I was free earlier than expected last night, so I went over to Sun Yat-sen Memorial to practice. The veranda was packed with dancing teens. I swear, with the amount of practice all of these kids do, why isn’t Taiwan the Teen Dance Capital of the World? Oh, I know, it’s because they’re just annoying copycats who can’t be bothered to turn their music down to tolerable levels.

I was really out of it, though. I haven’t managed to get back into things since Chinese New Year. I feel like all the other students are advancing while I just tread water. I practiced with Mr. Hu and performed miserably. The new girl has already finished studying the empty-handed form; I think she learned it in about half an hour. I realize that I am probably the worst student there, but sometimes it depresses me more than others.

I didn’t feel like walking up the usual hill this morning. It was kind of gray and cool, and I felt I should walk up Yongye Road instead, dodging the cars as there’s no real space for pedestrians to walk due to its narrow width. I turned aside at the new motel and walked up a steep path to the small group of luxury homes on the crest of the hill, taking macro shots of water drops on leaves as I climbed. A man stared at me from his garden as I walked through the community to the road beyond.

I walked along the road and found a wooden deck shaped like the bow of a ship, complete with a wheel-shaped chair, jutting out over the cemetery on the hillside below. I did some tai-chi but it didn’t feel quite right, so I continued walking down through the curves of the slope, noting that the water in the gutters was the exact same color and consistency as Thai milk tea.

I was walking through the cemetery when I heard some dogs barking. That’s not unusual, as a pack of dogs in the area often barks at people passing through. This time, however, it was accompanied by a crying sound, like a cat or a baby, full of fear and anguish. It was disturbing, so I went up into the thickly treed cemetery to see what was going on.

At first I didn’t see anything, and the barking had stopped. I was about to leave when it started up again, and I turned a corner to see the pack of six or seven dogs attacking a smaller dog, which was making the crying sound I’d heard before. The small yellow dog, its fur covered with blood, lay on the ground crying as a larger dog chomped at its neck. “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING!?” I yelled at the pack, hoping that they would hear my outrage even if they couldn’t understand my words. They scattered.

The little yellow dog lay on the ground, breathing rapidly. It had a collar on its neck, a sign that it was someone’s pet. “You’d better get out of here,” I told it, and it pulled itself up and began to walk, but only made it a few steps before collapsing again. Over by the front of the cemetery, I spied a man on a scooter squeaking a doggy toy as he rode, but he had left before I made it there.

I went back to the dog to make sure the other dogs weren’t renewing their attack, and got it to move a few more feet, rest, and then a few more, bringing us closer to the edge of the cemetery trees. The pack of wild dogs waited about fifty feet away. I was wondering what to do next when the man on the scooter rode back. “Are you looking for a dog?” I asked him. He said he was. “A yellow one?”

“Yes; he usually comes when he hears his toy,” he said, holding up the squeaky toy.

“I think I found him, but he’s hurt,” I said, leading him back to where the dog lay. Thanking me, the man gathered his pet up up and carried him back to the scooter as I described what had happened. He didn’t know why the dog wasn’t fighting back.

“He’s a retriever, he should know how to fight,” he told me, shaking his head as he headed for the vet. I don’t know why I felt like taking that path today, and maybe the man would have found his dog without my help before the pack finished it off. It could be that there’s nothing more to it than that, but then again, maybe not.

I got a new computer last month, just before Chinese New Year: an iMac. I figured that, as I do a lot of media-related things such as photography, video and music, I’d give the whole Mac thing another shot (I had a Powerbook at one point a few years ago, but things didn’t really work out between us). I’m keeping my old PC around and have been using both, but since I got back from the last trip I’ve been gradually migrating to the Apple machine. The above video was done on iMovie, and I have to say the experience was much, much nicer than it ever was in Windows. First of all, the iMac recognized the .avi format of my little Canon SD800IS immediately. I had painstakingly imported the clips to the PC via Windows Moviemaker, the only Windows program that recognizes the format. I used to go through that and then export to one media file which I would then open in Premiere, but this time the PC steadfastly refused to export, coming up with error after error and taunting me, egging me on each time to “Please try again!” It might as well have been wearing a blue dress and holding a football.

iMovie was much easier and smoother, and I learned my way around it while slapping this thing together. I felt I didn’t need to use Final Cut Pro as my travel videos are just thrown haphazardly together for the most part and don’t require very detailed production tools. The more I use this system, however, the more I appreciate the lack of BS I have to put up with to get things done. It’s so much closer to the experience I want when working with media that I find myself missing the Mac when the PC grinds to life, Windows taking roughly five minutes to fully load and looking so primitive. Which it is, I suppose: it’s an old, loud machine with XP, and old, loud OS. Both are stable enough I suppose; I guess I must have drunk the Kook-Aid. It’s true that the iPhone is a gateway drug. I’m afraid I’m becoming addicted.

