Jen and Rebecca Manage a Memorable Day in Malaga

Somehow in a town that prides itself on being sunny 320 days a year, we managed to tour Malaga on one of the 45 cloudy days.  It wouldn’t have been too bad if it wasn’t so windy.  And, the wind wouldn’t have been so bad if we had each added a layer of clothing when leaving the apartment in the morning.  But the saving grace was that it finished raining over night.

Since the only thing Rick Steve had to tell us about Malaga was how to leave it as quickly as you arrive in it, we thought it would be good to get our bearings with a free walking tour of the city from Pancho Tours.  Apple maps failed us again, taking us to the Roman Theater instead of the Cervantes Theater, but fortunately the tour was still gathering when we found the right meeting point.  We then spent the next three hours with our self-confessed talkative tour guide Luis, a native of Malaga.  We learned a lot about the city and its history, including that it’s Antonio Banderas’s hometown and he is a majordomo for the Holy Week celebrations in Malaga (yes, this is clearly the most important thing we learned about Malaga.)  The city was the second to last Muslim stronghold in Spain, succumbing to the Christian Reconquista only a few years before Granada. Plus, like everywhere else in the Mediterranean, the Romans were once here, so we walked through the Roman amphitheater which was in the shadow of the Muslim Alcazar.

Your humble bloggers at the Roman amphitheater

After the tour ended, we needed lunch (we were on the typical Andalucian late lunch of about 2:00/3:00.)  We stumbled upon a cute restaurant with a fixed price menu whose name translated to The Dog House.  It was delicious!  After a few glasses of wine, and realizing that we hadn’t been overly silly with our photography thus far this trip, we went into the Alcazar and managed to stage way too many ridiculous photos.  The castle had a ton of paths we could follow without much of any signs to explain what we were looking at, so we were free to wander.  It wasn’t exactly the Alhambra, but as an Alcazar, it was better than the Alcazar at the Alhambra, we thought.

Alcazar silliness

Turns out Antonio Banderas isn’t the only famous hometown boy of Malaga.  Pablo Picasso was also born here and lived here in his youth before abandoning the dictatorship of Spain for permanent self-exile in France.  So we went to the Picasso Museum for some artsy local culture.  Thanks to the audio guide, we may now understand some of what Picasso was trying to do with the unusual human-forms in his paintings.  (Maybe.)

After the museum, we weren’t quite ready to eat, so we decided to join the locals for a spot of tea.  We wandered a bit before finding the Tea Saloon.  Turns out, it was primarily a hookah bar, but they have delicious tea as well.  We all tried new-to-us/local tea varieties; we even got Anna to drink something other than her daily English Breakfast.  It also made imagining life in the Alcazar a little bit clearer! And made us feel like we’d visited Morocco even though we abandoned that planned side trip weeks before we left on this trip.

Shaun enjoys some tea and the contact high from the hookah fumes

Sadly we ended up at a place which was essentially a tapas sports bar with futbol on the TV and a limited menu.  There was a slight ordering snafu due to Rebecca’s crappy Spanish pronunciation, but we eventually had both patatas bravas and some chicken skewers which were surprisingly tasty.  Weirdly, the bar was out of both olives and cheese, so on our walk back to our apartment, we stopped and got some freshly sliced cheese from a shop and had a little wine and cheese picnic on Rebecca’s pull-out sofa/hide-a-bed as a way to round out the evening.

Happy about manchego!