The Beggar Dilemna

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We sleep long after yesterday’s exertions, and as I lie in bed half in dreamland I can‘t help but reflect on a couple of other apparent oddities of life here in Malaga.

They‘ve got Un Museo de Videojuegos, which unless I’m very much mistaken translates to "a Museum of Video Games". Now I think most of us can probably cope with museums displaying artefacts from Ancient Greece and Rome … but things that were only invented last week? Now we didn’t go in, but I can’t help but wonder what exactly is on display - it’s a bit hard to imagine a bunch of 12 inch floppy disks with “Pac-Man“ written on the covers attracting too many customers.

One of the busier squares in the middle of the city has pairs of wooden seats bolted to the ground in each of its four corners. This would seem to be excellent for pairs of people to sit on and exchange ideas about the events of the day.… except that they’re about five metres apart, and the square is always noisy and busy, so unless the participants have pairs of walkie talkies they won’t be able to hear each other.

I convince Issy that we should visit the Carmen Thyssen Art Museum, which I went to a couple of days ago and thought was excellent. She of course provides the artist’s perspective, which in this case raises the excellent question as to how nineteenth and earlier century practitioners were able to paint such significant detail of large groups of people when they didn’t have the luxury of photos to work from. That would presumably have required lots of models to stay in exactly the same positions for weeks at a time. I hope they paid them well.

I head off to the main Malagueta city beach to take some late afternoon happy snaps. The beaches here all seem to have large signs on them made out of compacted sand to tell you exactly which one you’re on, just in case the Google machine isn’t working too effectively, or you’ve ingested a few too many cervezas. And it seems the Malagueta beach sign is particularly iconic. The beach is very crowded, and looks very pleasant in the late afternoon sun. At least the sign here is still in one piece. I got very enthused about taking an iconic photo of a similar sign at El Palo Beach a few days ago until I noticed that two of the letters were held together with some of the red and white striped tape that they use to keep people out of construction sites. Hopefully they’ve managed to repair it by now.

Next up is a tour of the roof of the Malaga Cathedral. I join a group of thirty or so fellow climbers and we begin the long ascent up the narrow two hundred or so step spiral staircase to the top. The Indian lady in front of me looks like she’s really struggling and waves me past after only a couple of flights. Hopefully they’ll give her a refund if she doesn’t make it. The views from the top are spectacular. I’ve often wondered what Cathedral rooves look like, given they never seem to have traditional tiled rooves, or at least ones that are identifiable from ground level. This one’s made up of a dozen or so tiled domes, most of which are more or less completely covered in bird droppings. At least now I can stop wondering, although I am still at least slightly curious about what they do to stop the bird droppings piling up too much.

Issy and I head out for dinner in the Plaza del Obispo in front of the Cathedral. The paella is excellent. The beggars are out in force as usual, and I never quite know how to respond to them. I’m sure there are cases of genuine hardship where government assistance has somehow fallen between the cracks, but how do you tell the genuine cases from the frauds. Tonight’s example has somehow spotted that we’re English speaking, and asks us for money in our native tongue. When I complement her on her English she tells me that she studied in London, and then quickly complains that I’ve only given her a measly twenty cents. I doubt she did a course on begging, so other than providing lessons in how to complain in English, whatever she did study clearly hasn’t come in all that useful.

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Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

Scenic Location
A beautiful roof.