Els Poblets - Costa Blanca

Today we made our longest car journey - a five hour drive from Orgiva to our new home for the next few days: the Costa Blanca. Known for its white sandy beached and agreeable weather, we are all pretty excited to experience yet another side of Spanish living.

Our house is in a beach village called Els Poblets, near the more well-known beach towns of Denia and Javea, and 45 minutes south of Valencia. Upon arriving in Els Poblets, we noticed a very different vibe here.  First of all, it's off-season, so the town has a sort of post-apocalyptic feel about it as we seem to be just about the only people here.

Secondly, all of the signage around town is in Spanish, English and German.  On our short walk, we encountered three different German restaurants, and no tapas bars.  If Germany had a beach town, this would be it.

Finally, the architecture is, well, weird.  Our house is a turret style, and the rooms are circular.  It's reasonably comfortable, and has a pool.  And we noticed many other turret style homes in the area.

The owner also seems to be a bit of a cheap-skate.  Not to generalize on Germans (especially since both Sue and I have German roots), but during the rental process a 20% offer on the web site was not honored, and when we arrived they attempted to charge us extra for internet access - in spite of no mention on the web page.  Plus, the owner insisted on Pounds instead of Euros at the same number.  With the Spanish, I think they would have been more accommodating.

In the evening, we walked down to the nearest beach, and settled into a restaurant (with a German/Spanish menu) with a view of the Mediterranean. It was all very pleasant, but the beach was big rocks held together with some sort of dirt ball. It looked more like a fisherman's beach.

Still, the area looks interesting, we've seen promises of great beaches, and we're optimistic we'll find a lot of cool things while we are here.

Update: The next night, we discovered an amazing Indian restaurant called Halawi in a neighboring village. We eat a considerable about of Indian cuisine in San Francisco, and the food here was better than any I have eaten in SF.  Maybe it was a reaction to our diet of gazpacho, Spanish tortillas, patas bravas and ham bocadillos over the last 6 weeks, but our meal of chicken tikka masala, butter chicken, lamb gosht (lamb with chick peas) and palak paneer (a spinach and cheese dish) was one of the best ever.  Desserts were awesome too. I never would have expected great Indian cuisine here. Go figure.