Lloret de Mar, day 2 (continued) and day 3...

Galina and I went back to the room and rested after the boat ride. At around 6:30 pm, we set out for the Internet cafe where we had stopped the evening before to buy a wireless access card, and Galina surfed on my iPad while I went for a swim in the Med.

The water was cool at first, but easily gotten used to. The beach, on the other hand, took some effort, as the sand consisted of small pebbles, measuring perhaps 1/8th of an inch or finer. The shoreline enters the water at an angle of between 20 and 30 degrees, which means that my 6-foot high frame was in over its head within a few yards of the surf line (had there been any surf).

While I swam, I noticed there is every kind of entertainment offered to tourists, all of which pretty much involve moving at high speed over the water. I could recognize the parasailing concession and the jet skiers, but the one where about a dozen intrepid riders hang onto what amounts to a giant hot dog that's dragged behind a power boat was new to me. I had seen one during our boat ride earlier in the day, during which time one person fell off, whereupon the rest of the passengers jumped off, too, either in a show of solidarity or because they had been instructed to.


We met Valeriy and Olga in front of the ajudamente (city hall) at 8 pm and went walking through the town, past the shops hawking everything from liquor to a session with schools of tiny fish (baby piranha? I didn't ask) that purportedly nibble the dead skin from whatever you may choose to dip in the water and also provide a healthful boost for blood circulation (according to the proprieter).

We ended up walking the length of the resort, whereupon we turned toward the beach and ended up at a place that served ice cream sundaes. I ordered a beer (I thought), while everyone else indulged in a maraschino-cherry topped adventure involving strawberries, coffee, or caramel nougat. My beer, when it came, had a strangely sweet taste, which I later learned was the result of it being not beer, but a clara con limón, consisting of half lager beer and half Sprite soda, a drink with an apparent following in a number of countries. I've reserved judgment for the time being, as I really need to down a few more of this drink to properly make a definitive assessment. (However, I suspect those sessions may lag behind my trying a drink called a "Guinness and black," which was described to me by LJ friend bogorad as a mix of Guinness stout and blackcurrant liqueur.)

We finally said our farewells a few minutes short of 11 pm, and Galina and I returned to the hotel.

It was another one of those hard-to-fall-asleep nights, but instead of male voices engaged in a pre-combat ritual of words, there was an incessant and insistent conversation among females. I was reminded of the poem by Pushkin composed during a night of insomnia, where he speaks of "Trifling talk The Fates dissemble" ("Парки бабье лепетанье"). When I finally stuck my head out the window at 3 am to view the source of this endless stream of babble, it turned out the source was not on the street below, but in one of the other rooms in the building we were in. Ye gods.

Just as during the previous night, the gulls loudly greeted the new day, after which there was a wonderful two-hour period, between roughly 6 and 8, during which one could actually catch a few winks.


Getting home was about like getting there, except for the market we passed on the way out of Lloret de Mar (see the photo above, with the chanterelles) and abandoning the toll road around Arles to go over secondary roads, via St-Rémy-de-Provence, back to Cavaillon.

(The French ASF, whose logo looks suspiciously like a dollar sign, charges around 8.5 eurocents per kilometer to travel its roads, or about 20 cents US per mile. That's about twice the per-mile rate to travel the length of, say, the Pennsylvania Turnpike.)

A pile of work awaited me. I've since done some of it; the rest will have to wait until tomorrow.

Cheers...

P.S. Thinking about mile markers reminds me: today is the 11th anniversary of my first LJ post.