This week has been a week of discovery and departures for our backpacking family. It’s a big week!
Firstly, Charlie and Billie left Friday morning with Steve and Dacey walking them to Malaga Airport via train to catch a flight to Gatwick Airport in England departing at 12:35pm and landing London time 2:35pm (London is an hour behind Malaga). They are catching up and staying with a family we met on the backpacking road five years ago in Vietnam (OMG is it that long ago already!?). How very lucky are they hey? I say VERY lucky…and yes I will be reminding them of this luck every so often (and when I need to!).
Secondly, those of us who are not heading OS (lol) are hiring a 5-seater car for the weekend and exploring the other areas of the Andalusian region. We are heading to the city of Cordoba on Saturday and then driving to Seville on Sunday and staying overnight in Seville and returning to Malaga in time to pick up the two jet setters at 9pm from Malaga Airport from their London long weekend. Well that was the plan until things went wrong…but more on that later…
When they arrived into Gatwick and made their way through customs the girls were questioned by an English customs guard as to the nature of their trip. Being 16 and 13 years of age and travelling internationally around Europe without a parent, he had good reason to ask so many questions!
How long are you staying here for?
Where’s your family?
Do you have a contact here? How do you know them? Are they picking you up? What happens if no one picks you up from the airport? Do you have a number?
How much money do you have?
What does Francesca do for work?
And then that was it. They looked at both girls sussing them out, and then processed their passports and said, “have a lovely time.” They were in. Phew!
Viernes | Friday
Ash is not talking to either Steve or me, and barely to Dacey. She’s locked herself in her room, appearing only when she needs water or food and that’s not much at the moment. I think we’ll give her a day to be with herself which will hopefully give her a chance to reflect on why we cancelled her flight to London. In the meantime, we are left with only one child – our youngest Dacey! So we are making the most of our only-child day today with a fun line up of exploring Malaga.
Only-child day first stop: Ice cream
When there’s always four kids in tow, purchasing ice creams in down town Malaga usually costs us a small fortune (around $25-$30 a pop). But with only one child today, it was “yes of course we’re getting ice cream!”. So far the top three flavours are raspberry sorbet, chocolate and peppermint, and I have a like for the coffee. We are happily eating our cold ice cream as we walk down the sunny main street of Malaga central towards the beach and port area.
Only-child day second stop: Ebikes
We’ve been looking at hiring bikes – there’s plenty of organisations to choose from here in Malaga – to get around to seeing the other beaches in Malaga along the promenade. Riding bikes is very popular here in Malaga, as well as taking tours on Segways (a two wheeler electric upright bike). But you have to take a tour to get about on a Segway and we don’t need the tour bit as we’ve seen and explored most of Malaga on foot in the previous four weeks. So the next best thing: ebikes (10 Euros each for 2 hours).
They’re awesome for when you’re going up hills as all we need to do was turn on the electric switch and the bike would push itself! We cycled along the promenade and thoroughly enjoyed taking in the views of the Mediterranean Sea as we cycled right beside it. Blue skies, sunshine, gentle breeze and an expanse of ocean. I was pinching myself and turning around and yelling back to Steve, “Hey we’re actually cycling along the Mediterranean!” It’s times like these, of being absolutely present to the moment that I adore.
As in my previous post, we discovered that Malaga Beach is actually man-made. And today we saw the extent of its so called ‘unnatural’ nature with loud bright yellow diggers digging up the sand and placing scoopfuls into large bright yellow tip trucks. They’re obviously moving sand back to the main beach as it erodes away over time and sand is dumped in places it shouldn’t be in time for the peak summer season in Malaga. I’m guessing this process of scooping and redistributing and then rolling the sand flat is done each season at this beach. Many of the other beaches along the promenade were closed; cordoned off with tape around its boundary, while expensive beachside restaurants continue to serve their customers.
Only-child day third stop: Malagueta Beach
On the way back from riding all the way around the promenade and enjoying the spectacular views, we stopped off at the main beach – Malagueta, chained the bikes up together, and sat on the beach with some drinks and potato chips. It was warm and relaxing after our couple of hours of riding.
There was a crowd of party-goers on the beach this late afternoon. Malaga attracts tourists from other European cities to visit and stay to celebrate pre-wedding bucks and hen’s nights and birthday parties. Each weekend there are plenty of young people with dress ups on celebrating something. They go to a lot of trouble with their costumes too. And being a Friday, these beachgoers had come here for a weekend of fun.