But enough crazy fanboi talk; I’m sure I’ll find plenty to bitch about with the Mac in good time. I am pretty happy with the video, however, which, in a first for me, is available in relatively high quality on Youtube and Vimeo. I did the same thing as I always do when I’m traveling alone, i.e. periodically take the camera out in public and talk to it unabashedly with no regard to the strange looks I get. I’m loathe to do this kind of thing when I’m traveling with people, but you’ll be happy (or sigh in annoyance) to know that I managed to take quite a bit of such self-absorbed and pointless video on the trip to Spain and France as well, despite the presence of actual friends. I’m curious to know how that turned out as I also got a new compact camera for such things: a Panasonic LX3, to replace the Canon, which I sold. The LX3 has a wider, faster 24mm f2 lens (and admittedly looks cooler) than the Canon and in a pinch could be used for street photography provided the light is sufficient. The IS seems to work differently from the Canon, but once I got used to it it seemed fairly smooth.

We had a week of wonderful weather after I got back from Europe, and I’ve been feeling very glad to be back in familiar territory. Two weeks abroad is long enough to get far enough away from one’s usual surroundings to get some perspective on things, just long enough to start missing home, making both the voyage there and the trip back happy occasions. Typical Taiwanese Spring weather has returned this morning, however, with a cold front bringing a barrage of rain that is far more suited to the current economic predictions than the sunnily hopeful blue skies of last week, forcing men with jackhammers to stop their outdoor frolicking and return to drilling nearby walls in my building.

Valentine’s Day wasn’t particularly notable for anything for me, but I did manage to drag my ass to practice that day. Nobody from our school was at the park when I arrived, however. I figured they must all be late or something and went through the forms as best as I could until I got a call from Teacher X, who told me that they’d moved back to CKS Hall since the construction work there is finished. They still practice at the park on Sunday’s though.

I walked over to CKS and joined the group there. It was a gray day, cool and somewhat forbidding after a week of solid sunshine and warm days. I was tired and really out of shape after such a long hiatus, and UPS guy pushed me over several times. I had a better time of it with Mr. V.

My Tuesday and Thursday nights are almost full up, though, so I’m not sure how quickly I’ll be able to get back into the swing of things.

It was 2 a.m. by the time I got to bed last night in Madrid after packing all my stuff up in preparation for our departure in the morning. A little after 3 a.m., someone started knocking on the door of the hostel. The sound quickly grew more insistent until it became a loud pounding. The pounder would go at it for a minute or so, then stop just long enough for me to fall asleep before starting up again. At first I thought someone had forgotten their key, but the keys to the hostel are all on one ring, so if they had the one to get in downstairs, they would also have the one to the front door. I had no idea what the situation was, so I didn’t answer the door. Nobody else did, either. The banging continued until after 5 a.m. When I got up at 7:30 and took my stuff out to the hall, I found a young woman sitting in the lobby under several layers of mascara. Was she the violent pounder? At that point I didn’t care; I just wanted everyone to get going in order to avoid another mad rush to the airport.

Checking out was simply a matter or handing the keys in to the young man at reception who claimed that he hadn’t heard any pounding the night before, and we caught a cab on Gran Villa. The city, few people on the streets yet, was bathed in bright morning light; it was a beautiful day. Driving through it drove home the fact that we hadn’t time to properly see it. That’s one of the hazzards of travelling that way, I guess. If it were up to me, I would have picked one or two places, preferably large cities like Barcelona or Madrid, and stayed for a week each, making more of an effort to interact with local people and see what living there was really like. I’m not fixated on eating the best food or seeing every sight; I eat wherever I feel like, even fast food sometimes, and am more interested in the regular streets than monuments and cathedrals (castles are pretty cool, though). This trip was an experiment for me in a different kind of travel, and while I’m glad I got to see the places I did, I definitely would have done it differently had I been on my own.

