Andalucia
¡Hola! Yes, it is I, returned to the blogosphere to tell you yet more of my travels and travails here in Spain. This process has been helped significantly by what I consider one of the greatest boons ever to reach Youth Hostels - Broadband. No more hanging around waiting for a connection to be made, and frantically shovelling all the spare change to hand into a machine while it attempts, over a glacially-paced dial-up connection, to retrieve one's Hotmail. Quite a few of the hostels here in Spain actually have free internet now, which makes matters SO much easier.
Anyways. re-reading back over the lump of verbal diarrhoea that was my last posting, I seem to have got as far as our adventures in Toledo, so I shall pick things up the next morning, as we head down towards Sevilla, in the heart of Andalucia...
Thursday was, in fact, a very long day. The joys of travelling on an Interrail pass are that we are constrained by the rail timetable. And when your rail-plans for the day involve heading back from Toledo to Madrid, in order to catch the AVE (Alta Velocidad Español) express to Sevilla, and RENFE (the Spanish national railway operator) is in the midst of upgrading the Madrid-Toledo line, this can be quite a constraint. Because our only morning option for departing Toledo was the 7am train (well, bus actually, for the first bit of the journey, due to the engineering work). Having only made it to bed at various times between 3 and 4 in the morning. We were not the happiest of bunnies that morning.
After snoozing most of the way back to Madrid, we adjourned once again to the cafe in the main hall of Atocha station. I didn't mention this in my last post, but this is an extraordinary room. Because it basically has a little bit of rainforest growing in the middle of it. Not what you normally expect to find in a train station, that. Spanish railways being the scarily reliable things they are (I don't think we've had a late train yet), we hd no problems boarding the 10am express. Astonishingly, it only takes 2.5 hours to get from Madrid to Sevilla, which is basically half the length of the country, as the trains go up to 300kph! Whereas it takes an hour and a half to get from Toledo to Madrid, which is maybe 50 miles or so, and nearly two hours to reach Segovia.
Anyways, we made it to Sevilla fine, where the temperature was already up in the mid-30s in late May. Our home for the 2 nights there was the Casa de Sol y Luna ("the House of Sun and Moon"), run by an English-Italian guy called Geno, from Kent. The difference in accent when he switched from Spanish to English was extraordinary. Very nice little place, though - a guest-house rather than a hostel, something with which Sevilla is not particularly blessed.
Unfortuately, the spectre of Corpus Christi came back to haunt us that day, as the Catedral was closed for the day. Given that this is obviously one of the main things to see in Sevilla, that was a bit of a bummer. On the other hand, it did mean we went straight on to the Alcazar, the palace. And boy, did we need the time. It's a truly gorgeous building, mostly built by the Mudejars (the name given to Moors who lived on in Spain under Christian rule). Think the kind of amazing stuccoed columns and the like which we traditionally associate with Arabia, Persia and the like in England (Aladdin, Sinbad, etc). And the gardens. The gardens just seem to go on for ever. I probably spent an hour or so wandering around them, despite the 30+ degree heat.
In the end, though, the place closed at 5pm, so it was a good thing we hadn't been into the Catedral, as we wouldn't have been able to appreciate the Alcazar properly (though John and I had a fascinating chat for about 15 minutes at the end in the little cafeteria with a Danish guy in his 80s, a former photographer). That evening we popped over to Triana, the district on the west bank of the Guadalquivir river, for our dinner. This is where I reminded myself just how good fresh fis can be. Having picked somewhere that wasn't ridiculously touristy, though, and not having brought a guidebook out, I had to just guess at what the different fish were. Bit of a case of "eeny-meeny...", but I ended up with a very pleasant fish dinner. I then giggled somewhat when I got back and looked up what I had eaten, to find that it was a Sea Bass (cue Austin Powers impressions). We ended up having a quick drink in a terraza down by the river, which was almost more of a garden than a bar, before heading back for a relatively early night (i.e. only about 1am).
On Friday, which was James' birthday, we went to Cadiz, which was realy cool. It wasn't originally one of the places I had planned to visit, but reading about it on the plane over I decided it sounded fun and we agreed it was worth going to. As one of the oldest settlements in Spain (Gadir was set up by the Phoenicians sometime around 1100 BC), and the heart of the Spanish maritime trade at the height of the Spanish Empire, it's certainly got plenty of history to investigate. It also reminded me a teeny bit of Portsmouth, where I was born, as the city proper is out on a couple of islands joined to the mainland by causeways (much as Portsmouth is officially out on Portsea Island).