Only-child day fourth stop: Malaga’s Gastronomy Festival
We return the ebikes back to the shop and plan on walking through the city centre to get back home. But we stop just near the port area and information centre as there is a live band playing music and singing, and there seems to be the selling of food and drinks. So of course we investigate. As it turns out this weekend is Malaga’s Gastronomical Festival so we buy some drinks – champagne and beer, some Argentinian pastries, and then try some small burgers of pulled pork and coleslaw. Oh so yum. Dacey messages Ash to meet us here, but she declines.
We return home via the scenic walk through the tree and green foilage lined streets of Malaga. Steve and Dacey decide to play a game of beach tennis but on the footpath and the ball lands in the pond. Steve jumps in and wades through to save the ball. We head home and get ourselves ready for our following day trip to Cordoba. Ash was a little happier to see Dacey (but not us yet). Steve has organised the hire of a smaller 5-seater car which will make parking so much easier. The cost of hiring for three days is 130 Euros.
Sabado | Saturday | Road trip to Cordoba (day trip)
We depart at 11:30am after Steve jogs to collect the hire car for the weekend. We’ve had breakfast and we’re ready for the 160km journey on the A-45 motorway. I’ve managed to have a bit of a one on one chat with Ash, but not got much back other than, “Do I have to come?” I just reply “Yep” and walk out of her bedroom. Amazingly we five are all sitting in the car happy that the Spotify music breaks up the icy conditions amongst us.
The Spanish motorways are amazing – two lanes and 120km speed limit most of the way. We are experiencing the feeling of standing still even when we are travelling 120km/h as other cars pass us at 140/150km/h. It’s really hard getting used to the ‘outside’ lane being the slow lane here in right-hand drive land. But Steve’s doing an amazing job.
The landscape looking out the window is magnificent (once again). White homes clumped together perch on top of hills and roll down the slope of the mountains with long rows of olive trees lapping all the way up to their doors. The rolling landscape is a mix of all shades of green plus speckles of white and dark ochre red-brown in between the rows of newly planted olive trees. The overhead clouds are a plump shape and stark white against a vivid blue sky. And the hills that roll over one another are home to thousands upon thousands of olive trees until the eye can see.
We Google places to park the car in the city of Cordoba. This is our next big challenge, especially on weekends or peak summer seasons, parking a hire car can be problematic. We drive down the main street entering Cordoba and there are parking places but they are full. We follow Siri’s direction down a one-way narrow road. We park near a dumpster and I run out to check out the rates and times but it’s all in Spanish. Steve finds a man and with a lot of hand gestures and pointing, we are back in the car and driving up the ramp and parking here for about 5 Euros an hour. I have no idea where we are in relation to the main part of the city and its attractions, but I figure we’ll soon find out.
The car parking building is multi-level and very narrow – the turns are so tight that we all breathe in as we go around them. The distance between the floor and the ceiling of the car parking place itself is so small that Steve’s hair nearly touches the ceiling. There’s no logical order to the floors either as we push our bodies into the small lift and press a number hoping to reach the correct floor to exit out of the car park. It takes a couple of tries, but we finally find our way out and we are ready to explore the city of Cordoba.
We walk down the wide main road that is lined either side of shops and cafes. Then we venture down a narrow offshoot of a road, following Google maps direction, and find ourselves in the network of narrow cobblestone lanes that is old Cordoba. We were warned not to attempt to navigate the car in the old city of Cordoba and now we can see why. We watch as one driver in his small car attempts to turn and then drive down one of the narrow lanes full of people give up and cautiously back track. We walk on.
We’re bee-lining it to the tourist information centre to get a map and some helpful directions on where to go and what to see in a day around this city. We try and pass through a horde of people that belong to a tourist group entering a small doorway in a narrow old city laneway and are stopped in our tracks due to the congestion of people. We finally slip through amongst them, find the tourist information centre located near the Roman bridge. We breathe out as we come out of the narrow streets and into the wide open space of a plaza. The kids are wanting something to eat first but the tourist information centre woman informs us that the popular area (where we came from) will be very busy right now and that’s where the main cafes and restaurants are located. Never one for having to dine at the most popular we make other arrangements. We are definitely on Spanish time now as it’s just after 2pm and it’s lunch time. We decide to walk over the historic Puente Romano or Roman bridge and try our luck on the other side.
We find a small café and relish the food and atmosphere. Steve and I share a hot plate of seafood paella and the kids enjoy a bowl of fresh pasta and a wood fired pizza. Everyone is happy. Ash is starting to talk to us by this stage of the teen-parent standoff. Things are looking up then.