As for what I did manage to see: Spain seems like a rather impatient country. Wherever we went I felt like I was holding someone up, and it wasn’t just when we stopped in the middle of the high-speed lane on a highway. It’s also a great deal more messy than I had imagined, especially the pervasive graffiti and the areas around the towns, outside the tourist zones. Even Taiwan doesn’t look too bad in comparison, actually.

The drive to the airport was quick, the driver whistling along to a CD of Zamfir’s Greatest Hits. Breakfast was donuts at the airport cafe, and then on through the usual security theater show, where I got patted down by a cute guard after the machine detected a fraction of a receipt in my back pocket.

The flight to Amsterdam was so crowded that I couldn’t find an overhead bin for my backpack. When I found occupied only by a jacket, its owner told me not to smush the poor jacket, possibly due to eggs in the pockets or something, and to please find another bin. “Sure, that’s fine,” I told him. “If you don’t want me to put it in there, I won’t.” He smiled. “I will find another place, perhaps on the wing, or tied to the tailfin.” He stopped smiling. “Or maybe I’ll just stand here. You don’t actually need to go to Amsterdam, do you?” Cold stare.

Eventually I managed to stuff the bag into another bin, egged on by a group of enthusiastic American teens as if I were chugging a beer. Then we were off, flying north over Spain, France, Belgium and Holland to Amsterdam’s modern Schiphol Airport. Every few minutes they would announce that someone or other was delaying a flight and that their luggage would be uncerimoniously dumped from the airplane while all the other passengers sniggered and jeered if they didn’t get their asses on the plane right quick.

Gordon had warned us about food on KLM flights, and he was right; it’s clearly not as good as Air France in this respect (though still much better than China Airlines, of course). It seems that the airline spent most of its food budget on packaging that tries to convince you that the food is actually very good and how you should appreciate all of the trouble they went through to fit the meal into such ingenious packaging. Gordon was flying on to Copenhagen the next day, so Ray and I proceeded to the gate for the flight to Hong Kong. I got through the security theater first, but Ray took forever to show up. It turned out that he had stopped for curry on the way, convinced as he was that there would be slim pickings on the flight.

We had to go through another bout of security theater just to get on the plane. In fact, this grand farcical opera has become so pervasive that I was told to take off my hat just while walking through the duty-free shops area. I was sure that if I had asked why I would have been marked and delayed from the flight. Or maybe they just didn’t care for the hat.

I’d specified a window seat on an exit row, which, on the aging Boeing 747-400 turned out to mean that I had no actual window and about six inches of space in which to put my right knee. The windowless part didn’t particularly matter as we were travelling mostly at night, but the position was awkward, especially for a lefty like me. The old plane had no in-seat screens, just old CRTs mounted on the ceiling, the stripping hanging loose over the aisle. Fortunately the flight was only 10 hours instead of the 13 we’d spent going to Paris two weeks ago, albeit with better food and seat videos. I managed to get some sleep in between watching Futurama episodes on my iPhone and chatting with Ray in the back of the plane about how I felt even more Taiwanese in Europe than in Taiwan.

There was yet more security theater in Hong Kong, even though we were just going from one plane to another. It occurred to me that I haven’t been back to Hong Kong in about ten years; maybe I should take a weekend sometime and make a visit, though I think I’ve worked through most of my travel-related urges for now.

The China Airlines flight back to Taipei was almost deserted. We could have laid down across rows of seats and nobody would have noticed. Taoyuan Airport was in a similar state. In just a few minutes we walked off the plane, through immigration and customs and got right into a taxi to Xindian, where I spent the afternoon sifting through the detritus of the journey that has accumulated in my pockets and bags: tickets, brochures, restaurant cards, receipts, etc. I have no idea what time my body clock is on at the moment and am making no effort to find out.

So that’s the trip: Tomorrow we return to our regular Taiwan-based program, i.e. work and badminton. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed the tales.

We’d arranged a trip to Tangiers in the morning, though it was raining and blustery. It was worth a shot, and all the travel agents said it was ok, though these were of course the same travel agents who said Gibraltar would be ok.

