Hoov's Travel Adventures: Malaga— what in the devil did I just eat?

The train station was co-located with the metro station. So I followed the instructions from the Feels City Hostel, and took the redline metro after first buying a ticket from the machine. I seemed to be getting pretty proficient now at using these automated machines, and on the internet for buying my travel tickets on buses, trains, and metros.

Turns out the hostel instructions weren’t all that clear since none of the stops mentioned the stop that the hostel referred to. I just figured I needed to get off at the Atarazanas stop because that was closest to the historic old town. Their misleading instructions reminds me of when you give instructions to people on how to get to your place if they have never been there, you usually forget some key part like passing two streets and not one, or you tell a person you are at the 2nd house from the corner, but you are on the third because the house on the corner is facing the other street, etc.

I ended up using Google maps to get me there, and their additional instructions matched except they described the hostel as being between two businesses that have gone out of business and had different names.

When I checked in, they were able to get me a bottom bunk in the place above the kitchen. For the first night, I was the only one in the four-bed dorm. It had a musty smell to it so I kept the A/C on all night. In the morning, I saw the A/C had leaked water onto the floor, the floorboards were loose, and there was water all over the floor.

I had a tough time sleeping because the mattress was so saggy, so I swapped out the one in the bed above me and it was not much better. Although it didn’t sag, it was so thin I could feel the springs beneath me.

The bathrooms were a disaster area. The 3 showers had very high plastic brackets that shot the water out over into the common area past the shower stalls if you used the holders otherwise you had to handhold the showerhead. There was no place to hang your dry clothes and no changing area. One of the two toilets had a missing seat. One of the showers had a vinyl shower curtain so when I took a shower, it clung to you.

I wrote a note to the owner/manager and described all of these problems, and the only fix while I was there was to install the toilet seat.

I really enjoyed the walking streets in the old town, many of them were very wide and had high-end stores. Others had many tapas bars and restaurants seating, and some streets were very narrow that twisted and turned and no sunlight reached the ground.

I enjoyed the bass dinners at the restaurants near the hostel. The beef and pork choices tend to be thin and tough.

From the Hostel, it was a short walk to the beach area and the marina.

On the way to the beach, I walked along the beautiful botanical gardens that contained over 150 species of plants.

I saw several multimillion dollar boats moored along with this multicolored box artwork at the marina.

For €9 I rented the beach chair and palapa for shade and enjoyed the 90° weather with a cooling breeze.

Fishing for Euros with sand sculpture crocodiles.

I visited the Pablo Picasso Museum, which had much of his artwork, including drawings paintings and sculptures.

Malaga was his birthplace, so there were also lots of descriptions of his growing up there and his life as an artist. I think my favorites were the chicken on the chopping block, and boy with shovel. This first painting is one of his early ones when he was a young teenager of his sister and mother.

After this visit, I stopped in to one of the more popular tapas bars, Lola’s, where I sat right by where they were preparing the tapas.

One was an eggplant cannelloni and the other prawns with red pepper mayonnaise. Each for under €3.

I tried a couple and then I got talking to Andrez. He was on business for Air Transat headquartered in Montreal and was originally born in Columbia. Since I had worked for FAA, we swapped a lot of aviation stories.

He suggested some other tapas to try, so I did. This was called Pepito Lola with ham and green peppers. I enjoyed the variety of tapas I have eaten in Spain.

I visited the Malaga Cathedral, which was similar to the one in Seville with separate little areas for different religious figures and places to worship. Periodically, they would play the organ as I walked around.

I visited fascinating, 11th century Moorish palatial fortress of the Alcazaba. The path to the top went through numerous Arabic style arch doorways, and past several gardens, pools with lots of geometric tiles throughout the fortress.

On another path was the steep walkway to the Castillo de Gibralfaro that was way above the city. Again, it was another remaining remainder of its Moorish past. Some chose to take the taxis up to the top rather than the steep climb.

After that, I again enjoyed some more beach time, relaxing after those two climbs to the reminders of the Moorish influences in Malaga.

In the morning about 7:30 AM as I walked to the train station, I noticed everything was closed up. Apparently nothing starts up until about 9 AM in the morning.

I remembered that the train station was fairly large, so I was hoping that they would have a place there for breakfast.

Once at the train station cafeteria, I ordered a coffee, orange juice and with something called Huevos Rellanos. I was hoping that they would serve scrambled eggs inside a poblano green pepper. I was surprised to receive two deviled eggs on toast stuffed with tuna fish. I guess the devil is in the details or lost in translation. Edible, but not my idea of breakfast with eggs.

We queued up in two lines for the arriving train that would take us to Granada. It just took us 10 minutes to get loaded up and we were off right at 9:25 AM. After passing through the coastal mountain range, we passed by miles and miles of olive orchards and some wheat fields.