Andalucia is beautiful. We´re in a little beach town, surrounded by palm trees and lush Sierra Nevada mountains, with crystal-clear aqua Mediterranean coastline stretching to the horizon.

We just met Alexandra, the woman who lives on the farm, and although we haven´t been to her place yet, we definately like her.

She´s a total hippie, with long dark flowing hair; exactly the kind of woman who you´d expect to move to the Spanish Mediterranean to grow tropical fruits and raise three kids on a farm without electricity. She has a kind smile and a cute French accent.

We're leaving today for this rustic little farmhouse in the Granada province. We'll probably arrive tomorrow and we'll return to Madrid on Monday or Tuesday.

It's great to know there's a couch we're welcome to sleep on, anytime, in Madrid. Without it, I think Kim and I would both have gone nuts. (Thanks Matt!)

Since there isn't electricity where we're going, I'm not sure if I'll be able to post to this blog until we arrive back in Madrid -- maybe yes, maybe no, depending on whether there's an internet cafe in the neighboring village.

On an unrelated note, here's some thoughts on my culinary exploration of Spain:

• while the sandwiches are plain (they lack lettuce, tomatos and other U.S. classics), they DO feature top-notch jamón. But what else would you expect from a country that seems to revolve around ham?
  
• the paella is well-spiced, though the shellfish is still in its shell, which turns eating shrimp into a violent, mutilating act
  
• 99 cent store-brand Nutella knockoff and1 euro wedges of brie
  
• Spicy ice cream! It's called "Maya" ice cream, which is strange because Mayan culture is Central American, and it's chocolate with various spices (also reminiscent of Central America?)
  

Success!! We found an avocado farm in Granada that's happy to take us in. It's run by a French-Polish couple with three kids, and its totally rustic: there's no electricity and we sleep in little yurts. We'll be helping them paint a shed and prune their trees; in exchange, they'll serve us Mediterranean food and give us a temporary home. We leave tomorrow.

We're really diving into the cultural shine of the city -- I've spent the entirety of the last two days at art museums, taking in Raphel, Picasso, Dalí, Velasquez, Ribera, Rembrant, Goya and El Greco, learning about space, dimension, lighting, the size and speed of brush strokes, and how to see influences of several art movements on a single canvass.

Kim spent today jogging a 12K with a pan-European crowd.

We're not sure what's next on the agenda. Here are our most compelling options, in no particular order:

1. Go to Croatia, where the cost of living is cheaper
2. Go to Amsterdam to celebrate Queen's Day, a major annual festival, on Wednesday
3. Go to a farm in southern Spain
4. Go to a farm in Italy
5. Stay in Madrid and get jobs teaching English

Great days in Madrid

It's wonderful to be back in Madrid, and particularly nice to know some "locals" our own age who can show us the city.

Yesterday Kim went golfing while I walked around Puerta del Sol (the historic square), we met at the apartment for a stir-fry lunch, and then she, Matt and I went to "University City" -- which boasts a total of more than 100,000 students -- for an outdoor concert.

I've never seen a university that officially sponsors the type of concert/party we ended up at yesterday; the cafeteria sells beer on tap and has full shelves of liquor.

We wandered away from the crowds, met up with Matt's best friend Abe and girlfriend Nicoletta, and went out for tapas in the evening.

A few more quirks about Spain I've learned -- wine is literally cheaper than water; you can find bottles of red wine for 0.55 euros. If you "splurge" on a 4-euro bottle, you can get really good stuff.

Also, two of the best museums, El Prado (12th century through 19th century European art) and the Reina Sofía (20th-century art featuring Picasso, Monet, and Dalí) are free once a week -- the Reina Sofía is free Saturday afternoons and El Prado is free Sunday mornings. Perfect! We're cooking paella and heading to the Reina Sofía today.

Unlike traveling in countries where no tourist knows the language (like Thailand or Czech Republic), the people of Spain really expect you to speak Spanish, and get a little snooty if you don't.

We made it back to Madrid!!

We caught an 11 p.m. bus out of Málaga that arrived in Madrid at 6:30 a.m. When we pulled in, the cops told us that we can't take my bike on the subway until 10 a.m., when rush hour ends.

We tried to sleep at the bus/subway station for those intermediate 3.5 hours, but the cops put an end to that, too, so we started walking across the city.

By 10 a.m., we'd drowsily trotted halfway across Madrid, and caught the subway for the other half.

We arrived in front of Matt's apartment around 10:30 a.m. and waited on the street until 2:30 p.m. for one of the roommates to come home to let us in. As we waited, Kim sat on the sidewalk drawing plants and napping; I finished my fourth audiobook of this trip, Barack Obama's Audacity of Hope, and both started and finished my fifth audiobook, Robinson Crusoe.

BUT NOW WE'RE FINALLY HERE!!!!!!

I feel so relieved and refreshed -- we have a nice, secure stable home with a shower, bed and kitchen!

We don't know what our plans are. We've given up on preconceptions about what we want this trip to look like. Preconceptions can be stressful. We just want to have fun.

"You must let go of the life you had planned, in order to have the life that is waiting for you ...."

Another omen?

So, here we were in Málaga, and it was hard to believe that life could be bad. The sun was shining, the beach was beautiful, and we were basking in the Andalucian coast.

But things took a sharp turn south.

This place is built on tourism, and is priced accordingly. The cheapest hostal is the U.S. dollar equivalent of $35 a night -- FAR more than we can afford. We´d been budgeting with the idea that 4 weeks would be expense-free on a farm, which is no longer the case. To save money, we decided to sleep on the beach.

We set up "camp" at around 10 PM, while there were still quite a few people roaming around. We chained our bikes to a sturdy rail, put our valuables inside our sleeping bags, and stuck our bags between us (so that we were lying in a row -- Kim, bags, me).

In the middle of the night, Kim sat up, looked over, and saw that all her bags were missing. "Oh shit!" she shouted. As soon as the words left her mouth, she saw a man crouched down about 12 feet away begin running into the distance.

After he left, we saw that the bags were still there, but had been moved down the beach. A look inside the bags showed that they had obviously been rummaged through, but most things were still inside -- and our valuables, like our mp3 players and passports and money, were with us inside our sleeping bags.

We put the bags back in the middle of us, strapped everything together (so it would be much more arduous to lift one), and laid back down. Needless to say, neither one of us got much rest after that.

When sunrise finally broke, I walked down the beach to the pole where we´d locked our bikes. Uh-oh.

I waited for Kim to wake up.

¨Do you want the news now, or later?" I asked Kim.

¨What news?" she asked.

¨We have a serious problem ... One of our bikes is missing," I told her.

My bike had been secured with a steel lock, but Kim´s had been chained using a cable lock, which a good pair of bolt-cutters can slice through.

"It was mine, wasn´t it?," Kim asked.

"Yeah," I replied.

She took the news well. ¨What´s done is done,¨Kim said. ¨No use getting upset about it. I feel like I got good use out of that bike while I had it.¨

So, that brings us to now. The adventures of Kim and Paula, wandering in Spain. We don´t know what we'll do next. We do know one thing: we don´t want to sleep in this town another night.