As soon as we had entered the ferry terminal vicinity, a guy in a pink shirt waved us over, and Gordon showed him the tickets. The guy said they were no good, that those were hotel bills. I was thinking, this guy’s either nuts or up to no good, but Gordon seemed to believe him, parked the car where the guy said and then followed him, not towards but away from the terminal.

At this point I was on full scam alert, but all I could do was follow Gordon and Ray at enough of a distance that I could help out if there was any funny business. It was one thing for us to lose our trip money; that I hadn’t paid yet, but my computer was in the car, and I was sure that looting would ensue where it was now.

Pink Shirt led us back across the highway to another travel agency, as I’d thought he might, to try to get Gordon to buy another ticket from another company, I’m guessing. At this point Gordon seemed to catch on and came right back out, walking towards the terminal again. Pink Shirt followed us all the way, hoping for a tip for his “services” I suppose. Ray and I got the keys for Gordon to go move the car up into the proper parking lot.

It was all moot, of course, because we couldn’t go to Africa; Ray and I just don’t have the right visa. We could have gotten all of these beforehand, of course, but we just didn’t think of it.

Back in the car, we looked for breakfast, ending up at a seedy diner by the bus station, full of smoke, trash and shady figures, transients and drivers, taxis lined up outside as we mapped out the way to Seville.

That drive was much more pleasant, through rolling hills and green pastures with short trees and the occasional herd of cows, horses or sheep. Vast wind farms crowned every other horizon. Gordon, perhaps to make up for the terminal episode, drove at a hundred miles per hour, getting us there in just a few hours. The VW had no complaint; we’d discovered earlier that it is a turbo diesel and got excellent mileage. The weather was brilliant now as we passed towns on hilltops surrounding central church towers, ugly utilitarian sheds around the edges.

Finding the hotel in Seville was difficult; we were looking for a place in the old quarter, which is a warren of tiny alleys with no parking and no real directions. Just finding the old quarter itself was an exercise in frustration, with Gordon on the phone and driving according to the hotel’s instructions. I found myself wishing we’d taken the GPS option on the car.

We eventually parked the car at a nearby underground garage and lugged our things into the maze of old buildings to find the Amadeus, a hotel converted from a traditional home with courtyards inside. I selected a room on the second floor with a semi-balcony overlooking the back courtyard and the door overlooking the main lobby atrium. All the furniture is old, the doors tall and wooden with original metal knobs, the walls thick and the ceilings featuring wooden beams. It felt a bit like staying at Grandma’s house. It is a musical-themed hotel with various instruments lying around, mostly broken, and music performances playing in the lobby on a small dvd set. Musicians get a practice room, but alas are not eligible for a discount. And no trumpets or washtub basses to be found, either.

After we were settled in we headed out for a late lunch at a local tapas bar where the floor slopes down from the door and is covered in dust and paper. The food was very good, and my eye was caught by one of the staff behind the counter, a stocky Spanish man with a missing tooth that showed when he smiled, which was not often.

We continued to walk around the area afterwards, passing the huge cathedral and the old palace nearby. Seville is full of orange trees, now full of ripe fruit that nobody bothers eating or picking for some reason. I wondered if it would just go to waste or if the city went through and picked all the fruit at some point. Maybe it is just ornamental and tastes awful? I have no idea, but fruit was already dropping into the street. If the city had more Chinese tourists there wouldn’t be any fruit left no matter how it tasted, I thought.

Being dumb tourists ourselves, we took a ride in a horse-drawn carriage even though it was too cold; I had been lured by the sun into wearing only a thin jacket and sweater instead of my big jacket. The driver called out the names of various places we passed in Spanish nonchalantly, waving his hand at traffic. Nobody honked at the carriages, which was strange as we had been honked at incessantly on the way in. Perhaps there have been cases of horses being spooked by car horns.

As the sun set it got even colder. We stopped in another tapas place that was packed with people, mostly a party of older people celebrating the birthday of one of their number perhaps. We stood at a table for a while, and I was thankful when we were finally seated as I was beat, but not hungry. “Is he ok?” the owner asked after I only ordered one dish. Afterwards we all had shots of a caramel flavored vodka that was like eating an entire cake in one small glass.

I was still ok when I came back to the hotel, but a couple of hours later I became violently ill and spent the entire night in and out of the bathroom, throwing up repeatedly into the bidet. I think my stomach had just had too much and too many different kinds of foods, combined with the cold and other things. I finally slept early in the morning, staying in and sleeping the entire next day as well as the next night.

