Málaga With Screaming Children

Yesterday might well have been the longest day of my entire life, from getting up at 4 a.m. in London to going to sleep at 8:30 p.m. in Málaga. I was exhausted by the end of it. But we're here now!

That's the view from our hotel balcony, looking down at a souvenir stall on the Calle de Granada below. As you can see, the weather is so far cooperating, with bright sun and blue skies.

Getting to Málaga was not that fun. Soon after 5 a.m. we took the tube to a very crowded train -- surprisingly crowded, given the hour -- and got ourselves to Gatwick. There, we stood in the British Airways queue to check in, since I'd bought the ticket through BA, but it turned out the flight was actually operated by Vueling, so we had to go stand in a different queue. And then my boarding pass didn't work at security, because of a printer defect at the Vueling counter, so I had to go back and get a new one.

And then we were on an airplane with a family with three small children in the row in front of us, and those kids fought like cats and dogs the entire flight -- screaming at the top of their lungs. The girl, probably kindergarten-age, was upset because her brother was playing the video game that she wanted to play, and then she was convinced he had Internet and she didn't, and the completely ineffectual parents kept trying to negotiate with the kids to use this or that game console or iPad and the kids were having none of it. Tantrums, tantrums, tantrums.

As Dave and I remarked later, the negotiation needed to stop. The parents should have separated those kids and taken away all the digital devices, and after about 20 minutes of staring at their shoes they would have been more compliant. There was a similar meltdown from the youngest daughter just before landing, and the flight attendant actually came by to ask them to be quieter. Permissive parenting -- ha!

A pre-arranged driver collected us from the airport and we found the hotel and, praise God, they sent me the access codes so we were able to get in. We dropped the bags and set off for a wander around town, where I saw this clever monk parakeet snatching food from the pigeons on the Plaza de la Merced.

We settled into a sidewalk cafe, where we had a few drinks and some tapas like gazpacho with cubed salmon, sardines on a skewer (apparently a Málaga specialty) and a ham & cheese board. There was some kind of carnival event going on and there were people wandering the streets in costumes, mainly children.

I found this sticker near the gelato place where we went after our tapas. I guess some family made a cartoon of themselves to post here and there on their travels? They look like a friendly bunch.

As the afternoon wore on, Dave went back to the room and I set out for the water. I wanted to see the sunset and the Mediterranean. So I climbed up a series of paths to the hilltop Castillo de Gibralfaro, overlooking the waterfront. Lots of people had gathered there to watch the sun go down.

That's the bullring down below, in the district of La Malagueta with the beach beyond.

And here's a 40-second video clip so you can get a better sense of what it was like on that hillside, with the sun going down and a guitarist playing nearby. (The "birdcalls" are actually whistles, being sold by another vendor.)

As the sun got lower I found myself on the waterfront near the glass cube of the Centre de Pompidou, a branch of the Paris art museum.

I made my way back to the hotel and joined Dave, who had already collapsed into bed. Today, we're off to Córdoba, but we'll be back to Málaga for one more night at the end of our trip.