Day 4 (February 5, 2011)
Itinerary: Tour La Orotava
Today feels like the first real day of vacation. We woke up in our wonderful hotel room and went out on the porch to see the gorgeous day ahead. It is beautiful, sunny, and should warm up into the 80s again in the sun today.
We missed the included hotel breakfast and instead hung out in the hotel room. This hotel is great. It has an amazing wifi connection that is both fast and easy to use and located almost right outside our room. Also, there is a business center with a printer downstairs that I’ve needed to use as well.
We toured La Orotava today. Mostly we just picked a direction to start walking and kept going that direction. We started going towards the coast and then realize that those buildings on the coast are a) part of another town called Puerto de la Cruz and b) we couldn’t cross the highway to get there anyway.
We happened upon a place for lunch that ended up being rather entertaining. The waiter didn’t speak any English but through our Spanish we were able to answer his questions as to where we were from. Once he heard we were from Texas he went on and on about his relatives in central america and I think he was telling us something about the influence of the culture from San Antonio. He came back often to talk to us about various things and show us pictures of places in Canaria where we should visit. We had a good time. The food was great as well.
We wandered around through a high-priced area with beautiful houses, lavish gates, and a few guard dogs. We also wandered over to a high school futbol (soccer) match. We watched the first half. Eventually we wandered around past several obviously historical buildings, but as we found out earlier today, the tourist office is not open on weekends. So we didn’t know what we were looking at. As we found out on Monday, the tourist office would have been so useful had it been open today.
Eventually we found ourselves back at the hotel and decided to use the afternoon to start planning out the rest of our vacation. We have a bit of an outline now. At least we have a plan for tomorrow to go to Puerto de la Cruz. After that, we are still planning.
Dinner tonight was at the hotel. There are only about 8 tables, so a reservation is necessary. We managed to get the last one. I think the hotel only has about 8 or 9 rooms anyway. There is only 3 staff working in one night. One waitstaff is manning the bar, waiting tables, and all kinds of various other things. Then there were two cooks in the kitchen. Needless to say, it was a long and relaxing dinner. =) We even sprung for dessert.
