Tales of Two Ladies

Met up with iris, my sister in law, and Jen and Kel her daughters who flew in from Leeds for the night...
We had a few drinks in the hotel pub and listened to Irish music before heading out to dinner so we could do the 'Pub Crawl' all evening. We headed down Essex Street walking from pub to pub.... each place was absolutely packed full of people, girls on Bachelorette parties dressed up in the wierdest outfits, hats, wigs, clothes.... LOUD music, very expensive drinks... two gin and tonics (which by the way were mainly tonic because the shot here is soo bloody small, basically a splash of gin!) anyway, two gin and tonics were 13 Euros, about 16 dollars.... 16 dollars!!!! We could buy a bottle of gin for that! Q and I quickly changed to drinking 1/2 pint beer! But were so bloated after a couple that we had to stop that too! We just arn't sure how everyone does this kind of drinking! Had a good time talking, laughing and dancing with the fam., and meeting very colorful locals! Headed home about 1am along streets that were still absolutely packed with party animals!

After arriving an hour late on the ferry we met with our guide at the port. He supposedly only showed us the rich and middle income areas of Tangiers..... not quite what we were expecting! To start with Tangiers is a very large city with high rises and very congested streets.... the homes we saw and the streets we walked (again supposedly the best places) were dirty, stinky, filled with puddles of we didn't want to know, tiny cobbled streets packed with people trying to sell us stuff and touch us... stores on the street selling dirty 'Organic' vegetables, masses of mint, lots of jewelry stores... we were shown "wonderful" views of the city that consisted of views of barges, garbage, broken down houses. We were regulalry encouraged to buy Moroccan dresses and shows and even had to sit through a carpet demonstration where about twenty carpets were laid out for us to buy.... the man was not very happy (read pissed) that we didn't buy one. who wants to buy a carpet from there? Who does buy a carpet from there?
Arrived back in Spain safely.... although getting off the ferry was an experience in crowd management!

Headed back up to Seville and found a hotel for the night near the airport....... Q figured out how to play charades in French while getting directions to the airport!

Leaving Porto Banus we made our way along the coast heading towards Gibraltor.... we think we're getting used to this driving now because we didn't get lost at all! As we drove up to rock we were reminded of our own little piece of rock back in Morro Bay, but the closer we got the bigger the Gibraltor rock became.... about the same height as ours, but much more expansive. Passed through passport control (from spain to England) with barely a look at our passports and no stamp!. and arrived in min-England. Had a pub lunch, Q ate fish and chips and I had steak ale pie and chips.. and we wandered the streets filled with English people and english shops.... it was like a practice for the real thing!
We wanted to head up the rock on the cable car and take a look at the apes (yes apes) that live on the rock, but when we had walked all the way through town we discovered that the cable car was out of commission.... So, we did get to walk on Gibraltor but didn't get to go the top! Got back into spain, and headed to Tarifa!
No room at the inn here... we didn't have any reservations so had to find a spot. tried calling quite a few places but everywhere was full. Eventually found a less than desireable accommodation without air conditioning (a necessity) or soap (a necessity). This was our worst spot so far!!!
Tarifa turned out to be another walled in city with small cobbled streets.... trendy shops and a lot of surf shops because of the new kite boarding interest here.... We decided to take the ferry over to Morrocco as long as we were so close.... found a place to make arrangements and we set up a private guide to show us around... we decided that going by ourselves was not an option.
Headed to bed early while the rest of the city partied (till 4am) our room was like an oven, and was incredibly noisy....we slept with luggage pushed against our door - it didn't seem safe!

We arrived at the coast and headed to a small town called Porto Banus, right next to Malaga... Carlos recommended we stay here, thought we would enjoy the people watching, car watching, yacht watching - you get the picture?
The town was filled with a bunch of people showing off what they had, ferraris, aston martin, porches, bentleys.... mercedes were like toyotas here! The peeps would just keep driving round and round a small loop that was filled with people watching them and they were watching the people watching them. Tourists were posing by the cars taking pictures! The yachts in the harbor were big and beautiful, some even looked like cruise ships... again tourists (including us) were taking pictures. We saw amazingly poorly dressed rich people that had no sense of style, we saw faces that had had quite a bit of work done. After a few hours of this we both decided to go back to our room and read having burned out on the fakeness of it all! Our room had air conditining, which at this point was like heaven... the weather here was incredibly hot, muggy and overcast... it was like spending the day in a turkish bath!

Set off to see the "White Hilltop Villages" in the scorching heat.... about 130! More mountain driving through windy little (and we mean little) roads. It seemed that everytime we arrived at a village it was Siesta! Villages were Grazalema, another one we can´t remember, and Ronda... All the villages were beautiful, perched on the sides and tops of mountains... Q and S couldn´t understand how they became villages in the first place because they were all surrounded by nothing.... Ronda was the biggest of the three, and our hotel overlooked a huge gorge and the old bridge connecting the new town to the old. Because of S. fear of heights, she had to sleep in the bed farthest from the window! Some good people watching in the square as we drank some "OK" sangria.... but it was soooo hot!