Cartagena, Spain...

Grafitti Cartagena style

Good Friday throngs at the Cartagena harbor

Cartagena, Spain
Spent yesterday (April 17) wandering about Malaga, taking photos, just generally being tourists. And looking for internet—unsuccessfully. Almost found in internet connection but there was a Catch-22 (how many of you are too young to understand that reference?): I got the internet connection but I needed to go to my email to get the password and I couldn’t get to my email without the password to get on the internet. Oh well.

We watched our departure from the Malaga port from our balcony—of course! We may never have a cabin like this one again so we might as well enjoy it! The pilot boat is kind of interesting: it tags alongside the ship waiting for the pilot to debark (is that a word?) and the best description I have of it is that it looks just like a puppydog, tagging along right at the heels of the big momma dog. The pilot boat keeps exactly the pace of the ship and the pilot jumps off the ship and onto his boat; the ship doesn’t slow one little bit!

Again in Cartagena we didn’t have a tour or even a plan as to what we would do. Just got off the ship and started walking. Up. Cartagena has a lot of hills. We didn’t head for the highest hill and we actually ended up walking down a shopping street which, at 9:30 on Good Friday morning was pretty much deserted. (It was NOT deserted later when we headed back to the ship.) Looking down a side street we saw what looked like a float from the Rose Parade so of course we had to check it out.

Apparently, and my Spanish isn’t good enough to know this for sure, there would be a procession later tonight (9pm) of religious floats. But not just any floats. There is a church, Iglesia de Santamaria (yes, all one word), that has float-sized Stations of the Cross. The altars of the church are actually jacked up on float platforms and covered with flowers—not so many as the Rose Parade, but still, LOTS—and then towed somewhere. We couldn’t really understand what was going to happen because some floats were being towed INTO the church, some were towed past us later when we were eating lunch, and some others seemed to be being prepared to be towed OUT of the church. In any case, it was very festive and there were lots of people climbing all over the floats covering them with flowers. A few young men were stealing flowers from the floats for their girlfriends. There were plastic chairs everywhere with numbers on them and several kiosks selling tickets to something. It’s really frustrating when we can’t speak the language! I can sort of kind of have a minimal understanding but certainly not enough to know what was going on here. One nice man tried to tell us but he had minimal English and I had minimal Spanish so we didn’t really get very far. But we can order tapas and cerveza!

So we wandered some more and found an old Roman/Punic/Spanish Civil War archeological dig area, Molinette Park, and that was quite fun to meander about. We have noticed in Spain and Portugal that there are lots and lots of children’s playgrounds, and they are everywhere, not just at schools or the ordinary public area or park but even at the archeological digs where we were walking. There were three playgrounds scattered about the digs and one was even electronic, as in, climb on and lights start flashing as you do various maneuvers on the equipment (we know that because we climbed on them and tried them out). We saw playgrounds everywhere: turn a corner and there’s a shop and a playground, around another is a park and a playground, at the top of a hill with a monument there’s a playground! Really wonderful that they care so much for the children.

Back to the ship after a nice lunch, a couple of beers, a wander through the shopping area, and an internet connection so I could finally post some photos on facebook. Unfortunately I also learned that my daughter-in-law’s mother, Jan, fell this past Monday and fractured her patella and had surgery today. She does seem to be doing well and I had a short facebook chat with Yolanda (my daughter-in-law).

Tomorrow and the next day are a couple of islands, Ibiza and Mallorca, and then Barcelona where we will finish the first half of the cruise and several of our new friends will depart for greener pastures. At that point we will have, I think, 13 days to go. My how time flies!