OK it's been awhile, but we are still alive....

"Oh, in the States we eat about 7 or 7:30."

This simple statement elicited looks of incredulity, and peals of laughter, from our Spanish AirBnB hosts. We'd been talking about dinner, and eating habits. The Spanish, you see, like to eat late, like around 10 or so. Dinner at 7? Impossible! "What do you do for the rest of the evening?" they asked.

We slowly acculturated to Spain, but that part of our trip is over. We flew back to Milan and leave in a few hours for Puglia in the south.

Its been a bit of a buzz, but we wanted to get a sense of what Spain's coast was like. And we did. We've driven from Tarifa in the south up the Costa del Sol (totally overbuilt; even the outskirts have overbuilt outskirts) through the Costa Blanca (only a little overbuilt, with some relief in the high rises given by the many greenhouses of industrial agriculture).

There were some areas about 50 km south of Barcelona that seemed like the original, authentic Spain. We liked them.

We took a day to visit the mountains, and the town of Ronda. Its quite fantastic, very beautiful, and apparently the source and heart of bullfighting in Spain. Hemingway was here, and wrote about the bullfights (Death in the Afternoon); actually being in Ronda almost gave me a twinge of regret that I really don't care about bullfighting.

Ronda, inland frlm the Costa del Sol, is nothing if not dramatic!

In Granada we visited the Alhambra, finest example of Moorish architecture in Europe. All the on-line tickets were sold out over a month ago, but we showed up at 7AM hoping to get a ticket, along with several hundred other people. There were tickets, but the machine would not accept our credit card. We did well, considering this was a goal of a lifetime, missed by that much. But wait, the French woman staying at the same BnB says, here, use mine. YEAH! We got in! And we even sold the tickets to the garden we'd bought instead of the ones we really wanted. Tutti va bene!

Us, really at the Alhambra!

The Alhambra at sunset

We had a wonderful time last night with our AirBnB host, a man of almost our age who's wife was traveling. She was the one who spoke English. We had a hilarious evening, drinking his excellent wine and communicating through Google translate. He was wonderful, very caring and heartfelt.

After an evening of celebration with Paco. We felt about this fuzzy (especially the next day!)

Barcelona, time to drop off the car. It's always so wonderful to arrive somewhere and get a car: the implied freedom, the lure of the open road, the ability to follow your own schedule and your own route. Then, a week or two later, after spending what seemed like hours carefully navigating the last few kilometers through heavy (3 million people) city traffic, it is such a relief to pull into the rental car garage and be done with it! No more parking hassles, no more gas stops. Free at last to wander unencumbered!

We spent the afternoon pounding the pavement, seeing the sights on Barcelona. There are a number of striking buildings by famed architect Nicoli Gaudi. He loves colorful, incongruous, seemingly unrelated elements thrown together whimsically. Our word  gaudy must derive from his name. (Check out his Sagrada Famila cathedral on-line!)

A peak at the Sagrada Familia cathedral. Pretty crazy.

We're now back at the BnB in Ferno, a little town near the Milan airport. The owners are wonderfully warm and caring. In response to our email, letting them know we were coming back in a day or so, Monica and Giovanni replied, "oh don't worry, we'll catch you when you land! " And they did!

Now, with our laundry clean and an Italian SIM card, so we can make phone calls, we're ready to fly out tonight for Lecce and our Southern Italy adventure.

Standard coffee in bars and cafes in Spain are these tiny but potent cups of espresso. I've got a thng about these cute spoons....

All for now.
 P&P