Day 9: Malaga (June 20)

Spending two nights in Malaga gave us a little freedom to slow our pace.  Rachel had found a vegan breakfast spot and completed destroyed me in Rummy while I happily enjoyed an acai bowl.  What can I say, I’m Californian through and through.  While I have supported and enabled my girls’ decision to be vegetarians, I have drawn a pretty firm line on veganism, but I think I may lose that battle with Rachel in the coming year.  Seems so much harder to me to figure out protein sources when you eliminate them even further, but she seems interested in the challenge.

Malaga is the birthplace of Pablo Picasso and our next stop was the house in which he was born which has been turned into a museum, not of his art, but of his life.  It was interesting to learn more about him and the years he and his family (his dad an artist and teacher in the local art school) spent in Malaga.

We wandered through the city afterwards and ended up at the big cathedral in town and listened to a very detailed audio guide that walked us through each of the chapels.

Our hotel is right next to an international movie theater showing a variety of movies in several different languages (only one in Spanish).  There were a few choices in English and since we had already celebrated on of Spain’s sons, we chose to see a movie celebrating another – Cervantes - by watching The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.  We had scouted out the movie earlier and had just barely enough time to get in our 30-minute Nike Training program before the movie started, but we did it!  Though the movie was super weird and hard to follow (especially when you take a little catnap in the middle) it was really cool to watch as it featured Americans in Spain and was filmed in little white hill towns not unlike those we have been visiting.

Spain's second pool game was starting about an hour and half after the movie ended, so we thought that gave us enough time to tour the Alcazaba before hand...and it would have been if we hadn’t struggled to find the entrance.  Though we started standing literally right next to the entrance, we thought it must be up higher so we climbed up and around the whole thing before asking and being pointed back where we had started.  By that point, the guard working told us to come back tomorrow.  Just outside the entrance, an artist named Oleg who specializes in sardine art that Rachel really liked, displayed his work.  We are down to our last euros and I didn’t want to get more out, but he ended up agreeing to take US dollars - she is starting quite an art collection.

We had gotten a recommendation of a bar/restaurant to watch the Spain vs. Iran game and settled into our seats in front of one of the many TVs a few minutes before kickoff.  It was again exciting to watch Spain as they barely eeked out a victory.  We left a little early in search of a place where we could get churros and chocolate. I’ve decided not to eat meat on this trip so we can share food and in solidarity she has stuck with white chocolate for me.  But, I thought it important that she experience at least one of the Spanish food traditions.  Turns out that the tradition of churros and chocolate is a breakfast one, not a dessert one, so we got our second ice cream of the vacation (we used to do gelato daily in the good old days!), and put churros on the must-do list for tomorrow, our final day in Spain.