Getting to Malaga isn’t as easy as it sounds

Very uneventful flight to Brussels and even less eventful four-hour wait in the airport. People not wearing masks here either. Maybe stupidity is a global phenomenon; or maybe I am the weird one. I certainly haven’t ruled that out.

Sat for a while nursing the most expensive coffee I have ever had, lifting my mask to sip it every 20 minutes or so, and watching a group of four Belgian police officers drinking coffee, chatting and laughing in Flemish, their sub-machine guns casually placed over their shoulders. The airport in Brussels is one of those majestically banal places with crappy information boards that don’t actually give you information. “Relax, your flight information will be shown one hour before the flight”. That, of course, means you cannot relax. Because the airport is big enough to make you panic about getting to the gate on time. And if you have too much hand luggage, you’re made to sweat. Despite officially offering you one piece of hand luggage and a personal bag, which my laptop was, every single flight has so far announced they were completely full and passengers should ‘volunteer’ to have their hand luggage stowed in the hold. There are only two words that should ever be used to respond to that announcement, and the second of those is “off”.

But the flight from Brussels boarded easily and I found I was among a party of Flemish pensioners on the equivalent of a Saga holiday to the Costa del Sol. Having not slept at all on the trans-Atlantic portion of the flight, I managed a couple of hours on the Brussels-Malaga leg, and this despite the attentions of what I first assumed was a geriatric nymphomaniac in the seat across the aisle. At first I smiled graciously, assuming my facial expression could be interpreted through the mask; still she stared. It started to be quite uncomfortable to be honest, and I was just about to say something when the Saga handler came along and mopped up the drool from her chin. It turned out that the poor thing was recovering from a stroke and had the odd lapse. It had nothing to do with my unparalleled animal magnetism. We landed without further incident. Feeling somewhat chastened, I retrieved my luggage (which had made it safely through the twin nexii of suitcase hell, Toronto Pearson and Montreal) and headed off to catch the train to Fuengirola.

Masking is still mandatory on Spanish trains and buses. Thank God for that, because the train from Malaga airport to Fuengirola was packed more tightly than Kim Kardashian’s pants. Through the stations we crawled, until people started to alight after Torremolinos. At Fuengirola, I got off and walked to the bus station and met an English couple with whom I made polite conversation until the 220 arrived to take me to Calahonda. At least, it started off politely, but they turned out to be the “loadsamoney” type of people, who started telling me about a cruise they had just booked from Japan to Alaska, passing by Canada and taking in all points around the globe, as far as I could tell. “Do you know what I’m looking forward to most?” said the female portion of the couple. “Running in the morning around the ship,” she said, oblivious to the evident charms of Alaskan fiords, Canadian islands, whales, etc. etc. I smiled and shared one of the few bits of information I know about cruise ships (other than their propensity to pollute the oceans). “Did you know,” I said, “that cruise ships have the highest rate of unsolved murders of any jurisdiction in the world? It’s that word ‘jurisdiction’ you see, there is none. By the time the body drops overboard, it’s either eaten by the sharks or left to float until the seagulls devour it.” A small victory for humanity, I felt, as the colour drained from their faces.

Tomorrow is a national holiday in Spain, so I had been advised to get in some groceries as nothing at all would be open. Arriving at just before 5, I ran off (the word “ran”, despite being in Spain, is still idiomatic) to buy a sim card for my phone (the one I had purchased in 2019 during my last visit refused stubbornly to work) and the essentials of life. Then I made it home, called Mrs. Ottawacker, and set about unpacking. I stayed up till 10.30 or so, which meant I could squeeze in a call with Ottawacker Jr. as he came home from school. And then I crashed. Until around midnight, when I was wide awake again. Oh, the joys of jet lag. The blip is of my home for the next month, realpolitik willing.