1995 Gran Canaria: Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

My Macintosh PowerBook is experiencing strange crashes. Since I have the debugger installed I can trace through these potholes in the path to happy functioning, and I'm sure that one or another system resource has gotten corrupted, what with all the flapdoodle that's happened on this trip. The fix is to reinstall the system software. The problem is that I don't have the floppies (or the disk images) with me. So I'm going 30 km (18 mi) north to the capitol city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria to check out the three stores that display the Apple logo in their advertisments in Los Paginas Amarillos (Yellow Pages).

I've already written their names, addresses, and phone numbers in my Newton. I've packed my tourist map. And I have spare change for the bus. After an early breakfast I don my backpack and walk to the bus stop in front of Yumbo. Within a minute I'm on a bus; the one-way fare costs 515 pesetas (US$4). Here's what it looks like from the back raised seat on a bumpy bus:

All of a sudden it occurs to me that I can take my own picture by holding the Apple QuickTake 100 at arm's length:

The bus rolls through a half-dozen stops in Playa del Inglés and the town to the north, San Augustine, before it rolls onto the Autobahn. Rather than put the highway a kilometer inland and preserving the shore for land development and parks, the Spanish equivilent to the U.S. Corps of Engineers has put this ribbon of asphalt right along the water, causing millions (perhaps billions) of lost dollars in future revenue. Sigh.

The most notable sight are the crops, or to be more exact, the inability to see the crops. Because of the scorching tropical sun the renowned Canarian crops of tomatoes and melons are grown in tent cities. These tents are made of a white (sometimes green) woven plastic "cloth" that is stretched as far as the eye can see. (They remind me of an Isaac Asimov story, The Caves of Steel, which describes a humanity that never sees the outside world, a humanity that lives in one big city that completely covers the planet.)

We roll past acres of tented crops; where the highway moves a bit inland the crops take the room between the asphalt and the ocean. There are few buildings to be seen; sometimes I see a ramshackle hut next to crop tents. Soon we're in the suburban neighborhoods of Las Palmas. These, like poor neighborhoods the world over, are filled with an industrial tenants: factories, mechanics, and bulk warehouses. Since the word "supermercado" was already being used for what we call corner markets, a new word had to be created for big markets. This is what a "hipermercado" looks like:

Before I know it, we're in downtown Las Palmas, passing throngs of students entering the university. Everything feels different; there's a city feeling that I haven't enjoyed since leaving San Francisco. There are city people, and there are country people. I'm one of the former. Much as I love the high country of Yosemite and Mont Blanc in Chamonix (France), I feel most comfortable in the hum of a city. cafés, book shops, restaurants, movie theatres, opera houses, schools and colleges and universities. Resources. Resources and people. Diversity. Culture. The bus suddenly whips to the right and dips underground; the promised land disappears from view.

The bus complex is a two-block long subterranean affair. Each bus pulls into a numbered, angled berth before disgorging the passengers. There's an open-air roof that disperses the exhausts rather than aphyxiating us. As I climb up to the surface of the earth I turn and look around. In a rather unremarkable section of city architecture lies this scene from a Mad Max movie. It's a courageous adventure in construction that I think works.

I turn and head into the heart of the city.

Have you found errors nontrivial or marginal, factual, analytical and illogical, arithmetical, temporal, or even typographical? Please let me know; drop me email. Thanks!

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