After settling in (aka dispersing my belongings throughout my room), drinking my coffee, getting cleaned up, attempting to fix the broken TV, eying the radio with consideration but then rental-car-induced animosity and getting a recommendation from my suddenly not so nice and sunny front desk lady, we set out for dinner. The ‘mellow twenty minute walk’ was nice, but lent on the ‘full city tour’ side, which was a little difficult on my hungry stomach. We followed the sound of drunk people and by 11 we found a nice little Spanish restaurant. Or so we thought. Rey later relabeled it ‘memorable.’ It started with absurdly full glasses of free red wine. What could be better, right? Wrong. That was to hide something…something called their food. I got the paella, but sent it back. Rey got lamb chops (yeah, he’s crazy), but sent them back. They gave us some nice ice cream though, and played an upbeat, jazzy lounge singer covering the most serious pop hits of the nineties. Think Frank Sinatra plus Alanis Morissette’s ‘You Aughta Know’, Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Closer’, Nirvana’s ‘Rape Me’, etc etc. Added bonus: if you are sitting in my seat and look to your left, you see this:
It was definitely memorable.
Over the course of dinner I made a single, solitary goal for the next day: finding an ipod adapter for the car. When I finally woke myself up, about 2 hours later than I had planned, it was noon. We wandered around looking for food and ipod accessories. The former proved much easier than the latter, although neither was easy. We ended up in a little corner bar/restaurant that didn’t have a menu. In every restaurant there are these little refrigerated cases with trays of tapas on display. The waiter pointed at his display and said just choose which ones you want. I bemusedly chose meatballs, potatoes and roasted peppers, to which the bartender/waiter/chef said ¿Bocadillo? And I shook my head yes. My selections showed up on the table surrounded by bread. New vocab word: bocadillo means sandwich.
Everyone responded to my queries about electronics stores with lots of puzzlement and very little
information, so we decided to just head towards a mall and hope to find something suitable there. I selected El Centro Nuevo in the GPS and pressed ‘Go!’. Seventy round-abouts and about that many declarations of ‘recalculating…recalculating’ from the GPS lady-voice we were nowhere near a mall, but Rey spotted a Media Markt sign (Euro version of Best Buy). Hoooray. After much deliberation, we chose the only radio tuner ipod adapter thing they had and gleefully hopped back in the car. Now driving will be fun! As Rey fiddled with the new whatchamacallet, I fiddled with the ignition, unable to get the car started. [Quick side note: Rey doesn’t drive stick, so at this point I am the sole Partner operator. This will be revisited later, I promise.] Around the time he realized that the reason they only sell one type of FM radio ipod adapter because there were no open radio stations and they didn’t actually work in the city, I started the car with absolutely no realization for any reason why it took ten minutes to get the silly thing to agree to let me turn the key. Maybe the poor little Partner was tired, I don’t know. But we were on the road again, this time towards Granada.
