Day 5 found us in Granada and the palace of Alhambra.

Day 6

Back on the bus, everyone. We’re headed to Malaga!

This bus ride was to our last destination, the coastal city of Malaga. By this point in the tour, we were both used to the schedule and a little sick of it. It’s perhaps in this spirit that we were treated to an easy day, with a drive out to Gibralfaro Castle on the coastline. We did not tour the place, and I know I’ve been complaining about the similarity of the cathedrals, but I would have enjoyed this place.

Instead, we went to one of the lookout points for a top-down view of Malaga, and everyone had a blast taking photos and admiring the view. Janice and her family took lots of pictures of our little group throughout the trip, but this was one of the few times we all got into the massive group photos. I’m still very indolent when it comes to stuff like that. More and more I find myself taking pictures of the things I want to remember and photo reference for my burgeoning digital morgue, but I don’t do a lot of what I think of as “tourist photos” which is where you have several people standing in front of the much cooler thing that I’d rather be looking at.

I say this with no acrimony whatsoever. I’m happy to be in those photos, but as we all spend a portion of our lives online and cultivating our digital presence, the number of tourist photos and selfies in front of National Treasures has exponentially multiplied throughout social media. I find that the more continuous and repetitive exposure we have to media, any media, it has a numbing effect on us. How many times have you been idly trawling through Zuckerville and hit someone’s vacation photos and just skimmed right over them because this person always takes selfies with the Grand Canyon over their shoulder and if you’ve seen one of those, you’ve seen them all?

I really have to stop complaining about social media on social media. It’s an intellectual ouroboros that comes off as disingenuous at best and tone-deaf at worst. Let’s get back to Malaga, shall we?

After the view of the city from the observation point, we drove into the city center, parked the bus, and hoofed it up to this incredible Roman amphitheater that had been excavated—and it was really something else, y’all—and then the group went on a walking tour to visit (wait for it)…a cathedral. There was something else on the itinerary and we decided that we would not partake of the cathedral, preferring instead to hold out for the Pablo Picasso museum.

We had an additional wrinkle to contend with: Janice’s niece got some sort of bump or rash on her leg that was itchy and weird, and out of an abundance of caution (it was thought to be an insect bite or sting), she and her father went to the local emergency room. It turned out to be some sort of virus, like a cold sore, that just showed up on her leg instead of her face, so they gave her a topical antibiotic and an oral antibiotic and sent her on her merry way. Crisis averted.

That took a bit of time, during which, we found a café that served great food (no, really?) and enjoyed the sun, the sea air, and did a bit of people watching. Antonio Banderas has a home here, in the very area where we were, and I kept my eyes peeled for him.

We knew the rest of the tour would end up at the Picasso Museum so one the two stragglers rejoined the group, we moseyed over to it, taking our time and enjoying the sights, eventually ending up at another café, where I indulged in a sweet crepe and a café con leche. We enjoyed a brief exchange with a young Scottish couple on holiday; Zane commented on the man’s Seattle Seahawk cap, him being a Forty-Niners fan, and we had to explain the rivalry to him. He’d just bought the cap because he liked it. Me, I was thrilled that I didn’t code-switch while talking to them.

Eventually the others caught up to us, and they looked beat up. It turns out that the guide for the cathedral tour was the opposite of Marta from Alhambra. He was a semi-retired art history teacher, which should have been a good thing, but evidently he kept trying to engage with the group and get them to engage back, rather than just coughing up with the dates and proper names. That same guy was to be our guide through the Picasso museum.

As we cued up in the line outside of the museum, the lady at the front tapped the sign by the entrance and said, “Be sure you read that,” so I did. As it turned out, our timing for touring the Picasso museum couldn’t have been any worse; they were in the process of redoing the entire museum, changing out exhibits and so forth, and so, while we wait on that to finish sometime after Easter, please feel free to enjoy this OTHER exhibit in its place, “Echoes of Picasso.”

What is “Echoes of Picasso,” you may be asking yourself? It’s a brilliantly conceived and curated collection of works of art that were inspired by Picasso’s genius and vision. So, like, anyone who painted something or sculpted something in the cubist style was fair game. Crom give me strength.

Look, it wasn’t a bad exhibit, okay? But when you’re all set for a deep dive into Picasso’s works, from the family private collection, no less, and you get a bunch of stuff that is most emphatically not Picasso, it’s a letdown. It was a bummer for me, as I am an art-guy, but even the disinterested homeschool family felt cheated. Especially when they were exposed to some of these works of art, a lot of which was in the realm of what could be described as, um, transgressive.

The guide didn’t help matters much. He kept trying to get us to “try and visualize” and “try to imagine seeing this art for the first time,” over and over again. Kinda hard for some of us, who have known about Picasso and have had him contextualized and explained to us for as long as we’ve been looking at art seriously. It’s that knowledge and understanding that made me want to see the museum in the first place! I’m right there with you, Jack!

I did my best to follow him, but most of the others scattered as soon as we got inside the converted guard house. The structure itself was beautiful and simple, all the better to showcase the artwork, of course. We dutifully walked the circuit, and I was happy to find there were two Picassos still on display, in and amongst his many, um, admirers’ works. They stuck out like a sore thumb, you could spot them instantly. I could, at least. Everyone else just walked around in a kind of daze, and you could see they were trying to make sense of it all.

I was hoping to at least get a book from the museum to enjoy vicariously, but there were no English versions of the tour book. Moreover, the staff was kinda snotty about it. I wasn’t being a dick or anything; I just asked.

We bought some art supplies for people we know. As we were leaving, the guide called us over and took us to a side door that we’d not seen earlier. It was a courtyard, fenced in and private, with tables and chairs for people to presumably sit and contemplate their lives. It was lovely, but what drew our eye was the proliferation of birds in the fountain.

They were either mutant feral parakeets or mutant pygmy parrots, but either way, there were a lot of them and they were making all kinds of noise. Not about us, but the other birds who had the temerity to attempt a drink and splash in their fountain. It was the bird version of West Side Story. We stayed until someone came looking for us, and then we rejoined the group at the bus.

As we were heading back, our guide pointed out to us where Antonio Banderas lived, overlooking the amphitheater and literally right where we’d spent the day. My chances of seeing him were great, but it didn’t happen.

At the hotel, we were treated to a grove of trees with blooming orange blossoms that smelled amazing and almost made up for the fact that the stairs were designed for a race of giants. Getting up them with suitcases may have taken years off of my soul.

Malaga was great; it has a wonderful, casual energy about it that reminded me of San Diego when ComiCon wasn’t in town. Only with less bras. I have never seen a people so statuesque and beautiful and so lacking in support underwear in my life. One of our group mentioned that when she was shopping, she brought a lot of bras and underwear. She seemed embarrassed, but, she pointed out, “They were so cheap!”

“Of course they were,” I said. “They have a surplus because no one who lives here is buying them, apparently.”

Up Next: More Malaga!