Morning, Tuesday 25 March 1997
Las Palmas, Gran Canaria We stayed in again as we wanted to go to the mountains tomorrow which required an early start. I cooked a kind of pasta styled, marinated chicken thing with parmesan and Christian’s tomato and onion salad. Adding the restaurant flare comes out as chicken marinated in mustard, wine and kikkoman sauce, gently sautéed with caramelized onion served in a rich homemade tomato sauce on a bed of conchillo, lighted dusted with parmesan. It went down well.
We had to shop for the food in a supermarket, just along the paseo. The supermarket was full of all the same kind of produce that you see in an English supermarket, apart from the brand names were a little different. ‘Heinz Baked Beans’ sat on one shelf, next to it the same can but named in Spanish. The only other difference is the prices. Some are a little more, like mushrooms, and others are a lot less, like olive oil and booze. Decided a bottle of virgin olive oil for £2.50 couldn’t be missed and had a long, wishful look at the spirits which were all less than a fiver for a litre. The other thing was, at last, I found evidence of self-sufficiency in food. There were great piles of fish at one end of the shop. Big ones, little ones, green ones, red ones, ones with heads, ones without. At last there was something on this island that didn’t reek of European dependence.
After the meal Christian fell asleep and Nicolette did the washing up. After the washing up was done we took pity on Christian and didn’t insist that she came out. We sent her to bed and headed out along the paseo up the bar at the end. The wind had got to almost hurricane strength by now which made walking in a straight line difficult. I know that some people would have blamed the two bottles of wine we had with the meal, but it was really blowing, honest. The bar was overlooking the reef where the waves break, and they were definitely breaking tonight. Nobody was sat outside, they would have been very wet, and there weren’t to many people inside. Monday is a quite night so I guess the wind had to make up for it.
Once we had our beers we looked around the restaurant with a general aim of having a good discussion of the varying groups represented. We picked on a group of girls sat nearby and started taking their style apart. ‘God, we haven’t had that kind of fashion in England for at least ten years’. ‘It’s really sloany to wear clothes like that’. The had starched shirts tucked into designer jeans all held together by a good quality leather belt. In other places and other times we might have referred to them as the ‘horsy set’.
Bed was achieved at about half past midnight with alarms set for nine. Alarms were ignored at nine and the day started nearer ten. It’s still the earliest uptime on Gran Canaria so far.
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