My Shout

Toledo turned out to be a beautiful town, as only was to be expected! We arrived there around midday on the 13th and checked into our first 'hostel', which turned out to be our nicest accommodation so far! The room was very nice and large and featured a rather pleasant balcony out on the street and a very friendly host.

We started with a visit to the Iglesia de Santo Tome, a fairly unsignificant church with an extremely significant painting inside by El Greco. We spent quite a while in there looking at the painting and managed to catch a tourguide explaining how this was one of the four most famous paintings in the world.. of course that sparked a discussion on whether or not it really was. His other three in the top 4 were Mona Lisa, the Nightwatch and a painting by Velazquez (which name has escaped me, as has the El greco one ). Funny how two spanish artists managed to feature

There is a lot of El Greco to be seen in Toledo, including a house museum with a lot of his works which is what we visited next. One thing we have found on our trip is that our Youth Cards actually seem to be paying off as they did on this occassion again, gaining us free entry to the museum!

There are a lot of things to be seen in Toledo and a lot of people are trying to make money off of that.. One of the two synagogues, which is rather small, but still very beautiful inside, costs 1,50 to enter. The other is currently being renovated, so not hope of even entering there. Prices for food and drink seemed higher than Cordoba and Sevilla, which was a little unexpected, but not surprising considering the amount of tourists visiting the town.

The Cathedral was a rather pleasant and lengthy visit. Every little town in Spain has a big cathedral it seems, which is usually its prime attraction. The Cathedral in Toledo was quite worthwhile though, with some very nice artworks inside, from the likes of Breughel, El Greco, Goya, Velazquez and many other big names - undoubtedly not all peacefully obtained! There was also an exhibition of Cardinals' cloaks and treasury items which provided some more interest.

It seems that every night there is something going on in Toledo, probably partially because we were there on the weekend, but also because the Corpus Christi celebrations were starting to heat up. Last night as we were wandering from the river back up the (rather steep and tiring hill) we came across a procession on their way to the cathedral. No big pointy hats at this stage, probably saved for next week, but still an interesting thing to encounter and something we hadn't really expected. While the procession walked up the windy streets on their way to the cathedral, we caught the rather convenient, and very stylishly created, escalators on the side of the mountain! I tell you, there is nothing more handy than escalators on the side of a steep hill.
In the evening we wandered to the cathedral to see where they had ended up and found there was a public performance of traditional dance and music going on. We of course stayed there for a while to watch the singing and dancing that was being put on display for us.

All in all, Toledo has been a very enjoyable experience. Now on to Madrid.

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 seperate berths! I felt rather bad, coughing all night and keeping all the other occupants awake. Finally made it though!

Barcelona is a lovely city! Beautiful buildings, great food and really nice people so far As I mentioned in the last diary entry, we were late on our first night here, which meant the hotel was mainly booked out when we arrived there at twenty to midnight. This worked in our favour, as we were upgraded to a beautiful four person room with a huge bathroom and a LOT of space! We went out for some tapas on las ramblas to finish the day off.

Next morning we were told that they had a smaller room which is what we had payed for of course, so we had to move to that one.. a lot smaller and the bathroom was crammed into a room that would normally only fit a toilet, but the view was of the Joan Miro mosaic on las ramblas and there is a lot more action in general to be seen from the balcony. More about that later.

To start our visit of Barcelona, we made our way down to the Sagrada Familia, the amazing Cathedral that Gaudi started work on over a hundred years ago and still is work in progress. It is basically a construction site, so you can only walk around certain restricted areas. Well worthwile though and we spent almost two hours walking around looking at it from different angles and wandering through the museum underneat the cathedral.

Besides our visit to the Sagrada Familia, we also visited the Textile Museum, which proved rather fascinating, with some beautiful capes and old spanish clothing. It is situated in the Old Town of Barcelona just opposite the Picasso museum. The narrow winding streets in that area are beautiful and a great pleasure to walk down as there are all manner of lovely quaint little shops.

After dinner, we sat on our balcony for a good hour and a half watching all the action on las ramblas. We were keen to try and spot any pick pocketing, but instead were treated to a lot of street performances and a rather violent episode between a certain man and the police! The events took well over half an hour to unfold and we followed the whole thing like it was a play being acted out in front of us. I won't go into all the details, but it included a lot of arguing, some hassling of restaurant patrons, some urinating on the sidewalk and some fairly serious looking fighting talk! Besides that, there was also a man dressed up as a gorilla hassling people, which we thought would be a perfect setup for a pick-pocket.. who knows

Well, that's pretty much yesterday's story. I'll tell you about our new camera tomorrow..