The taxi driver had apparently never heard of the Hotel FrontAir Congress, near the airport, but he punched the address into his GPS (Linda had printed the confirmation from Expedia) and got us there, and for about 21 euros instead of the 35 we expected. We never used an ATM here, and we still have about 50 euros (we came with 300 between the two of us). It's been easy to put things on credit cards (though the train ticket machine would only take a debit card, we finally figured out). We even put the taxi fare on a credit card.
Lisa had already determined that there was a restaurant with "Wok" in the name close to our hotel (thank you, Google Maps on iPhone), so we walked over there for lunch. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet with sushi, fried food like shrimp chips, fish, squid legs...we also had cold dishes like baby octopus, a seafood salad, olives and cornichons... There was wokked/Mongolian barbecue with lots of different (huge mushrooms, seafood, skewers of chicken and beef... We even had some dessert: melon, ice cream, what must have been canned lychees (seasoned with something like cinnamon), and coconut balls that were not to our taste. We paid for that with a credit card, too. There was a big banquet area downstairs, and a whole upstairs too...gigantic place.
In fact, gigantic is the byword of this place. The hotel is gigantic, our room is gigantic compared to what we've gotten used to over the past couple of weeks, and it's in a gigantic shopping center. We explored a sporting goods store called Decathalon that looks like a Big 5 and an REI got together and had a gigantic baby. There was everything: toe shoes, hunting gear, golf clubs, athletic clothing and shoes, fishing gear, ping pong rackets -- maybe the only thing they didn't have was dive gear. Or maybe we didn't see it.
We skipped the electronics store and took a quick trip through Babies R'Us/Toys are Us. It looked much the same as at home, but some of the prices were outrageous - we saw a car seat for 369 euros!
There was also a clothing store that we trotted through, and then we went into Al Campo (which Lisa had noticed as we'd approached the hotel in the cab -- it's the same store as Auchan in France. It also turned out that there was a mall in there.
But Al Campo was amazing. Huge, wide, long aisles full of all the foods a Spaniard could ever want. Hams (complete with hooves) of all sorts, cheeses (small ones up to huge wheels), frozen foods (tapas, sushi, meats, pizzas), empanadas, a gorgeous fresh fish section with live lobsters, clams, snails, mussels, fish...we walked through the store for two hours before we decided we were tired and just couldn't do any more. We probably only got about a quarter of the way through the store, and we hardly looked at the clothing, housewares, etc. We saw most of the refrigerated and frozen foods, and the produce (which was actually the least interesting thing there) but didn't even get to the cans and boxes and bags of food. It was just too much. We took lots of pictures. The yogurt section alone was bigger than any entire dairy section in any supermarket in the states (maybe Walmart is bigger; haven't been).
We came back to the room (impeded slightly by a half-dozen Swedes with golf clubs). The other impediment to reaching our room is that you have to put your room key in a slot in the elevator, then punch the button for your floor, and then usually (but not always) key in the secret code 2030. Maybe we'll get it right the third time around, after dinner, which we are planning to eat in the hotel right at 8 pm when they open, because...
We have to get up at 3:30 am to get the 4:30 am shuttle to the airport (which we can see from here) in order to catch our 6:30 am flight to Amsterdam. Ugh.
No comments:
Post a Comment