One of the things to come out of the previous night was a realisation that we were looking for slightly different things from our holiday, and that it would make sense some of the time to split up and do our own separate things. What this meant for Friday was that John and James headed off to get some tanning time on one of the beaches around Cadiz, and I went off a-wandering around the old town, continuing to rack up ridiculous numbers of photos as I looked around some of the old harbour defences. I also made it down to the city beach, where I went for a quick paddle. I ended up heading back on an earlier train than John and James to Sevilla, so I had the chance to pop into a bookshop and pick up a copy of Lonely Planet for Portugal (after we decided that we are going to have few days in Lisbon and Porto as part of our time out here). That evening, as it was James' birthday, we had a wonderful Italian meal at a place called San Marco in the old town of Sevilla - although it's one of a chain of six restaurants in the city, this one is quite special as it's in an old 12th-century Moorish bathhouse. It also does a wonderful Papardalle Alla Matriciana, which helped fill me up after we got a teensy bit lost trying to find the place. We went pretty much straight home after that, though, as Saturday (yesterday) brought another ridiculously early start.
Yes, we had another 7am train to catch, this time across Andalucia to Granada. Again, I'm afraid I slept for a goodly part of the journey, though I woke up for the last half-hour or so, meaning that I saw us passing through some amazing valleys and cuttings, and going past what I think was one of the White Towns of Andalucia, spread around the foot of and draped up the side of one of the hills. Beautiful. And I'm sure I appreciated it more for having had another couple of hours kip.
We did our usual routine of finding our latest home and dumping our bags before heading off to do the touristy thing. The bizarre thing here is that our hosts, Manuel and Claudine, don't speak much English, but Claudine is French, so I've actually been able to communicate better with them than with any of the staff in other hostels! I certainly didn't expect my French to come in handy this far down from the border, but it's been great to get a little practice. From the outside, it looks very unprepossessing, and is basically halfways surrounded by derelict buildings or building sites, bu it's lovely inside and our hosts are some of the loveliest hostel owners I've met. It's called the Posada de Colon ("Columbus Inn") Alojamiento Backpackers. Bit of a mouthful, but worth looking at as an option if you come down here.
Still, yesterday afternoon we did what every visitor to Granada pretty much MUST do whilst here - we went around the Alhambra. Many of you probably already know this, but the Alhambra is one of the greatest monuments of Spain, and indeed of the Islamic world. And no, that's not a typo - the Alhambra was the seat of the Nasrid Sultans of Granada, the last of the many Moorish, Islamic rulers on the Iberian peninsular. Reading about the history, it's nothing short of incredible that it's even still there, after neglect, the occasional over-eagerness of some of Spain's rulers and an attempt by Napoleon's troops to blow it up!
There's four main parts to the complex: the Alcazaba, which is the original citadel that the Nasrids inherited when they took over the place; the Palacios Nazarios, which is what remains of the main Islamic palace; the Palacios Carlos V, which is the rather jarringly different Renaissance palace put up by Emperor Charles V next to the Nasrid Palace; and the Generalife, a small summer palace set in beautiful gardens. All of this perched on one of the three hills which loom over Granada (the others are the Sacromonte, which contains many of the caves in which the gitano, or gypsy, families used to live, and the Albaicin, which was the old Moorish quarter and the cause of my deep disgruntlement when John decided we would walk up it in the morning - I remain less than fond of climbing hills when the temperature is pushing 30!).
We were all pretty knackered by the time we finished up at the Alhambra so, after a quick drink in the Plaza Nueva, we headed back to the hostel. John crashed out for a couple of hours more sleep, while James and I headed over to an Irish pub in town, in the vain hope of finding somewhere showing the England game that was on last night. Alas, Los Galacticos (Real Madrid) were also playing last night so, unsurprisingly, that was the game being shown. However, the pub turned out to be nowhere near as tacky as many pseudo-Irish pubs are, with a great selection of bottled beers (we have finally found some rather nice Spanish beer!) and the usual thing here in Granada that you get a free Tapa with each drink. This is a very good way to fill up while having a few beers!
Eventually John came and joined us, and we had a few more beers before splitting off to do our different things again. I ended up in a different Irish pub, chatting to a couple of Dutch guys and then a bunch of Spanish lasses who took us on to a late bar/club, which we'd probably never have found on our own. Though I am still left frequently bemused by Spanish music, and can probably do without too many nights getting back around 6am! Partly as a result of this, I've been having a lazy day today, just mooching around in the hostel, reading about Portugal, checking the net, etc. Oh, and getting my laundry done - the joys of living out of a backpack for a couple of weeks.
