Tarifa and Spain Generally

Tarifa is a cute little seaside town, as you can see from this skillfully taken video with a bit of finger in the frame for deliberate artistic effect.

I don't know what the history of it is. It isn't that kind of a town. I'm just hanging out on the beach all day. Here's a tiny castle.

I rented a little scooter because my hostel was further away from town than the others. This turned out to be largely unnecessary but tons of fun. I bombed the corners in roundabouts and scraped the kickstand peg.

I also ate some excellent seafood, like this grilled octopus.

I did have some additional thoughts about Spain that didn't make it into my other posts, though, so I'll share them here.

Milk

All over Europe they're drinking shelf stable milk. Like, it stores in their pantry and keeps for a month without refrigeration. When I first encountered it with a hostel breakfast, I assumed it was some powdered concoction or something to be avoided. After looking it up, I'm confused why we don't also do it this way.

American milk goes through a pasteurization method called HTST (high-temperature short-time) that involves heating it to 161F for 15 seconds, whereas European milk uses a pasteurization method called UHT (ultra-heat-treated) that involves heating it to 284F for three or four seconds. I always wondered why organic milk seems to have longer expiration dates and I learned that it's because organic milk also uses UHT. So if I'm understanding this correctly, American organic milk (so long as it's UHT pasteurized) doesn't need to be refrigerated before opening either. It really begs the question why we're wasting so much energy on unnecessary refrigeration.

Restaurants

I suspect that Spanish diners would really prefer to be left alone. They'd like to sit down and spend time with their friends with limited interruptions from a meddling waiter. I've had business lunches where a waiter failed to notice the severity of the tone of our conversation and cheerfully interrupted to recite a little monologue about drink specials or whatever. I guess I can relate.

Unfortunately it's almost impossible to get the attention of a waiter in Spain. I suppose it's customary to find a table and sit yourself down, because when I've asked for a table in certain restaurants, they've acted like I'm requesting permission to breathe. You'll never receive a menu without asking for it. Interestingly, they take your drink order without providing a menu. I've noticed that people sit down and ask for "vino" or "cerveza" with no further specificity. It's kind of wonderful that there's so little brand attachment. There's beer on tap and you're having whatever they're serving.

I've had food delivered without silverware and sat in front of it for five or ten minutes before I could get a waiter's attention. I've debated just leaving when I doubted they'd ever bring me the bill. Tipping isn't customary, either, not that you'd be tempted. You could self-immolate in protest of the service and waiters wouldn't notice.

Still, I enjoy the fact that they're not in a rush to turn the table. Patrons can spend as much damn time as they like occupying a table and drinking one €1.50 glass of wine per hour.

Siesta culture

My ideal lifestyle involves waking up at 5 am and doing things while the world is fresh and cool. Having spent the last eleven years in Arizona, the other benefit to waking up early is avoiding the heat of the day. Southern Spain gets as hot as Arizona for a portion of the summertime, and they long ago figured out the other secret to surviving hot climates: a long afternoon nap.

I'm all about naps. Naps were my favorite part of the early pandemic days, and in hot summer months, naps have always helped me stay up later than 9 pm. Of course in Spain they wake up in the middle of the day, so that afternoon siesta is the key to staying up all night.

I found myself slipping into the Spanish sleeping routine almost immediately. A lot of days I didn't wake up until 10 am, and I rarely went to bed before midnight. I don't think I could sustain that as a lifestyle, but it was fun to do on vacation.

Cash

One of the primary reasons I don't like buying things with cash is that it forces you to carry pocket change. In the US, the largest normal denomination of currency is the quarter. There's nothing you can buy with a quarter, and there's very little you can by with five or six quarters. As a result, pocket change is worthless. It's only technically money in the aggregation of many financial transactions, but the only practical thing you can hope to do with it is get rid of it. I have older relatives who would disagree with this and who delight in strategizing about the way they can pay a bill that results in getting the least change back. If the bill is $7.23, they'll eagerly present a ten, two ones, and a quarter so that they can receive two worthless pennies and a crisp, spendable five dollar bill as change. They're delighted they had an appropriate amount of change on hand—change whose sole utility was to prevent the annoyance of receiving more change.

In Europe, though, pocket change is often real money. A five euro bill is the smallest paper note and coins are used for one and two euro denominations. Small purchases are often exact increments of euros because the tax is included in the label price and the prices don't inexplicably end in nines. Even though a lifetime of annoyance with useless pocket change has conditioned me to dislike the feeling of coins in my pocket, I'm beginning to enjoy them more now that they serve some useful purpose.

I don't know what floor we're on

When I checked into one of my hostels, I had a really hard time finding room 114. I spent a lot of time in hotels with my old job, and I tend to have an easy time with orderly systems like room numbers, so this was unusual and frustrating. I followed a path that led from room 105 to room 113 but got to a dead end there. Eventually I had to go back to the reception desk and ask for directions. I was told that it was on the "first floor," so I went back and retraced my steps only to find the same dead end. When the hostel employee saw me return, she looked irritated. She said "No, it's on the first floor!" Although I was questioning my sanity, I asked her what floor we were currently on. She answered that we were on the ground floor.

I've since learned that they count the floors this way in Europe. You start out on floor zero, then proceed to floor one. If there are no stairs in your house, it's a zero story house. No floors at all. Just perfectly flat, I guess. Unlike other matters of regional custom where I'm inclined to be evenhanded and aim to see the value in doing things differently, this is just illogical and wrong and needs to be corrected immediately.

Room 114 turned out to be above room 101, and room 227 was above room 114. Insanity. I would have dedicated the day to helping them reorganize the hostel around a system of rooms 101-113, 201-213, and 301-313, but no one else seemed to be disturbed by the arbitrariness of the room numbers.

Next stop

Tangier, Morocco is up next. I'm taking a ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar. That's kind of cool in its own right.