It was a short day today. We lost 6 hours flying over from Miami. Good thing too, because we're both pretty beat. The flight went on time and our passage through customs was smooth. We even managed to get the customs person to stamp the correct page of our passports (the ones with our visas) without too much fuss.
I'm sure we looked like your average overwhelmed tourists as we wandered around looking for our hotel shuttle, but that too went relatively easily. The shuttle showed up pretty promptly and took us to our hotel very near the airport:
It's pretty isolated out near the hotel. Laura and I went on a couple of walks trying to find anything useful--a grocery store, an ATM, but kept running into dead ends where pedestrians were clearly not meant to go. That said, the room is lovely, clean and well-appointed. Also, the international electric outlet adapters that Emily got me for my birthday work like a charm. Thanks Emily!
We exchanged a $20 at the hotel desk at the very noncompetitive rate of 0.62 euro/dollar instead of the going rate of 0.86 euro/dollar. Upside, the hotel clerk told us how much the bus to downtown cost and gave us our euros in coins that were appropriate for the bus. Consulting google maps, we were able to get downtown to the Royal Palace of Madrid using the public transportation, bus to metro to city center about 45 mins. We had no particular yearning to see the palace, but it was a goal for us as we figured out how to get about. We have a full day here tomorrow before flying to Seville on Wed. Today was just to get familiar and get something to eat. Tomorrow we'll head down there again and perhaps take a tour or visit a museum. I actually didn't get a picture of the palace, but the view out the front was typical beautiful old European cityscape (pardon me while I squint into the sun, haha):
There were also a lot of statues of famous Spaniards presumably. Like this guy:
He looks a bit like he's been hitchhiking and without luck for so long that some birds have roosted on him. There were a lot of other statues. I didn't see any women which is probably one reason why these women were protesting the patriarchy on one of the nearby squares:
Neither of us was terribly hungry, so we stopped and grabbed some empanadas at this place in the palace district:
A few technical things. Our T-Mobile One phones work pretty well. Unlimited texting and data (albeit throttled back from US rates) with nothing to do and no extra fees.
We hit a cash machine with our Capital One debit card and after ATM fees etc, pulled about a 0.83 euro/dollar exchange rate. We also made a few credit card transactions using a Capital One Quicksilver card and pulled a 0.86 euro/dollar exchange rate (the going rate according to google). We'll try to use the Quicksilver card as much as possible. Also, if you have one of these cards and logon to your Capital One account and set up a "cash advance" PIN number, it allows the card to work with the "chip & PIN" systems ubiquitous here in Europe. The ticket machine at the metro station asked for the PIN, we used the aforementioned cash advance PIN, and the transaction completed successfully. We researched the heck out of credit cards before this trip and Capital One seems to be the best in terms of exchange rates, no foreign transaction fees, and now the chip & PIN technology.
Tomorrow we hope to be Madrid tourists for a day, then Wed fly to Seville to settle down for a while.
I'm sitting at the gate with Laura here at the Miami International Airport. We sailed through bag check and security. We were a bit worried about the weight of our checked bags and they did come in a kilo high (both), but the person checking us in let it slide. He even checked our carry-on rollers through to Madrid for free.
We've had a great time these past three weeks or so, seeing the country, visiting friends and relatives and finally hanging with Emily and Rachel down at the beach for a few days. They just dropped us off about an hour ago and we already miss them a bunch. Somehow it's a bit harder this time than when they leave Walla Walla or when we go back to Walla Walla, but I know that we're never more than a day away from them.
Rachel now has the car for the year. (I keep freaking out thinking I've left my keys somewhere, but then remember, I don't have any keys now.)
We closed out the airbnb condo this morning and drove to Rachel's new neighborhood. She has recently moved to one of the ubiquitous duplexes on the south side of the University of Miami campus.
We met her new roommate briefly. She seems like a good fit.
We went to Taste Buds of India for lunch. They had a buffet that was good, but not nearly as extensive as Walla Walla's Indian Cuisine restaurant on Main St. In particular, I was seriously missing the mango lassi.
After a bit of suitcase reorganization that involved annexing most of Rachel's living room,
We went to the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science. I actually showed my Whitman ID and got in free! It's definitely geared to kids, but they had a lot of interesting stuff for adults too. I particularly liked the aquariums. Also, the view of downtown Miami was beautiful.
The Schueller women, in particular Emily, got fixated on this puzzle in the "Design Lab".
They eventually solved it, but needed a hint. I saw first hand the persistence that Emily has developed working at MRL these past couple of years, haha. There was a fun touch sensitive dance floor upon which Emily and Rachel demonstrated their prodigious dance skills.
Our visit to the museum closed with a wonderful, immersive, planetarium show. If you're ever in the area, this museum is worth the price of admission (even if it ended up being free for me, haha).
On a tight schedule, we hit La Sandwicherie for dinner. I had the "exotic salad" which was mix of greens, avacado, mango and diced turkey. With the vinaigrette dressing, it was a nice mix of flavors. Laura and I tried to keep it light since we're on an overnight flight to Madrid and are hoping to sleep for most of it.