So, that brings things bang up to date, and I'll call it day before I give myself RSI from all of this typing. Hope all's well with you guys.
Take care and have fun,
Pat
Anyways. re-reading back over the lump of verbal diarrhoea that was my last posting, I seem to have got as far as our adventures in Toledo, so I shall pick things up the next morning, as we head down towards Sevilla, in the heart of Andalucia...
Thursday was, in fact, a very long day. The joys of travelling on an Interrail pass are that we are constrained by the rail timetable. And when your rail-plans for the day involve heading back from Toledo to Madrid, in order to catch the AVE (Alta Velocidad Español) express to Sevilla, and RENFE (the Spanish national railway operator) is in the midst of upgrading the Madrid-Toledo line, this can be quite a constraint. Because our only morning option for departing Toledo was the 7am train (well, bus actually, for the first bit of the journey, due to the engineering work). Having only made it to bed at various times between 3 and 4 in the morning. We were not the happiest of bunnies that morning.
After snoozing most of the way back to Madrid, we adjourned once again to the cafe in the main hall of Atocha station. I didn't mention this in my last post, but this is an extraordinary room. Because it basically has a little bit of rainforest growing in the middle of it. Not what you normally expect to find in a train station, that. Spanish railways being the scarily reliable things they are (I don't think we've had a late train yet), we hd no problems boarding the 10am express. Astonishingly, it only takes 2.5 hours to get from Madrid to Sevilla, which is basically half the length of the country, as the trains go up to 300kph! Whereas it takes an hour and a half to get from Toledo to Madrid, which is maybe 50 miles or so, and nearly two hours to reach Segovia.
Anyways, we made it to Sevilla fine, where the temperature was already up in the mid-30s in late May. Our home for the 2 nights there was the Casa de Sol y Luna ("the House of Sun and Moon"), run by an English-Italian guy called Geno, from Kent. The difference in accent when he switched from Spanish to English was extraordinary. Very nice little place, though - a guest-house rather than a hostel, something with which Sevilla is not particularly blessed.
Unfortuately, the spectre of Corpus Christi came back to haunt us that day, as the Catedral was closed for the day. Given that this is obviously one of the main things to see in Sevilla, that was a bit of a bummer. On the other hand, it did mean we went straight on to the Alcazar, the palace. And boy, did we need the time. It's a truly gorgeous building, mostly built by the Mudejars (the name given to Moors who lived on in Spain under Christian rule). Think the kind of amazing stuccoed columns and the like which we traditionally associate with Arabia, Persia and the like in England (Aladdin, Sinbad, etc). And the gardens. The gardens just seem to go on for ever. I probably spent an hour or so wandering around them, despite the 30+ degree heat.
In the end, though, the place closed at 5pm, so it was a good thing we hadn't been into the Catedral, as we wouldn't have been able to appreciate the Alcazar properly (though John and I had a fascinating chat for about 15 minutes at the end in the little cafeteria with a Danish guy in his 80s, a former photographer). That evening we popped over to Triana, the district on the west bank of the Guadalquivir river, for our dinner. This is where I reminded myself just how good fresh fis can be. Having picked somewhere that wasn't ridiculously touristy, though, and not having brought a guidebook out, I had to just guess at what the different fish were. Bit of a case of "eeny-meeny...", but I ended up with a very pleasant fish dinner. I then giggled somewhat when I got back and looked up what I had eaten, to find that it was a Sea Bass (cue Austin Powers impressions). We ended up having a quick drink in a terraza down by the river, which was almost more of a garden than a bar, before heading back for a relatively early night (i.e. only about 1am).
On Friday, which was James' birthday, we went to Cadiz, which was realy cool. It wasn't originally one of the places I had planned to visit, but reading about it on the plane over I decided it sounded fun and we agreed it was worth going to. As one of the oldest settlements in Spain (Gadir was set up by the Phoenicians sometime around 1100 BC), and the heart of the Spanish maritime trade at the height of the Spanish Empire, it's certainly got plenty of history to investigate. It also reminded me a teeny bit of Portsmouth, where I was born, as the city proper is out on a couple of islands joined to the mainland by causeways (much as Portsmouth is officially out on Portsea Island).