I was feeling better by Wednesday morning, though not exactly tip top strut stuff. I had toast for breakfast, eventually; Gordon is pretty picky about where he eats, and he was in the mood for eggs of a certain kind, and we ended up walking around a while before finding a place. Then the heavyset waitress with caramel-colored hair said we could only order eggs while sitting outside, but toast only if you were sitting inside. So we walked around some more before ending up at a trendy cafe on the main boulevard full of young people wearing black sweaters using Macbooks, where we got eggs and toast and listened to Spanish music videos. I watched the people passing by on the street outside, young and old, and the occasional tram. Seville’s metro currently has only four stops and runs just a short distance, but it is supposed to be expanded in the future.

After breakfast, I went alone to see the great cathedral, one of the biggest in the world apparently. This was the place where Christopher Columbus prayed for good luck before setting out on his journey to the Americas; he ended up just a few feet away as his tomb is also here, born aloft by four statues. The cathedral is impressive in its size, but it is not as focused in its construction as Notre Dame. Sure, you could play a good game of football inside without breaking any of the stained glass windows, but the space isn’t really used to great effect. Even the gigantic organ, bigger than most buildings, looks tiny inside it. I climbed the tower that was the original mosque’s minaret, dodging Spanish teenagers running down the ramps the opposite way, and found that the sunny weather had disappeared; rain was now pouring from the sky and blowing into the tower windows. A collection of bells is located at the top, each with its own name. As I looked down on the city I could see that rooftop space is much better utilized here than in Taipei. Here they have converted the rooftops into comfortable spaces with patios and swimming pools. But it was cold and wet; I headed slowly back down.

I met Gordon and Ray back down by the horses. Gordon had just toured Alcazar and highly recommended it. I needed to sit down somewhere, so Ray and I went to the palace and bought tickets and an audio guide, voiced by the same people who did the one to Alhambra. The rainy weekday meant that not many people were inside, and I was able to just sit inside the rooms listening to the commentary and thinking about old palace life as long as I liked. It is an impressive place, as it should be; Seville was the capital of course, but it is not as impressive as Alhambra with its imposing geography. The most interesting parts were the Sultan’s bedrooms, in the inner sanctums and private halls and escape routes. The gardens were closed, the staff said, due to some imagined wind problem. Ray and I had hot drinks at the cafe before it closed. It was sunny again outside, so we waited by the cathedral for the strong late afternoon light for a photo, but the light never quite came to the full fruition it had the day before.

It was our last full day in Seville, so we decided to take the boat tour, a short walk away by an old tower on the river. The boats would only run if four or more people bought tickets, so we waited for another group and then got on board.

As soon as we cast off, the sky clouded up again and the temperature dropped. We went down below to watch the city slide past, some historical landmarks, 60’s-era apartment buildings topped with neon signs, an old style sailing ship that might have been a replica of one of Columbus’s ships, and the depressing remains of the ’92 expo, huge structures now seemingly abandoned. I would have liked to go there and take pictures of the desolation, but the weather and our schedule wouldn’t allow it. It was interesting to think that Columbus set out from these waters, but the tour wasn’t nearly as interesting as the one in Paris.

Rain began to bead up the windows of the boat as we neared the dock nearly an hour later. I had not brought my umbrella, again fooled by the previously good weather. I was beginning to think that Seville is just bad luck for me.

Though the walk to the river had taken about five minutes, the walk back to the hotel took about three hours, or at least it felt like it. The architects of the city somehow found a way to make the structures dump as much water on pedestrians in the streets below as is physically possible, and the streets and sidewalks made short work of my supposedly water-resistant shoes, which now need replacing. Thankfully I was wearing my big Gore-Tex jacket, which repelled the rain well enough, but my pants and feet were soaked.

Back at the hotel, I borrowed Ray and Gordon’s bathtub to soak for a bit and warm up before we headed out again for dinner. I had had only had a piece of toast in two days’ time so I really just wanted something to eat, but again we ended up wandering around the maze for about ten minutes before we found the place Gordon was looking for. It was an elegant establishment with tablecloths, folded napkins, wineglasses, an atrium and no customers; we had the entire place to ourselves. Taking it slow, I just had some salty chicken rice soup and water.