As I write this final post from the US for a while, there are some sad football fans in the gate area in the wake of Spain's upset loss to Russia in the round of 16 of the 2018 World Cup. This is a bit rushed, so pardon the errors. I'm going to pull the trigger on this and then change the timezone on the blog to central European summer time (+6 hrs from the east coast, +9 hrs from the west coast). See you on the other side!
Not content with seeing the ocean in person, this evening we watch Blue Planet on TV:
The morning was spent watching the move Extract on my recommendation. It wasn't as good as I'd remembered, but also not terrible. After lunch, we went to the beach and snorkeled a bit more. The water was rougher and consequently cloudier so the visibility was diminished. We spent most of our time around the pier pilings at the nearest beach:
Afterwards, we spent some time on the beach:
The tall buildings here are ubiquitous and in many ways depress me. Even as I use them, I'm left wondering what was here before and am struck by how wildly unsustainable all of this is and how precarious:
These massive towers are visible as far as the eye can see. Each one contains multitudes, consuming resources and generating waste. And, using massive amounts of electricity:
I enjoy the beach and the time with my family, but whenever I'm in environments like this, I'm left a bit sad.
There's a bridge visible from the balcony of our 23rd story condo with a drawbridge. This afternoon I noticed that it was preparing to open so I did a timelapse:
This is our last full day in the US for a while. Tomorrow evening we fly to Madrid to begin our year in Spain.
Beautiful day today. I got up around 7am and went for a run before it got too hot. After shower and breakfast, we went to the beach. I was mostly interested in snorkeling around the pier. The water was clear and warm--great for snorkeling. We also managed to set up towels and chairs near the pier building, so I was in the shade and the rest had sun (I'm not a fan of sitting in the sun).
Snorkeling around the pilings of the pier was really fun. There were large schools of small fish that would gather around you if you stayed still, but would part before you like magic if you reached out and swept your hand around.
There was one small barracuda hanging around out there. You could see its teeth, but it was not threatening at all.
There were numerous sting rays lying on the sandy bottom beneath the pier. Some were as much as 3 feet across where others were just a handspan in size. They kind of nestle into the sand for camouflage, but once you know what you're looking for, they're pretty easy to spot. This is just a stock photo from Google, but it pretty well captures what we were seeing, though perhaps even more buried in the sand:
The pier pilings themselves were encrusted with barnacles and other coral-like things. If you looked closely, there were a lot of different animals and plants living on the sides of the pilings.
After the beach, we had lunch and played Phase 10 down at the pool in the condo complex:
Rachel took this while I was still working on getting out my phone. She's a pro. She also won the game.
We ran a few errands and had dinner at an Olive Garden. Our waiter was interesting since he'd just returned from a vacation in Barcelona. He used to live in Spain and was excited to hear that we were heading there for a year starting Sunday.
We dropped a few things off at Rachel's house and went to ChilliN7 Nitrogen Ice Cream. We need one of these in Walla Walla. The idea is that they pour the ingredients for your ice cream into a mixer along with some liquid nitrogen. They "churn" the ingredients into ice cream in about 30 seconds. It is soooooo goooooooddddd!
After Emily's usual flight delays (she has the worst luck with planes), we picked her up at Miami Intl at about 1am this morning. It was great to see her, but we were all pretty tired by the time we got back to the condo at 2am.
We all slept in this morning. I didn't get up until 9:30am. Emily slept until noon-ish.
I went to the beach twice today. Once in the morning with Laura and Rachel. The water was warm and clear, but the sun was blazing. We only stayed down there about an hour and went back to the condo for lunch.
After lunch we play a game of dominos on the balcony. We're all looking into the sun here, can you tell?
We're on the 23rd floor. The big challenge was shuffling the dominos carefully so that none fell off of the balcony. I think a domino dropped from the 23rd floor could seriously harm someone.
I was excited to snorkel a bit off of the beach here, so Emily joined me this afternoon for another trip to the beach. The late sun and a bit of cloud cover made for a darker view underwater, but the lack of a blazing sun was a net plus in my opinion. The ocean floor here is pretty uniform. Just rippled white sand for several hundred yards off shore. You have to keep a sharp eye to spot anything interesting while snorkeling. That said, I did see a few interesting sights that have me anxious to go back tomorrow. I found this little live conch:
I also saw a few schools for small and medium sized fish. I saw one very large tarpon, maybe 4 feet long, 60lbs. I also saw a sting ray resting on the sandy bottom.
Emily and I returned and went to the pool here with Rachel and Laura. Afterwards, Laura made dinner, tortellini and caesar salad.
The condo has a TV that has a builtin roku. We've connected our Netflix and MLB tv accounts. Rachel and I binged a fair bit of a stupid sitcom called "Schitt's Creek". We also watched the Mariners complete a 4-game sweep of the Orioles. The M's are headed back to the West Coast tomorrow, so their games will be on too late to watch. It's been nice having them on the East Coast this week while we're on vacation. We've been able to watch a few games.
I manged to fix a computer problem back at Whitman this evening while Rachel and Laura are out walking around the neighborhood. Emily is working on her stuff, reading papers and reddit (which is probably not work, haha).
Hoping to snorkel a bit more tomorrow. Going to bed now at a normal hour.
