My Shout

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!

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..