It’s Thursday morning now. I am sitting in a comfy chair in the atrium trying to connect to the finicky wifi connection that doesn’t work most of the time. We are going to check out after breakfast and head for our final stop on this trip, Madrid. Rain is pelting down on the Plexiglas roof high above me, loud enough to overwhelm the opera playing softly in the corner.

It was raining yet again when I opened my balcony doors in Malaga. I’d been awakened by singing downstairs that was either remarkably drunk people sounding like cats in heat, or just actual cats in heat. I hadn’t even unpacked, so hauling stuff back downstairs and into the car was quick work despite the rain. We drove to the harbor and found exactly one (1) restaurant open for breakfast, and it was missing a door. “This is one of the two days a year they actually need one,” Gordon remarked. The cold wind whistled and howled through the place, they had the Federer vs. Nadal tennis match on the TV.

After breakfast we headed out of the city and down the coast towards the very southern tip of Spain, passing a closed-up Catholic school, its brown walls splattered with graffiti.

This was the Costa del Sol, the Sun Coast, minus the sun; we strained to hear the Spanish radio commentary on the match over the patter of the heavy rain as we drove. The hotels, restaurants and bungalows we passed seemed ill-equipped to deal with the weather. For me, buildings should welcome people in bad weather, but these just seemed embarrassed, like an amusement park stripped of its facade.

We made our way to Algeciras, close to Gibraltar, choosing an especially swank hotel to make up for the previous night’s experiences. The decor is all glass and steel, black leather and dark wood, straight out of The Sharper Image Going Out of Business Sale Catalogue, with a view of the Rock over the shipyards.

After a cheap and filling lunch at a nearby restaurant, we headed to Gibraltar, but after being cleared by the Spanish side, we were told by the British side that Ray and I couldn’t enter because we didn’t have the special Gibraltar visa for our Taiwan passports. We ended up instead at a parking lot by the water taking pictures of the huge half-mountain. The bay was filled with all kinds of ships, including a large liner.

With nothing else to do, we decided to drive down to the very southern tip of Spain at Tarifa. The mountain roads were dangerous enough without the heavy rain and lightning, but Gordon, apparently liking a challenge, conducted a cell phone conversation throughout. It was not a relaxing drive.

We passed by more banks of windmills as we descended into the small town, known for its surf shops and nightlife, through the narrow alleys of the town to a small island connected to what appeared to be an old military fort in the sea. On one side of the bridge was a sign that said “Mediterranean” and on the other one that read “Atlantic”. Cats roamed the area, dodging the crashing surf as the blue-gray deepened into full-on night.

Back in town, we stopped by a cathedral full of murmuring worshipers and a cafe next door that was host to a group of middle-aged Spanish woman singing along to the songs of a man with a guitar at their table. It felt like a cheery place despite the weather.

But it was getting late, and the long road back to the hotel beckoned. The drive back wasn’t as scary as the ride there, but the road was dark due to the lack of streetlamps along the way. I was glad, though, because as we sped along the top of the hill through the rain and lightning, I could see the lights of Africa gleaming through the fog across the water below.

We had breakfast at Zeluan again in the morning; my ham and cheese croissant had no chocolate but was covered with sugar instead. The rain outside changed the atmosphere of the place considerably, at the same time more moody and more comfortable. Gordon was sure the weather in Granada bore no relation to the weather in Almeria, so we set off despite the rain in hopes that it would be sunny at our destination. As we drove I noticed once again the prevalence of graffiti everywhere in Spanish cities. Who draws it? Why doesn’t anyone bother cleaning up at least the obviously poorer examples of the art?

The highway climbed eastwards into the hills, and the rain turned to snow, light at first; then much heavier. Snowplows were parked along the road, and signs warned of giant snowflakes that were actually alike, a terrifying thought. The weather improved as we came down the other side, though, and distant patches of blue appeared above the fields of giant wind turbines and solar farms that dotted the landscape.

The land itself was becoming at once more wild and more familiar, at least to fans of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, which were filmed here. This was the reason we were here, actually; Gordon and Ray weren’t particularly interested, but I had to visit the place where some of my favorite cinematic moments were filmed decades ago. Watching the shadows of clouds speed over the hills, I realized that it must be the inspiration of Leone’s title sequences, the titles sliding over the mountains like clouds, no doubt painstakingly rotoscoped by some poor shmuck in the studio.

