Jun 2003

It's certainly been a more relaxed part of our holidays in Seville and Cordoba. Thanks to less tourist attractions, ie buildings etc, we have had a chance to take it a little easier. The weather in Cordoba has been scorching, so we have happily joined in with the locals in their siestas. Pretty much everything is shut from 2 till 5:30 anyway, so not much else to do!

Our first day here, we basically just walked around a lot and managed to cover a grand circle of the town, walking past about 8 or 9 (all beautiful) old churches along the way! Lunch was memorable at a little restaurant called La Lechuga (the lettuce I believe), which had some very nice tapas for us to snack on. We immediately followed that up by going to the local bodega (bar), which served wine straight out of the barrel - they had a whole cellar that we could see in the background as well. The price was of course suitably low at around 75 cents, although it wasn't the finest brew I've ever tasted After our drink at the bar, we jumped to the following extreme, with a visit to the ancient sinagogue just down the road, a tiny little building, but supposedly there are very few left in Spain that are that old. Finally at the end of the day, while wandering on our way back to the hotel, we heard the sounds of flamenco and followed them to find a show being put on. Of course we had to pay, but it was a great experience to just sit and watch for over an hour!

Yesterday we made our visit to the Mezquita, the lovely old mosque that underwent numerous changes over the centuries and was finally converted to a cathedral in 1600 or so. Very beautiful place to spend some time. As in all major attractions there are a lot of tourguides showing people around and explaining things in their language. It becomes confusing sometimes when the tourguides are standing near the pulpit and all the tourists are in the pews - they really do look like preachers! It was extremely hot yesterday, so we spent a considerable time in our hotel room siestaing till it became a little cooler. It is far more pleasant to wander around in the evenings, so we have generally been doing that most nights till past midnight.

Today we visited the Alcazar here in Cordoba, which is a lot smaller than the one in Seville, but still quite enjoyable.. There are also a lot of Roman remains here in Cordoba, which makes for a somewhat different scenery to Seville. For lunch we revisited La Lechuga, the restaurant we went to on the first day because we had enjoyed it so much.

Tomorrow we head to Toledo very early in the morning.

The hotel in Seville proved to be quite the quaint little place to stay, complete with knight's armour, spears, swords and a nice dark and moody interior in the waiting room. The location was convenient, in the heart of the touristy gothic quarters, only a minute's walk from the Real Alcazar and the huge Cathedral! We visited the Alcazar on the first day and would have to count that as one of the highlights of the trip thus far. The mosaic interiors and the amazing gardens were a great way to aclimatise (that spelling doesn't seem right) to the rather hot weather!

I'll have to keep the rest of this entry short, because internet time is running out.

We had some better luck with food in Seville, scoring beautiful paellas on our second day, which are so far the best food we have had! The prices were generally a lot cheaper than Barcelona too, especially for wine, which we have found as cheap as 80 cents a glass, not much more expensive than water!

We had a nice flamenco experience also at La Carboneria, a bar where people from the audience do the dancing - probably not the best quality performance, but still a whole lot of fun!

The Cathedral was a great visit. I finally realised that our youth cards can be used for student discounts, which saved us about 13 Euros! We walked to the top of the Giralda as well, for some nice views of the city, although we were rather exhausted when we got there! Fortunately the climb doesn't involve steps, but rather 35 ramps, because some person who it was built for took his horse up the top!

Well, I'll leave it at that for now. We are in Cordoba at the moment, but I'll tell you more about that later!

Peter

Barcelona was a fabulous experience! After the Sagrada familia and the first day, there were many other beautiful things to see. One small damper occurred when we found out that my camera was busted. It had started to play up on the top of the eiffel tower (probably fed up with the wait as well) and after developing the first roll, it wouldn't wind on anymore and so we started a quest for a new camera to capture our experiences. Of course, being on a fairly tight budget, we were looking to get a second hand camera. This is not an easy feat when you don't know where a store could possibly be found! We did manage to find a store that had a few second hand camera's and went for a rather cute looking Kodak Bertinette, which is fully manual, not an slr and without even a lightmeter to help set the exposure - great fun! We shot a quick roll of 12 shots and put it in to develop to check the results and it works fine, so should do nicely. Because I'm not that great at guessing exposures, I've been lugging around the other one, just to get a reading, which makes everything a lot heavier but should provide better shots in the end!

We did actually do more that second day in Barcelona - a lot of walking around mostly, walking past the Sagrada Familia again and down to La Pedrera and a few other Gaudi buildings as well on the way. We also spent some time in the beautiful park to the southeast of the city center. Visited an art museum and browsed around the park and the beautiful old fountain at the top end of the park. The day was finished off with a nice paella and a whole jug of Sangria, which after a couple of wines already had the rather undesirable effect of resurfacing the paella in the middle of the night.

Day 3.
Yet another Gaudi building to start of the day. The Palau Guell is the former palace of Gaudi's main benefactors, the Guell family. The visit there takes place in the form of a tour, so we found out a lot more information about Gaudi and some of the finer details that we may have missed otherwise.

After the Palau Guell, we tried to visit Montjuic, but in the end couldn't be bothered, because it was too hot! We found our way up to the entrance and had a great view of the city from there, but then gave up and returned to our hotel for a siesta.. rather a nice way of life really

We spent the evening wandering down to Barcelonetta, which is where the beach is located and made a rather unfortunate choice of Tapas, choosing two seafood dishes (which Janelle dislikes). Not knowing the language allows such things to easily happen.

Day 4.
We were to leave by train to Seville at 10 PM, so we had another whole day to kill and still had a few things that we wanted to see as well.. We had bought a two day ticket for the metro the day before and used it well. First stop was the Parc Guell (yet another Gaudi creation), and the gruelling climb up the steps thanks to malfunctioning escalators. The views are spectacular though and the park was well worth the visit.
Next stop, we returned to La Pedrera, which we had only walked past on the second day in Barcelona. Now we were committed to visiting it on the inside and climbing to the rather spectacular rooftop. The most impressive part for me though, was the apartment area, which was fitted out in its original style - very interesting. We finally caught the metro back la rambla again and walked through the old town again, visiting the Cathedral's courtyard and the geese in it one more time. For dinner, we now overcompensated for our previous night's mistake and had two dishes of sausage, which proved a little too much.. not much luck with food at that point!

The train ride from Barcelona to Seville proved fairly straightforward, although we had to sleep in separate berths! I felt rather bad, coughing all night and keeping all the other occupants awake. Finally made it though!