One of the things to come out of the previous night was a realisation that we were looking for slightly different things from our holiday, and that it would make sense some of the time to split up and do our own separate things. What this meant for Friday was that John and James headed off to get some tanning time on one of the beaches around Cadiz, and I went off a-wandering around the old town, continuing to rack up ridiculous numbers of photos as I looked around some of the old harbour defences. I also made it down to the city beach, where I went for a quick paddle. I ended up heading back on an earlier train than John and James to Sevilla, so I had the chance to pop into a bookshop and pick up a copy of Lonely Planet for Portugal (after we decided that we are going to have few days in Lisbon and Porto as part of our time out here). That evening, as it was James' birthday, we had a wonderful Italian meal at a place called San Marco in the old town of Sevilla - although it's one of a chain of six restaurants in the city, this one is quite special as it's in an old 12th-century Moorish bathhouse. It also does a wonderful Papardalle Alla Matriciana, which helped fill me up after we got a teensy bit lost trying to find the place. We went pretty much straight home after that, though, as Saturday (yesterday) brought another ridiculously early start.
Yes, we had another 7am train to catch, this time across Andalucia to Granada. Again, I'm afraid I slept for a goodly part of the journey, though I woke up for the last half-hour or so, meaning that I saw us passing through some amazing valleys and cuttings, and going past what I think was one of the White Towns of Andalucia, spread around the foot of and draped up the side of one of the hills. Beautiful. And I'm sure I appreciated it more for having had another couple of hours kip.
We did our usual routine of finding our latest home and dumping our bags before heading off to do the touristy thing. The bizarre thing here is that our hosts, Manuel and Claudine, don't speak much English, but Claudine is French, so I've actually been able to communicate better with them than with any of the staff in other hostels! I certainly didn't expect my French to come in handy this far down from the border, but it's been great to get a little practice. From the outside, it looks very unprepossessing, and is basically halfways surrounded by derelict buildings or building sites, bu it's lovely inside and our hosts are some of the loveliest hostel owners I've met. It's called the Posada de Colon ("Columbus Inn") Alojamiento Backpackers. Bit of a mouthful, but worth looking at as an option if you come down here.
Still, yesterday afternoon we did what every visitor to Granada pretty much MUST do whilst here - we went around the Alhambra. Many of you probably already know this, but the Alhambra is one of the greatest monuments of Spain, and indeed of the Islamic world. And no, that's not a typo - the Alhambra was the seat of the Nasrid Sultans of Granada, the last of the many Moorish, Islamic rulers on the Iberian peninsular. Reading about the history, it's nothing short of incredible that it's even still there, after neglect, the occasional over-eagerness of some of Spain's rulers and an attempt by Napoleon's troops to blow it up!
There's four main parts to the complex: the Alcazaba, which is the original citadel that the Nasrids inherited when they took over the place; the Palacios Nazarios, which is what remains of the main Islamic palace; the Palacios Carlos V, which is the rather jarringly different Renaissance palace put up by Emperor Charles V next to the Nasrid Palace; and the Generalife, a small summer palace set in beautiful gardens. All of this perched on one of the three hills which loom over Granada (the others are the Sacromonte, which contains many of the caves in which the gitano, or gypsy, families used to live, and the Albaicin, which was the old Moorish quarter and the cause of my deep disgruntlement when John decided we would walk up it in the morning - I remain less than fond of climbing hills when the temperature is pushing 30!).
We were all pretty knackered by the time we finished up at the Alhambra so, after a quick drink in the Plaza Nueva, we headed back to the hostel. John crashed out for a couple of hours more sleep, while James and I headed over to an Irish pub in town, in the vain hope of finding somewhere showing the England game that was on last night. Alas, Los Galacticos (Real Madrid) were also playing last night so, unsurprisingly, that was the game being shown. However, the pub turned out to be nowhere near as tacky as many pseudo-Irish pubs are, with a great selection of bottled beers (we have finally found some rather nice Spanish beer!) and the usual thing here in Granada that you get a free Tapa with each drink. This is a very good way to fill up while having a few beers!
Eventually John came and joined us, and we had a few more beers before splitting off to do our different things again. I ended up in a different Irish pub, chatting to a couple of Dutch guys and then a bunch of Spanish lasses who took us on to a late bar/club, which we'd probably never have found on our own. Though I am still left frequently bemused by Spanish music, and can probably do without too many nights getting back around 6am! Partly as a result of this, I've been having a lazy day today, just mooching around in the hostel, reading about Portugal, checking the net, etc. Oh, and getting my laundry done - the joys of living out of a backpack for a couple of weeks.
So, that brings things bang up to date, and I'll call it day before I give myself RSI from all of this typing. Hope all's well with you guys.
Take care and have fun,
Pat
Labels: Spain
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