For more on the amazing historical sites we visited on our day trip to Cordoba please see post titled: Day 139 | Five: Snippets of Spain | 6 May 2017 (posted soon).
Domingo & Lunes | Sunday & Monday | Overnight Road Trip to Seville
We woke early, purchasing breakfast from the local bakery (the only one open on a Sunday) around the corner – croissants and pastries – and headed off again in our comfy 5-seater Skoda 5-door hatchback down the A-45 (as we did yesterday heading north to Cordoba) but turning onto the A-92 west bound to the Spanish city of Seville.
Again we never tire of the southern Andalusian landscape of wind turbines sitting atop distant mountain ranges and today we pass a paddock full of solar panels soaking up the bright warm sun. Blocks of towering apartment buildings sprout up with antennae’s like spindly stalks standing on each rooftop and all facing the same direction. It looked like something out of an alien planet.
We’re cruising along the motorway listening to Cold Play, MGMT, and Empire of the Sun. The aux cord is in and we’re all happy and smiles today. Ash is talking to us (the evil parents are back in the mix) and we’re taking an overnight road trip to the Spanish city of Seville. We pass through the smaller towns on the way into Sevilla – everything is closed as it’s Sunday. Even the large malls are closed! It’s more of a ghost town than a shopping complex. The outer city of Seville sprawls out from afar giving us a taste of how large this city actually is – 690,566 population recorded in 2016. We are fortunate to arrive on a Sunday afternoon without having to navigate the craziness of city traffic around the huge four-lane roundabouts. Cars can at any time use whatever lane they wish to use when going around the roundabouts here. So we are on the lookout in all directions as we go around them, using the horn once when a woman nearly clips into us!
The 200km journey takes us just under 2½ hours but the real fun is about to begin: locating our apartment. It took us over an hour of driving around and around along the extremely narrow, often one-way streets, listening to some TomTom turkey with an Aussie accent tell us to “do a U-turn mate as soon as you can and if those backseat passengers complain tell ‘em to get out at the next stop!”. Our TomTom nearly found itself being thrown out the car window by me on more than one occasion, which I’m guessing would not be the first time for travellers with a TomTom in Seville.
I call the apartment we have booked to stay at, and the lovely lady speaks some English as I tell her how lost we are. She informs me that the garage doors are labelled number 12 and to give her a call back when we locate them and she will kindly open the door for us to park our car. I hang up devastated. We are going to have to find this place somehow. I resort to jumping out of the car and running up laneways to check road names and numbers. All I need to find is San Vicente and the number 12 and something that looks like a garage door! How hard can it be? And then I find it – number 12 garage door on San Vicente. I run back to the others waiting in the car that’s waiting in the middle of the laneway smiling. Now we just need to work out how to get there within this maze of one-way streets. Again we are very fortunate to arrive on a Sunday afternoon when there is hardly any traffic to manage.
The apartment we’re staying at in Seville is extraordinarily large complex of apartments compared to its tiny laneway entry. As we walk inside we feel a lot like characters in the book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as the place is huge and on an expansive setting. It’s part of an accommodation group called Museo Tempo and as we approach the doorway the lady with whom I was speaking to on the phone greets us just outside on her bike as she heads home for the day. She tells us to speak to her colleague Kevin through the intercom and he will let us in. Yay!
The apartment costs 90 Euros plus 15 Euros to park the car. But friendly Kevin waivers the parking fee and allows us to keep it there until late the next day as we plan on exploring the main attractions of the city the following day.
Kevin has lived in Seville for 10 years, originally from France. He is a lovely young man who efficiently checked us in and handed over the apartment keys with a map of Seville whereby he circled all the sites he recommends to see. There are plenty! We went up to our three-bedroom apartment on level one admiring the open layout of the building with its semi-indoor gardens and open air architecture. All we craved at that point in time was locating where the pool was! We changed into our bathers and headed straight to the rooftop for a swim in the pool to freshen ourselves up after an exhausting effort in finding this place. It did the trick, and after a dip in the refreshing rooftop pool, we are out and about with a map in hand working out where to head first!
To read more about our overnight stay in Seville please see post titled Day 140-141 | Six: Snippets of Spain | 7-8 May 2017 (posted soon).
Lunes en la noche | Monday Night | Dónde están las chicas? Where are the girls?
