cave, consult Wikipedia.  We also saw the Jewish quarter and got a tour of an old synagogue.  This was part of the walking tour that gave us an opportunity to tell aggressive street peddlers “NO” about 10 times per.  An herb shop tour explained to us that if we sniffed this particular herb, it would cure snoring.  I tried it but I am still relying on my CPAP.

We got dropped off at the ferry for return to Tarifa.  After a tasty dinner there, we headed back to the condo for night’s sleep and then we were off to the Malaga airport for the last leg of the trip.  The wife and I had not packed properly it seems so we were assessed a 60-euro charge per bag for our flight to Madrid.  She is going to contest it.  I say good luck.

At the Madrid airport, we ordered an Uber but could not find out where the hell we were supposed to be picked up, so we ended up in a cab which had a great deal of trouble opening his trunk.  We would have much preferred the station wagon that was second in line, but that is not how things work.  The cabbie drove like a bat out of hell but I tipped him well since we arrived at our hotel all in one piece.  I’d say the Villa Real was more of an old timey luxury hotel as opposed to, you guessed it, a boutique. We had dinner that evening at Paella de la Reina.  Check my wife’s FB page for a picture.

The next day the fun started.  Unc was out of commission with flu like symptoms so he stayed back while the three of us did the four-hour Madrid tour.  The first stop was Calle Santa Maria de la Cabeza, where I lived from September to December 1980.  I recognized it but the guy who used to serve me draft beer was not around anymore.  After that we saw all the highlights but then the crud started sneaking up on the women, so activity after that was limited.  We stocked up on Imodium and Advil and everyone survived the flight home.  I think we’ll travel again with Unc and Mashie, although they may have different ideas.