Drinkin' white rum in a Portugal bar

I think that from now on, whenever possible, I'm gonna be an off-season tourist. Today we went to Tossa de Mar, a little Costa Brava town about an hour away that a Catalan friend described as nice and only a little touristy. I bet in June the place is overrun with tourists, but on a Wednesday in March, it was perfect. There's this hill overlooking the sea with really cute houses and some old ruins and a lighthouse at the top. We went to this weird but fun lighthouse museum whose English-version information guides also had Russian translation. The first room was supposed to make you feel lost at sea: pitch black with the occasional flickering light that seemed to come from far off in the distance. The adolescent boy in me was thinking it would have been pretty cool to be stoned in there. The whole museum was almost entirely free of words--very foreign-tourist friendly, but without being cheesy. After the museum we had beer and olives and basked in the sun and the fact that we basically had this beautiful place to ourselves for the day. At an outdoor cafe on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean and drinking in the middle of the day in the middle of the week--life is pretty damn good. Marc Chagall lived in Tossa briefly and the art museum had a few of his paintings, as well as a really cool photography exhibit. On a different hill is a fifteenth century watchtower that our tourist information called the Moorish tower. We almost didn't find it because our tourist office map was so bad we had to wonder if it wasn't bad on purpose because they hate tourists in Tossa, but the getting lost first gave more of a sense of accomplishment when we finally found it. A fifteenth century Moorish watchtower--doesn't that inspire all kinds of romantic historical notions?

The bus made one stop along the way, in this horrible-looking town with casinos and neon lights and restaurants prominently displaying pictures of food--made Tossa seem even better, like we found a little hidden treasure.