As you know Charlie and Billie ventured off on a long weekend stay in London with our friends who live in Brighton. They are scheduled to return tonight, departing Gatwick Airport at 5:05pm and landing into Malaga Airport at 9pm. We were coordinating our drive home from Seville to coordinate unpacking at our Malaga apartment first and then Steve would drive to the airport (only 20 minutes away) to collect them. But that all changed when I received a Messenger phone call from Billie while we were in the car heading back along the A-92 to Malaga. It starts off like this…
“Hi mum, well ah, we’ve missed our fight!”
Silence. “What? You’re joking right?”
Silence. “No we missed our flight.”
“Really? Where are you now?”
“We are at the airport and the man is telling us we’ve missed it and the gate is closed.”
“OMG you’ve got to be kidding me!” I turn to Steve who is driving down the A-92 and repeat what Billie is telling me. Steve goes quiet. The music is turned off and the two in the backseat are listening to my every word intently.
Now neither Charlie nor Billie have a London sim card, but they have been able to access the Gatwick Airport internet – which was rather crappy and caused more stress in our disjointed communication with them by experiencing internet drop outs.
“So where’s Charlie?”
“She’s waiting for someone to come down and meet us here and work out if there’s another flight we can catch, but we don’t know if there are any seats left.”
So the girls work out that Billie will use her 90-minutes of free airport internet to communicate with us, while Charlie deals directly with the airport personnel at EasyJet to work out what they can do.
At the end of a long connected-disconnected Messenger conversation Charlie purchased another two one-way tickets back to Malaga. The girls had to come out of ‘no man’s land’ and line up to buy new tickets – hoping there were seats available – and then go through customs again. The cost: 80 pounds each (A$140 each)! This little trip to London was the most expensive trip by far in nearly 5-months of travel. Steve pulls the car over at a rest stop and I try and get a better signal to communicate with them. But I don’t.
In the meantime, Steve’s looking up EasyJet’s missed flight policy and what we can actually do while I’m transferring $300 from our account into Charlie’s account. We discover that since insurance wasn’t taken out on the tickets, there is no recourse for missing the flight. It’s pretty much start all over again scenario.
I receive a notification ping on my phone from the Messenger app it reads…
Mum I need to know now – will I buy the tickets or will we stay and look for new one’s tomorrow?
Charlie is demanding answers as she’s in a queue for new tickets and finds out there are two available to Malaga on the next flight. I can sense the level of stress has risen from her tone and also from me as I try and work out the best solution to the current situation sitting on the side of the motorway with shitty internet connection available. I Google the exchange rate of 80 pounds (about $140 multiplied by two!) and we tell her to just buy the tickets if they’re available and get on the next plane scheduled to depart at 7:20pm. I don’t hear back from her, and the only way I know all has worked out is watching the bank account balance diminish.
After Charlie and Billie get through customs and return to no man’s land, I receive another notification ping on Messenger:
Hi mum we’re through! We are in no man’s land again. Just left the country twice!
So how did they miss their flight? Well that’s a very good question…
Since they were already checked in, and had their return boarding passes on them already, they didn’t need to be at the airport quite as early as usual (or so they thought). Their problem was with a train delay and even though it was only three stops from Hove (Brighton) to Gatwick Airport the delay bit into their time. The train stopped and alerted its passengers that an extra carriage was being connected to the train, thus the delay that caused them to miss their flight.
Charlie and Billie finally arrived at Gatwick Airport aware that they had lost time. So after getting through customs they sprinted to their departure gate but it was too late. The EasyJet airline, like most airlines, has a strict policy of closing the gate 30 minutes prior to departure. There was nothing they could do.
So the remaining drive home to Malaga was a little more quiet than it had been previous to getting that call. The music was switched off and the holiday romance of Seville was definitely over. Ha…happy 18th wedding anniversary hey! The feeling of burning money was a vision that came into my mind, and I’m sure Steve who sat very quietly and reflective driving home was thinking much the same. But at the end of the day, our gallivanting world travelling girls were safe and it had worked out. Thank goodness they were in an English speaking country! We were especially proud of how both girls worked out a solution to communicating with us and the various issues facing them there and then. They really got a taste of what it’s like to be real backpackers and navigating in and out of international airports and working within the travelling system when things don’t go to plan. The big lesson learnt however was to always leave with enough time for an emergency or delay that’s out of your control especially when relaying on public transport systems that we really have no understanding of or prior knowledge.
