The Santa Cruz Auditorium
We have figured out the bus system well enough to get into town and we’ve been enjoying all that Santa Cruz has to offer. It’s actually quite a large city (the Island has 900,000 people), with skyscrapers, a tram, and massive condo development on the waterfront. It is very much like Toronto except for the clean air, easily understood transportation system, and the palm trees everywhere. Oh and no one speaks English. I’m not sure if we have been spoiled until now but we’ve been surprised at the lack of English here. In the Azores we found that it was widely spoken, not fluently, but everyone had a few words and we could make ourselves understood. Not so here. We went to check in with customs and a cruise ship guide had to translate for us because the officer couldn’t seem to understand what we wanted, despite being employed to check people into the country, and our really, very bad Spanish wasn’t cutting it. More surprising than a lack of English though is how Mono-cultural the city is for its size - everything and everyone is VERY Spanish. We went to the tourist information booth to ask about Thai or Indian food in the city and were told that it doesn’t exist. Adam was sure that this must be wrong, even though she checked twice for us, and so we scoured the streets. Aside from the MacDonalds, Burger King, and a couple of Chinese restaurants, we came up empty handed. Although we did find a Vietnamese owned restaurant, Bar Vietnam, which sold Spanish style fast food with a veggie burger option. Sadly I cannot recommend the hamburguesa vegetal. Visually the city is very appealing. It is full of interesting buildings, parks and monuments and it has a large water fountain in the city centre which takes us several city blocks. I won’t be sending any postcards this time though, apparently the Canary Islanders are fond of pornographic scenes instead of the usual landscape photos.