Today, I realized I took Lisa to the really lame places in Alicante. She saw the vacant outlet mall; I shopped in a four-story mall . She saw faux sunglasses, suckling pig on a stick, and a topless grandma; I saw a centuries old Greek merchant ship and a few skeletons. This will teach her to let me play travel guide.
The day started with me walking across the street to the Central Market to buy some more fruit and veggies. I spent some time wondering around the fresh seafood area, drawn by a morbid curiosity of all the dead sea life for sale. The seafood market is kind of like a Sea World Cemetary. At Sea World you get to look at lots of sea life you usually don’t get to (or want to) see up close. At the market, it is the same thing, except it’s all dead and you can take it home. I strolled among a variety of fish and squishy things. Stopping to watch a fisherman heft a huge tuna onto the cutting board and take a big swing at it (a sharp knife and strong arm is required to cut through the backbone), I was sprayed with fish guts and scales. It’s experiences like this you just can’t put a price on. Then, the police asked for my identification. Out of the hundreds of people milling about, I somehow was deemed a person of interest, again. Obviously, I am a lot less respectable looking without Lisa around. Out came the creased photocopy of my passport. This seemed to satisfy them and they moved on, perhaps, to get away from the fish guts.
Cleaned up, with iPod in hand, I headed for the MARQ (Museo Arqueologico Provincial de Alicante). About a twenty-minute walk from the apartment, the MARQ is an award-winning museum (Best European Museum Award in 2004). Luis, the resident USAC director, had recommended we visit this museum. However, Lisa and I decided not to. Someone (I’ll blame a student) had described it as a regional museum. This brought images of our own Boise Historical Museum: a few wagon wheels, a stuffed deer with mange, and slightly disturbing wax mannequins of Lewis and Clark. So, we passed on the MARQ. Our mistake.
The MARQ is one of the best museums I have visited. Arranged around a central core are eight themed halls, each focusing on a specific period of history in the region: Middle Ages, Roman Culture, Prehistoric, etc. Each room has just the right amount of artifacts, including very modern CGI movies, sceneries, full-scale diaramas, and interactive displays. In the Roman Culture hall, for example, one wall displayed a CGI looping panorama of a day at the Roman bathhouse. However, with slightly odd images of guys taking their clothes off in the changing room and splashing water on each other, it did nothing to dispell the sterotype of bathhouses.
One odd element (as if the CGI bathhouse wasn’t) is that you can’t backtrack. That is, once you leave a hall you must keep going to the next hall, and then out the exit. Once I finished the last hall, the Contemporary Culture Room, I wanted to go back to look at the shipwreck diarama again. I made it only a few steps and a guard appeared. I instinctively reached for my photocopied passport; however, in perfect English she tells me that if I want to return to an earlier hall, I had to exit the museum and reenter at the start. Odd, but OK. Overall, the quality of the exhibits, layout, and up-to-date use of technology earns this museum a 10 out of 10. And, I am not just giving this museum a good review because I got in FREE (finally, a perk for being a professor).
According the map, the Centro Commercial Plaza Mar 2 is nearby. We had seen it from the Tram on our way to Playa San Juan last week. The Centro Commercial Plaza Mar 2 looked like a big mall. It’s only a 10 minute walk from the MARQ. Yes, it’s a four-story retail mall, just like you find in the U.S. A few differences though. Wandering in and out of stores, I rounded an aisle and WHOA, that’s a huge …and those are …I found the adult sex shop. Also, the escalators do not have steps but instead are slanted conveyer belts (like the walkways at airports). Finally, the Alicante version of Wal-Mart (it’s huge, running the whole length of the mall) has security people at the entrances. Before entering, you must place everything bigger than a wallet–purses, backpacks, bags, etc–in a plastic bag, which is then heat sealed and handed back to you. I wonder how this would go over in the U.S.: imagine a Wal-Mart greeter with giant shrink wrap machine. Otherwise, the mall is fairly typical, except perhaps, an over abundance of shoe stores and coffee shops. Lisa would have loved it.
Seems like your take on Alicante, with the exception of the Museo Arqueologico, is pretty much a downer. As a nearby resident of this interesting city for six years, my experience is that the people are friendly, relaxed and outgoing, as the majority of Spaniards living along the Mediterranean coast line are.
Unless you are a fish hater, a visit to the Central Market is an expèrience well worth repeating, and a high level of security is necessary due to the frequent bomb attacks carried out by the Basque terrorists and Al Quaida (The Madrid Railway Station bombing). Security is in all our interests so I am sure Wall Mart would also insist on similar levels of security if terrorism was similarly prevalent in the US.