On the same street at Sento, this place has pretentions of being a restaurant rather than a bar; but they have a couple of bar stools at the window. We sit on them and, eventually, get served (with beer and delicate tomato and anchovy toastie tapas). The beer is served in oversized wine glasses.
It's ok here, but the bar inside is very long – curving round into a restaurant where far more important customers apparently need attending too. Anyway, we very rarely see, let alone catch the eye, of the bar staff so we sup up and move on.
We sit outside again, watching coverage of England v Slovenia World Cup Qualifier. It's a boring game, and after a while Steph gives up on it and wanders over to take a look inside the cathedral.
This bar is right on the Alicante tourist drag but A) there aren't many tourists about B) it's very reasonably priced C) it's a lovely spot right outside the cathedral and D) Carmen and her kids live metres away – within earshot of the buskers in this square, and the tips-bell at Sento, equidistant from her flat in the other direction. It really doesn't seem such a bad place to live...
We'd planned to pop round and visit Carmen, but she'd just put the kids to bed – and her flat had been hit by a power cut. Of course she might have just said that to avoid meeting us, we wouldn't blame her, but we were right outside when we called, and the whole building was dark... again, she could have asked a big favour of her neighbours and had everyone’s electric switched off.
So, with Carmen not out, we return to Piazza to watch England unexpectedly grab a last minute winner – and thereby win the right to ignominiously fail in the finals.
After that we return to the apartment, and the next day we return to Blighty (on the top deck of a 747 jumbo jet, to Gatwick, courtesy of Monarch having gone to the wall the day after they flew us out).
Carmen, it seems, isn’t going to show up. We’re five minutes late when we arrive at The Piazza, our planned meeting point, and wait around another ten before deciding to do the tourist bit and have a look in the cathedral. Just before we enter, Carmen arrives. Lovely to see her. She has kids and parents in tow – and it’s nice sitting outside with the extended family.
The Piazza seems like a tourist trap – on the square, right outside the cathedral, along with vendors and buskers. It’s possibly (actually, almost certainly) somewhere we’d not have gone to on our own – we’d have headed into the back streets – but in the company of a resident family it’s fine. And it is fine. Carmen, who studied photography with me fifteen years ago, noticing that I’m snapping away, produces her own camera – and a website on which she stores her photographs. She is, and always has been, far more accomplished than me – she takes some fantastic pictures. She doesn’t, as a rule, habitually photograph drinks in every pub she visits. More fool her, eh folks? “It’s not just beer”, she suggests.
No, there’s football too – on the Piazza tellies there’s coverage (a replay it turns out) of Man City v Shaktar Donetsk. Shaktar are apparently playing in Luton Town’s 1983 home kit. They still lose – as Luton Town were wont to do in 1983… although famously not at Man City (but they were wearing the away kit then).
Unlike the archetypal tourist trap we suspected this place to be – the bill for the beer was very reasonable.
Our favourite Alicante bar; no frills, very clean but run down at the same time. Most customers choose to sit outside, leaving ample room at the bar – and a large inside dining area which we’ve never seen populated. The Alhambra beer is a nice change.
No spontaneous dissolving into tears from the bar staff on this visit, but the night is young. We’re off to meet Carmen in a half hour; my old friend from uni’ is an Alicante resident, and likely wouldn’t dream of coming anywhere as untrendy as Santa Faz.
We tend to travel to the same places – and when we get to those places, we go to the same places. In Alicante, in our book, the place to go is Santa Faz.
On THIS visit… consulting my notes… yes, it’s late lunchtime and we’ve come back from the Museo de Hogueras and the Museo Volvo Ocean Race, both interesting in their own way. It’s our last day in Spain, and we have postcards to write. Elsewhere the bar is generally quite quiet – but we do get set on by an old fellow who has heard us talking, and wishes to practice his English by shouting it at us. I think he was a bit deaf. He didn’t tell us that, but did want to let us know that he was a supporter of FC Barcelona. Did we like football? Yes. He’d never heard of Luton Town, and when I held up four fingers to illustrate in which league our team resided he seemed less than impressed – and shuffled off.
We did the same. Our plan is to go to some more bars, have a little siesta, then come out again later.
Beer: Alhambra 5%