The sun was shining as we pulled into the parking lot of Mini Hollywood, the amusement park made from the old original movie sets, and as we were about to get out of the car, literally out of the blue, hail began pounding down around us, bouncing off the ground and some of the cars. A few minutes later it was over, but another one followed almost immediately. The ground looked like it was covered in mothballs before the hailstones melted.

We got our rather expensive tickets and crossed a wooden bridge over a gulch to the fake town. I immediately recognized the bank and hotels from “A Few Dollars More,” but some of the other buildings and angles took some time to recognize. The houses of both the Rojos and the Baxters were missing, but some of the buildings from the middle of the street were familiar. It would have been helpful if guides were on hand to explain which scenes were filmed where, but perhaps modern audiences aren’t interested in that and would rather see more touristy things.

We almost left after that, but at the last moment decided to stay for the dance show at the saloon at 4 p.m. Lunch at the canteen wasn’t as bad as I was expecting for a kitchen that is basically holding visitors hostage.

Before the show, I walked around the area, wondering what it was like when they were filming the movies, standing where I figured Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach or Lee Van Cleef had been standing in various scenes, climbing the balcony where I figure the “Me in the middle” speech took place, etc. It was actually pretty cool, though the place has been made over into a really cheesy version of itself for the Spanish tourists, complete with old video games.

The show turned out to be a kind of psychedelic can-can review, with canned music straight from “Hooked on Classics” and dancers with widely varying physiques wearing what appeared to be tighty whiteys under their skirts, which didn’t spend much time covering anything. It was very bizarre.

As we crossed the bridge back towards the parking lot, I was reminded of another scene, where Tuco crosses the rope bridge to the town after crossing the desert in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. It seems like the same spot, but I could be wrong.

On the road to Cabo del gato, we passed more spots I thought looked familiar, such as The Small House (Marisol! I wanted to shout out the window) and the location of the final shootout in A Few Dollars More.

Cabo del gato was the last thing on my checklist, what I thought was the site of the church where El Indio and his gang hid out in the second film, where El Indio gives the speech from the pulpit about a very special safe. We drove further and further into the desolate lands east of Almeria, and I began to think we’d never find it. I was already feeling a bit apologetic for dragging Gordon and Ray to Almeria in the first place, and this was turning into a real excursion when on the map it looked like a simple drive.

When we finally reached Cabo del gato, we stopped by a surprisingly turbulent ocean, faced by some kind of ancient stone guardhouse. I was nearly knocked over by the strong, cold wind the moment I stepped out of the car. We took some pictures and then got back on the road. I had nearly given up when I spotted the tower of a church in the distance, located between the coast and some nearby hills.

A sign next to the remote ruin mentioned that it was built in 1907; a centenary was held in 2007, but the church looks just as it did in 1963. I’m not sure who decided to build a church out in the middle of nowhere like that or why, or how Leone knew about it, but it is certainly a dramatic looking location, especially at that time of day. Ray and I got out and took pictures of the old church by the seaside, which was yellow in the light of the setting sun and striking against the blue sky. Not far down the road was a seaside resort of a much more recent vintage, completely shuttered and boarded up for the winter. “I never saw a town as dead as this,” I said; nobody got the reference.

I’m sure Gordon and Ray thought I was crazy for wanting to see such places, but to their credit they didn’t complain once about the detour. In any case, I’ve seen what I could, though ideally I would hire a guide and do research to find other locations such as the cemetery at the end of the last film. From now on the itinerary is up to them, though.

We drove back westwards along the southern Spanish coast as night fell. The highway was closed for most of the drive due to construction, so we took the winding regular road all the way to Malaga, where we had a late dinner of fried artichokes and fish. Gordon felt I should drive to the hostel we’d booked so that he could read the directions, but we somehow ended up in the middle of a pedestrian square surrounded by angry cops in cars and on motorcycles waving and shouting at us. Luckily they didn’t arrest us, and even guided us to the hostel, a strange, cheap affair on the third floor of an office building in an area of dubious repute. As I type this, I can hear loud conversations, scooter horns and thumping music out my balcony window. The in-room shower is exactly that; there are no walls, just a curtain, and the toilet is located across the hall. 30 euros a night. Obviously there is no Internet, so I will have to post this later. Tomorrow we might try to see Gibraltar, though Ray and I might not have the right visa.