Double Booked?

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We’re met outside our central Malaga apartment block by the delightful Carmen. She speaks about as much English as I do Spanish and the conversation is in equal parts both …. so virtually unintelligible to everyone. If she needs us to know anything important …. such as how to get in the front door, or perhaps more importantly how to get out the front door when the building catches fire …. well let’s just hope the building doesn’t catch fire…. She takes us up to our floor in the lift … but what’s this … why doesn’t the key fit in the lock? We prod and poke for several minutes, but it’s not budging. Hmmm. “Maybe the cleaner’s got a better key”, says Carmen, “I’ll give her a call.” We prod and poke some more. Eventually a young and very sleepy looking scantily clad maiden opens the door from the inside. Huh? That’s our apartment. What’s she doing in there? Of course, it’s been double booked. This is not good. Sleepy looking scantily clad maiden slams the door in our faces. She’ll have to come out for food at some stage I think. I hatch a cunning plan. We’ll hide around the corner, jump her when she emerges, and take possession of what is rightfully ours. That won’t be too hard. I just hope just she hasn’t got a muscly boyfriend. Carmen heads off down the corrídor, and comes back a few minutes later ... it seems we’re on the wrong floor .…

Our apartment’s quite small, or so it seems until we climb a narrow staircase to a killer private roof terrace; we can put up with any amount of small everything else if we’ve got that. Our kitchen's got the world’s smallest washing machine tucked in under the dishwasher … under the sink - one sock at a time type small. To compensate for that our bedroom’s got the world’s largest ceiling fan. The blades look like they belong on one of those turbines they use to generate electricity for entire countries. The only problem is that it doesn’t look like there’s any way to turn it on. Maybe it’s just as well. If the blades ever came loose they look like they’d decapitate everyone and everything in sight. Carmen points out a button on the wall next to the front door. She tells us that if we press it we’ll go deaf, and the fire brigade will turn up, presumably in that order. It’s big, you don’t have to break any glass to get to it … and it’s right next to the light switch just inside the door. This feels like a disaster waiting to happen. I think maybe we‘re going to need to do most of our drinking after we get back here in the evenings.

We head out to get some supplies. There’s a restaurant about a millimetre away from our apartment block’s front door - if a diner pushes his chair out too far he’ll be blocking our exit … and there are about a million other eateries (I know, I’ve told you a thousand times, don’t exaggerate) within a few metres of that. It’s all sooo cute.

We head out for bite of dinner a bit after 10pm. The whole place is still warming up, which is in stark contrast to San Francisco where we were struggling to find a restaurant that stayed open after 8pm. We head off for a post-tapas stroll through the maze of elegantly paved pedestrian only laneways. It’s absolutely buzzing now; people out in their droves. I tell Issy we need to move here and I'm not sensing a lot of disagreement …..

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