My team at work spent a few days last week at Las Palmas, on Gran Canaria — one of the canary islands. The islands are part of Spain but are geographically much closer to the northwest coast of Africa. For some reason, the airfare from my home airport was outlandish, so I drove to Charlotte, then flew through JFK to Madrid and then on to Las Palmas and more or less reversed the sequence (with some complications) on the way home, which was not altogether fun.
The city was mostly unremarkable to me — just sort of a standard city with lots of one-way streets and crazy parking (like on the sidewalk, straddling a corner, or at times even double parked). It was my first time driving outside of the U.S., which made me pretty nervous.
Most of the cities I’ve visited outside of the U.S. were pretty English friendly, but here very few people spoke English, so I often felt like a big, helpless, boorish, American baby. It didn’t help that I’ve been familiar with French more recently than I have Spanish, so when I did try to speak — even just to apologize for being a dumb American or to communicate other simple things, I often enough did so in a strange English-Spanish-French pidgin. Luckily, one of our guest attendees from a different team was a native of Argentina wonderfully fluent in both English and Spanish and was able to help us navigate meals and other transactions with the locals. Most of the time, he would just order plates of various foods for the table, so we had lots of variety, and it was all really good. We ate various rice dishes, lots of seafood of many types (squid, prawns, snails, clams, several fishes, octopus, and likely others I’m forgetting), and wrinkled potatoes with just about every meal. It was really some of the most consistently yummy food I’ve had at a meetup, and it was very inexpensive to boot.
Some of my colleagues had hoped to do some surfing or snorkeling while we were there (we worked at a place catering to such outings called The Surf Office, which was featured in the New York Times while we were there, complete with pictures of our team and some others who were sharing the space with us), but weather and scheduling stood in the way of those plans. Our main venture as tourists was to visit the Caldera de Bandama, a volcanic caldera. There’s a steep path down into the basin of the inactive volcano, where a working farm is currently situated along with some abandoned buildings. It was really neat, and the trip back up out of the volcano highlighted how seriously out of shape I’ve let myself get.
We got some good work done on the trip, and for me, the tourism to work ratio was about right, so the trip itself was very good, though I could certainly have done with less travel at both ends of the trip.
Two Ells 