Jo's Travels

Decided to have a rest day today, but before that we needed to squeeze in the Picasso Museum and the Alcazabar.

Malaga is the birth place of Pablo Picasso, and his daughter in law and grandson have donated 150 paintings to Malaga, where the local government has built a magnificent museum to house them.

I liked some of his earlier work, early meaning when he was a teenager, he actually did some really beautiful detailed portraits back then, and was interesting to see the progression into what he was doing in his final years. I also didn´t realise he did sculptures as well. Also some of his work was influenced by different women, ie. his first wife, then his next lover Marie, and another lover Dora. The bookshop is jam packed with just Picasso books, and lots of those books are just his work from those ´lover eras´. Anyhow, his later stuff looked as if he´d just got a big head and thought well i can just put any stroke down on paper and it will be fabulous, that, or he was getting lazy.

The building itself was built on top of an old Phoenician house. When I say old, I mean early 6th century. You take the stairs underneath the museum and they have preserved it all.

After that visited the Alcazabar, an old Moorish palace and fortress on the hill behind Malaga, the gardens, architecture, and water features, were lovely, very similar to the Alcazar in Seville, but I think better.

Alcazabar

We spent the rest of the afternoon laying on the beach, our first real day of relaxing our style. But beach, is more of dark brown gritty sand, dirt colour, the Mediterrenian Sea is extremely cold and flat, but very blue. I think Kev got up to his knees. The beach isn´t too busy but hearing plenty of Pommy accents, and some lobster coloured Brits.

We went out to a bar close to us at Malagetta, to watch the Soccer on TV, Real Madrid was playing the other Madrid team, and the score was 1-1. Interesting, considering Real Madrid has some of the best soccer players in the world. We finally got some free tapas, the first time since being in Andalucia. It seemed that the free tapas went out the window after leaving Madrid. But this time, it was laid on!! Armed with my trusty phrase book with a special culinary section, we figured out what we were eating. Old mate serving us was having a great time trying to figure out what I was asking him, but we figured out that one of the dishes was a seafood in a large snail like shell..we figured it out after he brought the actual shell out!!! He told me to keep it, so that´s a lovely souvenir of that night. Later, we took a bottle of wine to the roof top and watched the big ships pass into the harbour.

Hotel California - our pensiona is in the green building