The girls touched down in Malaga just before midnight. Steve drove to the airport with Ash and Dacey – they were both very excited to see the girls again while I stayed home and waited for their return. It was 1am before we all finally hit the sack. Our anniversary celebrations and my champagne would just have to wait until another time. Like tomorrow.
I dozed into a deep sleep after Steve got up a couple of times telling Billie and Dacey to stop talking in their room. It had been four days of not seeing one another and they were excited to be back together.
Martes | Tuesday
We all slept in after an emotionally draining afternoon of missed flights. Steve got up early to return the hire car near the train station. He then went searching for a retail outlet that sold mobile phones as his Windows 8 phone is just not keeping up with the times. He found one and purchased a new phone – a Huawei branded P10 Lite. It’s great! Steve’s back and reconnected with the world.
Today all the girls have some catching up to do with Distance Education work since missing all of yesterday with half of them travelling around Seville and the others in London. Oh such is the traveller’s life. So today was spent mainly inside getting through the tasks, with a couple of walks outside to buy food and stretch the legs. At 5pm, Steve and I got ready and left the apartment and the kids to celebrate our 18th + 1 day wedding anniversary together – no kids, no distractions, no complaining, no more missed flights. Just us. We headed to our favourite tapas restaurant – Casa Lola and saw our favourite waiter Miguel again. I finally got to enjoy a champagne or two!
We told Miguel it was our 18th wedding anniversary; he shared that he has been married for 22 years! But it was obvious something was lost in translation or the number of fingers we flashed up at him while trying to communicate the anniversary number because he appeared not long after with a surprise desert in the shape of a love heart sprinkled with gold glitter and the number 28 written in a chocolate sauce. We were sitting at one of the bar tables outside which we were lucky to snap up when we first arrived; this place is continually buzzing with customers. It was a lovely surprise, and we took the opportunity to get a photograph with Miguel. The surprise desert was delicious – like a thick creamy custard with bits of crunchy crushed nuts mixed in it and drizzled with chocolate sauce.
It was a fantastic night. Steve and I headed to all the cafes and restaurants in Malaga that we had previously visited or wanted to visit and enjoyed what we called a tapas crawl. The food was amazing. I think we will definitely miss tapas when we leave Malaga.
We returned to our quiet children sleeping apartment and stayed up sipping on Baileys with ice (which Steve had brought for our anniversary) listening to music in the lounge room. It’s was a very special Spanish anniversary that we won’t forget.
Miercoles | Wednesday
Our 18th wedding anniversary celebrations didn’t end until 3am. So this poor throbbing head of mine is a little too crook to do anything amazing today in Malaga. The couch in our apartment was a lovely oasis for me. So too was a strong Spanish coffee or two from the café just around the corner plus a Spanish donut at the bakery in the late afternoon. I was able to get out of the apartment with Charlie and Billie, and we wandered down to buy Charlie a journal as all of a sudden she wants to start writing her ideas and thoughts down in a journal. And if you know me, I’ll do anything to support my girls writing.
Since Charlie has returned from her long weekend away in London, she’s informed us that she doesn’t want to do school anymore. It’s boring. It’s not for her. It’s pointless. She seems to have caught the independent travel bug which is great, and wants to return to London to work and travel around Europe. I think there’s more going on to the story that could involve a certain known teenage boy who resides in Brighton…anyway…
This conversation, like many others coming from the teens, is an ongoing one of course. But I do acknowledge her point and I hear her loud and clear – the subjects and the content is boring and mostly irrelevant. I’m all behind a new school system and curriculum being born in Australia, similar to what Finland is doing to revolutionise its 1900s education system and scrapping single subjects and creating more meaningful groups of learning in an interdisciplinary way so what they’re learning is actually relevant to today’s young people. Rant over!
Jueves | Thursday
We are planning the next part of our trip. Where to in the term 2 school holidays (first two weeks of July) and the whole of Term 3? A great problem to have and to contemplate. The world is your oyster!
We have two weeks remaining living here in Malaga, Spain and then we are on a bus to Lisbon, Portugal where we will be stationed for five weeks (the final weeks of Term 2). The cost of the overnight bus for the six of us is 348 Euros departing at 9pm Saturday 27 May and arriving into Lisbon around 6am Sunday 28 May! We need to work out how we’re going to get to our apartment on the outskirts of Lisbon – a suburb called Parede which according to Google maps is about 50 minutes away from where the bus stops. I think we need to get in touch with our Airbnb host Gustavo and ask for his recommendations for early Sunday morning and when we can actually get into the apartment. Cause after an overnight bus ride I’m certain at that hour on a Sunday morning I’m not going to be thinking all that clearly.
