Theory goes brainstorming

I am writing this on the easyJet flight back from Lanzarote, where our entire theory group spent the last few days on a brainstorming/relaxing meeting. We stayed in the Lanzarote Bay Hotel, an all-inclusive resort. Did some seriously productive brainstorming and future career planning for the whole gang during the first day and proceeded to enjoy our stay on the island. Well, except for the odd hour that I had to spend preparing two presentations for next week. 

Over the last 20-odd years, Lanzarote was developed for mass tourism, so there are entire areas of the island that are full of hotels and the corresponding number of tourists. We found out the hard way that going exploring means to stay away from the overly commercialized parts of the country. Well, save for the Parque Nacional de Timanfaya, we did go there. The thing is that the interesting places are generally not on the map, while all the places on the map are not interesting. However, we did find some really neat volcanoes with hiking trails, making it quite fun to run both, up and down … On the way to one of these mountains, I also got to work on my slackchaining technique. 

To finish the first day, we headed down to the coast for some really interesting scenery:

Finally, today, we spent some time in the north of Lanzarote. It was confirmed four times that all the places on the map charge more entry than they seemed worth, in the case of one particular cave they also wanted to make sure that you show up in groups of about 50 people … So, instead we went off down a dirt track & did some slightly alpine exploring along the coast.

Overall, I liked the island a lot, although I think the few days were enough to "cover" most of what is there. At the same time, though, this was the first (and hopefully the last) time that I stayed in a cheap all-inclusive hotel in a fully developed beach-side community. It was horrible! While the rooms were reasonably alright, the food and drink was generally revolting or worse. The one actually enjoyable thing was beer - that's because it comes straight from keg to your glass and they could not do much to cheapen it. To give you some examples - each meal consisted of a buffet which contained, contrary to what it said on the menu, primarily English  food (fish & chips, burgers, bacon and eggs, etc., but also paella almost without fish and other "spanish" dishes). I accidentally tried the sausage for breakfast this morning, which turned out to be nothing short of a culinary atrocity. Checking out the restaurants nearby resulted in a number of "typically Spanish places" offering Fish & Chips (to go or eat in), Full English Breakfast (for €3.50 or less, argh), Pizza or TexMex. We found one decent fish restaurant and proceeded to go there twice for dinner as it was literally the only decent place in town! So, trip overall, but despite the "all-inclusive", I still ended up spending quite a lot of money on food!