WISH YOU WERE HERE

Here in Malaga, Spain, we are having trouble finding internet connections, so our communication is suffering some. Nevertheless, this is the view from our apartment balcony, so all we can say is: wish you were here!

We are in the first week of our four weeks in Spain. Thought we ought to put to use those Spanish lessons we paid for in Guatemala. So far, we are getting along well in Spanish Spanish, though they have a funny lisp that still makes me laugh, as in "grathias".

We are on the Costa del Sol (Coast of the Sun) which is a huge mecca for sun-lovers from all of northern Europe, particularly Great Britain. We went to the international branch of the church (in English) Sunday morning, then joined the throngs of tourists Sunday afternoon in line to enter Gibraltar, which is a British zone, requiring passports and British pounds. Yesterday, we drove up into the Andalucian hills and saw a lot of Pueblos Blancos (white villages). We also visited a cave with some actual prehistoric cave paintings, one of the very few in Europe that you can still enter. The famous ones, like Lascaux and Altamira, are closed now, because the paintings were being destroyed by the presence of so many tourists.

I love being in Europe again. For some reason, it always feels like home to me here, even though I've never been in this particular spot. (I feel the same way in Hawaii!) From here, we fly to Ibiza, an island in the Mediterranean, then we'll spend a week in Barcelona, then a week in Denia, south of Valencia. All our Spain destinations are on the Mediterranean Sea, which I doubt we will tire of. It doesn't get much better than this. Really, we wish you were here!