As for post-Portugal we have a couple of thoughts:
- Morocco for 6 weeks (staying at The British Language Academy in Berrechid (near Casablanca) as Workaway.com volunteers and helping to teach English and share our lives), return to Barcelona for a three-night stay and site see, then head to Cyprus for the remaining 5.5 weeks of Term 3
- Charlie wants to return to London (aha!) so we can all catch up with our friends who live in Brighton. And being summer holiday time over there, our pal Francesca has got her feelers out for a house we could possible babysit in the Brighton area for a bit sometime in July. Then we would head over to Morocco or Cyprus or well who knows right at this moment.
- Go to any non-Schengen Convention signatory state in Europe and stay for Term 3.
Not many travellers are aware, that as Australian travellers we are limited in the amount of time we spend living and travelling in Europe. The Schengen Area is an area comprising 26 European states that have officially abolished passport and any other type of border control at their mutual borders. However, after the November Paris attacks, some border areas have been checking passports and date stamps. What this means for Australians is that we can stay for up to a total of 90 days within a 180-day period in many of the Schengen states. Our three-month stay will be absorbed living in Spain and Portugal, but we are leaving a couple of days under our belts just in case we return to see the city of Barcelona or need to get a flight to somewhere else in the world from a European city.
The countries who are not part of the Schengen Convention are: United Kingdom, Ireland, Albania, Belarus, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Kosovo, Romania, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine. Hence why we’re looking at a non-Schengen state to live in longer term while we’re already over here in sunny Europe. Stay tuned to what we come up with in a future post or on social media.
But back to today, and this afternoon there’s a change in the nice weather and the sky is turning grey. Steve takes the girls to the local gym for a work out and then later on we all walk into the city centre to visit the Picasso Museum. We have to see the Picasso museum after all Malaga is his birth home and he lived in Malaga for 10 years.
Not all of us are happy to be going to the museum. The girls hear that word ‘museum’ and they think boring. But I persist, and three out of four are happily waiting downstairs while a persistent imp (the youngest) is stalling and bad mouthing the whole museum idea – and she’s the one who is most artistic! Go figure…I patiently wait for her outside in the hallway of our apartment level, and finally she peeps outside the door. Okay let’s go.
The Picasso Museum
The Museo Picasso Málaga is a museum in Málaga the city where many of the artist Pablo Ruiz Picasso is on exhibition to the public. Malaga was Picasso’s birth town. The museum opened in 2003 in the Buenavista Palace, and has 285 works donated by members of Picasso’s family. On a late Thursday afternoon there was none of the long queues we have seen previously especially on wet and cold weekends. We purchase tickets to Pablo Picasso Nueva Coleccion or New Collection (adults 7 euros and children 16 and under free). It was to be a perfect afternoon viewing one of the 20th Century’s most famous artists. We walked around with an English hand-held information headset that talked about Picasso’s life and described many of his works that are on display.
Now I don’t get to go to all that many art museums, and I could have stayed there a lot longer than the hour and a bit we did, but the kids were not going to stay much longer. But they did well and we learnt some new things about the life and painting of Pablo Picasso:
- he was an animal lover – cats, dogs, pigeons, goat, monkey, turtle, mice
- he created the enduring symbol of peace that we know of today with the flying dove
- he really liked painting women’s breasts
- he was not only a prolific painter, but also a sculptor using clay, ceramic, and bronze, lino carvings, sketches, writing and poetry
- he lived to the ripe old age 91-years
- he spent most of his adult life living in France
- he was baptised catholic but later became an atheist
- he married twice
- his father was also a painter and teacher of painting
- he was willing to take risks and paint how he wanted to paint (ie. Cubism and Surrealism)
We came out of the museum and sat down at an outside table at our favourite bakery and enjoyed a drink while discussing Picasso, travel and what inspires each of us. Great discussion with the girls. Some of them admitted to being inspired to paint! So on the way home, we walked into the local art shop and purchased some paint brushes, acrylic paints, and small multi use books (the artist books with the lovely thick paper) and excitedly walked back to set up a painting studio in the lounge room of our apartment. All the girls painted something tonight – it was lovely knowing that Picasso moved them to be creative.
I think I might venture back to the Museo Picasso Málaga on my own (or maybe with other interested parties) to see the other sections of the museum before we leave Malaga.
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