Tuesday afternoon- Remember that Jinx?

We are in Alicante, in a very jet set international hotel. The Melia, at 100 Euros per night is one of our most lavish hotels, sitting in a prominent location on the beach and near all of the vibrant nightlife. Caitie and her roommate, Catherine met us at the train station last night when we arrived at 10:00 PM. It is hard to describe how happy we were to see that beautiful daughter waiting for us. She is tanned and grown up after her summer on her own. The girls expedited our search for a taxi and generally made getting to our hotel fast and efficient. After helping us get the luggage up to our room we made our way to the promenade across the street from the hotel. The girls, living on their earnings from their senior year of high school have not had many dinners out, so they were unfamiliar with the restaurant scene but helped us to an Italian place called Miami where a German waitress served us the best spaghetti Bolognase Mike has had yet. After we finished dinner at midnight we split up and the girls went dancing while Mike and I walked back to the hotel for a night of luxury in our modern hotel. But, wow, was our room ever hot. It stayed hot all night too. At 5:00 I woke up so hot I thought I was dying, so I crawled out to the balcony and sat outside for awhile. No fiddling with the air conditioner helped. In fact, when you turned the temperature down below 25 or so, it cut off.

This morning, the girls showed up at 9:00 AM, a pleasant surprise. We had planned to meet Caitie in the early afternoon, but unable to sleep she came early. We all went in search of an American style breakfast which Caitie was hungry for. After walking around for awhile and getting a piece of toast and coffee each to sustain us, we decided our best shot at American breakfast was back at the hotel. We sat out on the balcony and enjoyed our eggs and coffee.

Because of the very hot night, Mike called the front desk and asked that someone come and look at the air conditioner. The engineer showed up just as we were leaving for our first breakfast exploration and assured us in Caitie-translated Spanish that he would handle it while we were gone. When we came back to the room we found that he had re-set the dial. We appear to have had the heater on all night rather than the air conditioner which is why it cut off every time we tried to set it to a cooler setting. Some jinx! I wonder how much of our hot nights could have been cooler if we had only understood the dials of the thermostats better. Our room is not yet cool, but we have higher hopes for cool now than we did after that painful night.

Catherine and two friends from Seattle are off to Madrid this afternoon and we are making plans to travel to Granada with Caitie tomorrow for a few days. After seeing the girls off at the train station this afternoon Caitie will show us their apartment then we'll head off for an afternoon of shopping. Caitie hopes to find some school clothes while Mom, Dad and their credit cards are in town. We've decided these few days are not going to fit in our budget but we aren't going to worry about it.

Alicante is the first modern city we have been to if you don't count Madrid where we have sat in the train station twice. Although their is a historical center to the city and a castle up on the hill overlooking the city, most of the city is modern. The promenade across the street from our hotel is a long boulevard with outdoor cafes and shops lined up parallel to the waterfront for at least a mile. Palm trees line the center divider of the boulevard and a yacht marina lines up on the water side making the city initially like Marina del Rey or some other modern Southern California city. Ice cream stands, busy traffic and crowds of people support that illusion. There are differences though, such as the men walking to the beach in their Speedo type bathing suits rather than the more discrete trunks favored by Americans and the mosaic sidewalks, the motorbikes weaving in and out of traffic and the omnipresent Nestle ice cream menus. Although we don't see "homeless" folks here, we do see people, usually elderly, with cups out begging for money. Overall, it feels quite safe here.

I'll expand on Alicante after our shopping trip. Thankfully I have free internet to write this on, because I will probably feel reluctant to spend anything later. Bye,
Deanne