Saturday, July 23, 2011

Málaga middle of week 4 of 12, July 23, 2011 Saturday


An Arabic-motif restaurant on the way to the Intercambio meetup.
Met with the Intercambio Group in El Palo (The Stick, east of downtown). Great bunch of people (20?). Very reasonable: 1€ / meeting. Some want to practice their German; others, English; others, Spanish. There are many people that speak several languages. Wow! ¨La mera verdad ...¨ What? You mean ¨Verdaderamente ...¨? Yeah, yeah, that´s it! They say I sing-song my Spanish. I didn´t know that! Also, Jugo (juice) is Zumo (THOO-moh). I didn’t know that either.  
¨Dispones de (You have) 15 días para tus devoluciones (returns), en cualquier (in any) hipermercado (supermarket) Carrefour¨. Carrefour (kah-rreh-FOORR) is the French-German joint venture equivalent of WalMart and El Corte Inglés. BRING YOUR OWN BAG! The store is huge. It has a bank branch, a Burger King, a dry cleaning window, optician (George), a Tapas Bar(, etc.), you know the routine. The BK combo (Whopper, Coke, and patatas fritas) is 5,99 (tax included), 9 bucks. BTW, a Big Mac combo downtown is 6,30€; the Whopper combo downtown is 6,55€. The Spanish BK tasted exactly the same as an American BK.(Yeah, I had one) 

A brand new car ... er, bike! Rated at 2L/100Km. That’s an odd way of saying miles per gallon.
You can park either (coche or moto) in the covered parking lot.

Auto Center? A French-German company doing business in Spain with an Auto Center?

A church ¨back home¨. There’s hundreds of them here. I’m not going to click each one.  

The lady next door is cooking ... It´s awful.

Moving money around. It´s easier, cheaper, faster(, etc.) to withdraw money at the ATM and then go inside and deposit it. My account is at the same bank as my landlord´s rep. To pay her, I’ll need her account number after she approves me as a valid sender. Eventually I will need to transfer money from here to the US. That’s done on the internet, and a code is sent to my cell phone. Hmmm, that’s not going to work when I go back. The bank rep will try to figure it out. No hurry.

With partly cloudy skies, the temperature in Málaga capital currently ranges from 32ºC (90ºF) to 20ºC (68ºF) with humidity ranging from 53% to 69%, no rain. Remember suffering through these?
C * 9/5 + 32 = F    and    (F -32) * 5/9 = C
Do a google search on ¨Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally¨. LOL    100ºC = 212ºF

It’s time to head down (west) the coast.

2 comments:

  1. Intercambio sound fascinating! And thanks for the info about Carrefour. I see it advertised all the time but never bother to look into what it is. There are a few around Sevilla. We'll have to check it out!

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  2. One can see the writing on the wall for the neighborhood stores. Lower prices, greater selection, one-stop shopping, parking (covered even), customer service, return policies, store hours (10 to 10). Dang.

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