Spain/China 2023, continuing (05)

[aadler]

Fourth day in Spain – July 02 Sunday

We woke about 8:40AM, got ready and went to breakfast. Kevin and Mei‑li and Amber arrived shortly after we did, and sat at an adjacent table (we’d picked one that seated two). We visited while we ate, and with one thing and another it was around 10:30 before we returned to our room. From there we did enough packing to be ready to depart.

We checked out by noon, and the bus started off about 12:25PM. We drove for a little over an hour, stopped at a roadside cafeteria to get a meal, then started off again around 3:45PM. I slept as much as I could, since there really wasn’t much else to do.

It was probably 6:45PM when we reached Cordoba. The hotel (Eurostars Palace Cordoba) was very luxuriously appointed, but we immediately found ourselves dealing with one frustration after another. We couldn’t figure out how to get the lights to work. I found that the adapter for my power converter had apparently remained in the outlet at the Oropesa Parador without my noticing when I pulled the converter itself, so we now had no way to run my laptop or recharge our phones. The printed directions for the room had the English text in tiny print, and were seriously inadequate. (What’s the one thing such directions should have above all else? why, that would be the number for the front desk. I had already established, two hotels ago, that plain “0” doesn’t work; fortunately, the technique from a previous hotel worked for this one. Still, you shouldn’t have to guess at it.) We were supposed to scan a QR code to access different menus from the room TV, but my phone has no QR scanning app and Susan’s was out of power (which we couldn’t recharge, remember?).

We worked our way through much of that. The front desk explained that leaving a room card in a card reader by the door would enable the lights; simple enough, but you don’t know that unless you know that. I checked at the front desk, and the hotel didn’t have the kind of adapter plug that would work for us. Kevin let us know that the room TV had a USB port, so I started recharging Susan’s phone from that. Susan didn’t care for the à la carte menu choices, and preferred to remain in the room and make do with some of our travel snacks while I joined the others for dinner.

I went to the lobby at 8:30PM, walked with the rest of the group to where we were to eat. I didn’t get the name of the place, and it may not have been a single place; I got the impression it was a kind of indoor “market” where Cristina bought various dishes from different vendors and had them brought to our table. We had pork with rice, mussels, nachos, fried baby squid, what might have been crab meat, heavily spiced saffron rice, and pizza. I got a carry-out box and took some pizza slices and nachos back to Susan, arriving maybe 10:30PM. We both went to bed sometime after that.

It took some time for me to realize it, but the number of children in the group didn’t match what I had expected. There are roughly 20 of us, but only five kids (and one of them is 15 and tall, so I didn’t count her among them till I learned how young she is). Each ‘child’ has a mother along, so that makes 10; Amber is also accompanied by her father and two grandparents, making 13; there are two tour guides, Cristina (Spanish) and Rena (Chinese), plus Cristina’s brother Joachim, making 16. One child has a grandmother as well (17), and the only other man present is with one of the women and I haven’t heard him essay any Spanish, so I think he’s just ‘accompanying’ the way Susan and I are (up to 18). Since the tour was put together for Cristina’s students and parents, this would seem to indicate that at least two of Cristina’s students are adults. Doesn’t really change anything, but I just like to be clear about things.)