Courtesy mint.com.
The restaurant part is pretty straight-forward, but I always have a hard time knowing how much to give a hairdresser, cabbie or bell-hop. Here's a handy guide.
Chowed down at the Green Mesquite, and it was awesome. Peach cobbler for dessert topped it off.
Visiting Banff again today and decided to overindulge in some excellent Elk nachos.
You Americans don't know.
I missed you, old friend.
I'm at a pub for backpackers and met a couple of people. Looks like we're going to do a cooking class tomorrow night where we learn to make paella and sangria.
So I arrived in Malaga at noon after traveling all night. I was pretty wiped, but I am staying in a great place for the 6 weeks I'm here. I arranged something with someone who was going to be out of the country when I was here, so he had his brother let me in to the place and show me around. I am staying in a converted attic/penthouse in the middle of Malaga's main town square. It's a pedestrian-only area and is beautiful. The entire area is paved with marble, which is notable especially as I have a friend who marveled at the marble door footers in my NYC apartment. It's a little less notable because everything in the area seems to be 100% marble. After showing me around the apartment, my new friend (David) took me on a tour of about 5 different little restaurants around town and introduced me to the tapas culture. Basically we would sit and have a beverage (coffee, wine, beer, Malaga's famous 'sweet wine') and share a small plate of food & then leave and repeat elsewhere. The specialty in Malaga is fried fish, which was great. We toured around for about 4 hours and then he realized he was supposed to run some errands for his girlfriend so he had to go (I caught a pic of his change in mood when he realized he had to go). It gave me a chance to nap for a few hours. When I woke up it was midnight and I went out to find some dinner. It was a Saturday night and the streets were packed with people. Of course they all spoke Spanish and I was still pretty tired so I ducked in to a small place and got a giant bowl of paella. Just like everything else I've eaten here it was amazing. Then I tried to find my way home and got lost. I still hadn't got the internet working properly on my iPhone after getting a new sim card from a Spanish carrier. I got home and was able to sleep in this morning. At lunch, David and his girlfriend (who's also great) came by the place and took me around some more. Malaga is the birthplace of Pable Picasso and, although its a cliche, he's my favourite artist (The Old Guitarist is probably my favorite work of art, which I saw in NY years ago). A lot of surrealist stuff came out of this area as well, including a lot of Dali's work. Anyways, we went to both Picasso's birthplace and the Museo Picasso, which sits on an old Roman ruin (the ruins are on display in the basement where you can see 16th century structures built on top of 6th century structures). We also did a lot more eating and drinking. An interesting side-note: I took up yoga while I was in NY (an ex of mine would probably shit herself to know this as she tried so hard to get me to go. While in NY I met someone who said I was too much of a pussy to go... that pretty much did it). Anyways, I actually kind of enjoyed the yoga but thought I likely wouldn't take it up again at least until I got back to NY. Turns out my new friend is a yoga instructor. Go figure. So after much eating and drinking, David and his girlfriend passed out here. And my sense of time is still pretty messed up, so I'm up late and now with this blog posting I'm finally caught up to present day. I'm going to bed. (a note about my pics: I know a lot of them are crap but I'm only posting iPhone photos here. I'll get around to posting my other photos on Flickr eventually)
