We're writing this blog entry a long time after the events: it's Friday morning and we're in the train on our way back to Barcelona, where we'll spend (most of) the night before our 6:25 am flight on Saturday.
On Wednesday evening, we ate dinner at Monterrey Restaurant in El Port de la Selva, where we'd had lunch. To drink, we had water and a red wine (tempranillo ibericos crianza Torres). For our first course we had mussels (which were excellent, and the portion was huge) and a tomato salad with cheese, drizzled with olive oil (naturally). There were herbs on the salad too, but it was again hard to taste them -- the seasoning of nearly every dish we've had here has been very subtle. For our second course we had Entrecôte (steak) and fries, and a grilled sardines and shrimp. Neither of those dishes was quite as successful. I think we were remembering the beautiful steak that the man next to us at Can Rafa in Cadaqués had. For dessert we had flan.
The restaurant was overrun with French people who were apparently also staying at the Porto Cristo and were also doing some kind of walking tour. We were sure we'd encounter them on our walk, but we didn't -- maybe they'd done Sant Pere de Rodes the day before.
One thing about Porto Cristo is that they don't allow you to wear your hiking boots up to their rooms -- you have to take them off in a sort of laundry area and put on one-size-fits-all (read: so large that our feet wouldn't stay in them) slippers. Apprently if you go scuba diving (and there were several dive operations in town, as there were in Cadaqués), you can't take your dive gear up to the rooms either.
Breakfast at the Porto Cristo was a big mob scene -- all the French people had gotten there right at 8 am too, so there was a bit of a line, especially for the coffee machine. They had a tv on in the dining room, and we saw the leading news story: "Mor Steve Jobs." The news of Steve Jobs death was the lead story everywhere we went.
We managed to leave the hotel shortly after 8:30 and started on our journey to Palau-Sevardera via the Monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes and the churches of Santa Helena and Sant Onofre. The climb up to the monastery was hot and steep - we stopped for water many times, but there were beautiful views back down. By the time we got to the monastery and paid our entry fee (4.5 euros for Lisa; free for Linda), we were absolutely soaked through our clothes and cold. We dutifully toured the monastery, much of which was built in the 10th and 11th centuries. And you think THAT's old: on the way to the monastery we passed by a dolmen (Neolithic stone structure) which dates from somewhere between the 4th and 2nd millenia B.C. While we were touring Sant Pere, we saw a woman working on restoration of some of the mural painting. There were also a lot of swifts swooping around the towers of the monastery. They have a nice little cafe-restaurant with a view up there too; we thought of having a drink there but then decided to have water and a piece of candy instead.
Our walking itinerary called for us to go up to the ruins of Castell xxx xxx, but we decided we'd had enough of long slogs straight uphill for one day, so we skipped the 20-minutes-up and 20-minutes-down. The day was hazy anyway, so it's likely that the great views wouldn't have been so spectacular anyway. (That's our story and we're sticking with it.)
Instead we continued on to Santa Helena and Sant Onofre, neither of which can be toured. We ate our lunch (an orange, the rest of our olive bread from Cadaqués, and our sausage) sitting outside of Sant Onofre. The insects -- especially the bees -- seemed to enjoy our lunch too. We saw a lot of beautiful butterflies on this walk, and some grasshopper-type insects too. The butterflies were small, some white, some yellow, some orange, and even some blue ones.
From Sant Onofre we walked straight down the hill into Palau Saverdera. We didn't follow the instructions very well, but walked right to our hotel anyway. Niu de Sol is run by a woman named Mercé and has gotten great writeups in all sorts of places, and for good reason - it's cute, there are a lot of nice sitting areas, the rooms are not tiny, there's places in the bathroom to put your toiletries, a big armoire for your clothes, lots of books and magazines to read, games, a terrace to sit on, good wifi (best we've had on the trip), great shower, beverages and snacks available on the honor system... The church tower (which we'd heard chiming at the wrong times -- about 66 minutes off -- during our walk turned out to be visible from the window of our room. We also had a nice view of what was probably the town of Llançà. Mercé also provided a very nice little book with information not just about Palau-Saverdera, but about other towns in the area that we'd been to. That's how we learned that Can Rafa (the restaurant we had fideua at in Cadaqués) is one of the best restaurants in the area.
We had a beer and a sandwich at a bar just down the street from our hotel, called Bar Nelai. It hit the spot. We sat outside; the tv inside was blaring music videos, starting with Annie Lennox.
Linda has a nap and Lisa sat in one of the lounges reading her book and perusing Spanish Vogue. Lisa realized she'd locked Linda in the room and went back up to free her. Then we went to explore the local stores and did some gift shopping. (The folder of information in the room directed us nicely to the grocery store and a little sundries store.) It was interesting to see frozen items sold in bulk (for example, string beans and fried calamari loose). There were also some pre-prepared dishes that you could take out.
Normally, Mercé serves dinner in the hotel, but tonight we she said it wasn't possible, and she arranged for dinner for us at Bar Cal Pintor down the way. We're not sure what we had: for starters we had white asparagus and cream of something soup (maybe also asparagus). We had red wine of uncertain provenance (it was red wine in a white wine bottle) and potato chips. For our second course we had a sausage with fries and some type of fish steaks with a salad. None of it was very good, but it was fun to be in a place where the locals go. One of the options for dessert was a "cornetto," which Lisa knew would be a pre-packaged ice cream cone, so we opted for that for dessert.
The TV was on and it was fun to decipher what we were seeing on it. There was a story about sushi made with raw meat (from a place in Barcelona called Fishop?), another story about special residence for gays, and another about the wedding of this 85-year-old Duchess of Alba to a man 24 years her junior. (Lisa had come upon a picture of her in Vogue earlier in the day and had wondered who this strange looking person was: she's had so much plastic surgery done that her face looks truly odd, and she has white curly hair that looks like cotton candy.
While we ate our ice cream cones, we ended up chatting with a couple from Scotland (the only other people in the place).
La duquesa
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