Carnaval de Cádiz - Day 6

Tuesday 12thFebruary

I spent Tuesday relaxing before heading out to the right police station, which turned out to be further down the avenue of Andalucia, on the far side of the city gates. I went with Kath who had been before to get her citizen card, once inside the station one of the officers asked me what I wanted and I explained that my phone had gone missing on Saturday night, he asked why I didn’t come the day before to report it and I explained about going to the wrong station which they seemed to find somewhat amusing. I was then escorted to a back room whilst Kath was left in the waiting room, I sat down at a desk where another officer started to take some details. He asked for some ID, and got a little confused when I presented him with my drivers licence, another officer had to come over and they discussed what the document number was, and after a while I managed to convince them which one was the right one. Then I needed to hand over my IMEI number for the phone that had been taken, luckily my parents had the box for the phone back in England and found it for me, in future I will be sure to keep a copy of numbers like this, just in case I am not so lucky as to have my parents find it. Then I had to explain when the phone went missing and provide some contact details for here in Spain, at the end the officer printed off a copy of the report and stamped it, I then had to sign it. He gave me a copy and then kept one for the records and reassured me that they would get in contact if the phone ever showed up, but I wasn’t to get my hopes up as it would probably never be seen again. I then left the room and picked Kath up from the waiting room, where she was surrounded by some very nice looking police officers, next time anyone loses their phone or anything I will be the first to volunteer to come back to the station and wait in the waiting room for them to fill in their report.

Once we were out of the station we hopped in the bus to go to Tienda de Vélez where we were meeting Sophie and Anissa for dinner. Being the eager beavers that we are we arrived before the restaurant was even open, we lurked around outside until Sophie and Anissa arrived and we decided to head to a bar over the road for a drink so that we didn’t look quite so odd waiting at the doors for the restaurant to open, the staff knew what we were doing so it was a little embarrassing. We went to a bar just across the road, near to the Playa Victoria Hotel, it was a really cute little bar with large tree trunks instead of tables, we ordered ourselves some drinks, I had a mojito whilst the others opted for pina colada’s, they were delicious, we drank slowly and chatted away until we were all feeling rather hungry, so decided to head back over to La Tienda de Velez where we were still the first customers. The food and service were just as good as ever, and it was definitely a delicious treat, although I feel slightly guilty for not having cooked food at home for days, once we had finished our meal we headed back out to the bus stop where we waited for longer than normal to catch the bus up to Plaza de Espana.

We were hoping to make it back to Plaza San Antonio in time for the bonfire, they would be burning a ‘momo’, although unfortunately for us we arrived half an hour later than the advertised starting time so missed the entire thing. They had cordoned off a section of the square inside which we could see the ashen remains of the momo. We decided not to let that be the end of the night so headed to Woodstock for a relaxing drink, the girls had some irish coffee’s and I had Jaeger and coke, afterwards we decided to go on a little bar tour and moved on to the Irish bar, once we were done there it was getting late so we thought that Nahu would be the best place to go. So we moved on to there where we bumped into the rest of my housemates and Stephane and his friends, Sophie and I briefly popped home to drop off our valuables so that nothing else went missing. We spent the night dancing and drinking, then when the bar was closing we headed outside where we bumped into some Americans who were visiting from Rota, they followed us to La Punta, where we were surprised that all but one of the clubs ‘La Cripta’ was closed. We were shocked that Aki Te Quiero wasn’t open, as we had never before seen it closed, so we headed to La Cripta which was a metal bar, that pleased me no end. I put in plenty of requests and really enjoyed myself, despite the club being pretty empty and me being the only one dancing. Unfortunately I can’t say that the others enjoyed the bar so much – metal and rock music isn’t much their scene, a lot of them left and at the end of the night it was just the Americans, Kath and I, but we enjoyed ourselves none the less.