We rolled into Granada yesterday and after a bit of confusion, managed to find the Airbnb we booked. It’s a very nice place. What a nice treat to have a bit of space, and a washing machine that actually works properly.

Our friends, Dan and Fran, were a bit behind us, as they finished their bike loop back in Malaga and took a train from there to Granada, arriving a bit later. When we were reunited, over beers, of course, we excitedly exchanged stories of our separate experiences.

This continued well on into the night with tequila eventually replacing beer. It was a fun night.

In the morning, we were all in pretty good shape despite the activities of the previous night. We had breakfast and then set off to join a  free walking tour (pay by donation at the end, really). It was really good, though. We saw many remnants of ancient moorish architecture and got the lowdown on the various power moves that happened over the centuries in the region. We toured through much of the old part of Granada finally winding up high on a hill looking (still up) to the Alhabra, an ancient palace and fortress set high up on a hill overlooking the city. This is probably the most visited location in Spain, according to many. It’s difficult to book tickets to this, but we managed to secure some for tomorrow. Dan and Fran were able to get in on it this evening and we have yet to hear from them how it was.

We parted ways with Dan and Fran so they could catch their tour. We continued to wander around the old town for a while, shopping and exploring the Cathedral as well as the adjoining royal chapel (photographs prohibited). It was weird going down into the crypt and seeing the caskets containing the bodies of Queen Isabelle and King Ferdinand. They’ve been laying there since the 1500s. Wild.

After a while we headed back “home”, picked up a few things at the market across the street which we TOTALLY got lost trying to find the day before. I don’t even want to tell that story as it’s so embarrassing. I blame Apple Maps, OK?

I had a bunch of stuff to work on to plan even more travel I’ll be doing after we get back to Canada. Logistics to figure out, flights to book etc. I feel better now that I have gotten that (mostly) off of my plate.

We have another full day in Granada then we’re off to Ronda, a much smaller, quieter place that’s a short hop by train away.

 

 

 

 

I’d like to say today was a good day.

The plan was to get moving earlier than usual and to visit at least a couple of must-see sights before we move on to Granada tomorrow. The best laid plans go awry, as they say.

Before getting up, I grabbed my phone to check on our return flights, just to remind myself what the times were. Malaga to Zurich – good. Zurich to Vancouver – Good. Vancouver to Edmont…..

Hold up.

Our flight to Edmonton out of Vancouver departs at 3PM and our Flight from Zurich arrives into Vancouver at 2:55 PM.

W…. T……..F………

There’s no way we can make that connection. 

How did I screw this up? What a monumental eff-up.

I check my emails for the booking confirmation. Wait…. It says right here in the email  that I got when I booked the flight out of Vancouver that  it departs at 5PM, not 3…..

Then I remember an email I got from Westjet telling me that they had made an itinerary change.  That was for the outgoing flight from Edmonton to Vancouver right? Yes, but they had ALSO changed the time of the returning flight, which I had. not. noticed.

OK, OK, this wasn’t my mistake. I had booked a flight for 5.  They will surely help us out with this because it was THEM who changed the itinerary, not me!

Long story short: 

NOPE.

Several calls were made to Westjet explaining the situation we are in and we got the same answer each time:

“This is a minor change to your itinerary (being under a certain amount of time)  so our policy states that we are not required to accommodate any changes.”

We wasted the entire morning trying to get Westjet to rebook us on a later flight, which we can SEE is an option when we go on booking sites, but they tell us “ We can’t help you.”  

When I was told that by a customer service rep on the phone I said “No, what you mean is you WON’T help us, not you CAN’T help us. She hung up on me shortly thereafter.

This left us with no other option than to book another flight ourselves for a later time, which I then set about doing. I found a ridiculously low fare from “Vancouver” to Edmonton, so I booked it. When the confirmation came through, I saw that the flight departed from Abbotsford, not “Vancouver”.  Hey people who live in Abbotsford, do you go around telling people you live in Vancouver? Yeah? Then you’re an asshole.

So then I had to get back on the phone and cancel that one and rebook…… with the only option I could find… effing Westjet.

So, wish us luck.

Needless to say, that whole debacle kind of set the tone for the day.

We tried to make the best of it and went out to see about visiting the Royal Alcázar of Seville. This is a must-see according to every write-up on visiting Seville. 

We headed out to the location and found a great jeezly long line. This must be the line to get in, right? I mean, you can book tickets online, so people surely wouldn’t be lined up just to buy advance tickets, right? Heading up to where the line bent around the corner ahead to view some typically vague Spanish signage, it became clear that we needed our passports to get access to this. Crap. Why???

Anyway, no point in asking why. Gotta have em. Luckily, the Airbnb isn’t that far away. Carla stood in line while I booked it back, grabbed the passports and then, looking like a total jerk returned with the passports to cut the line to where she was standing. It turns out that I wasn’t the only one having to do this, though, which made me feel better.

When we finally got closer we realized that people weren’t going in. They were booking advance tickets. Something we could have just done online. Fantastic.  We booked for 4pm.

Luckily, we saved a whopping 4 euros on an “administration fee” by standing in the scorching sun for about an hour. We immediately blew our savings on alcohol.

I will say though, the Royal Alcázar of Seville is definitely worth the visit. It was truly magnificent. As is the case with many Spanish relics, it is a hodgepodge of architectural styles slapped together over the span of many centuries, depending on who killed who and when.  I won’t get into all the details. They’re available  on Wikipedia. The gardens were stunning. The buildings, too. We did our best to enjoy it all, despite still being pissed off about how we had to spend our morning.

After a couple of hours at the Alcázar, we had about an hour to spare before the start of a free walking tour of Seville that we had booked earlier. Well, not really, because to get to the start of the tour, it would be about a 1.7 km walk.. to start walking.

We were hot, still somewhat disgruntled and kind of done with running around both literally and on the phone and online. We took a break and then decided we’d try to have dinner at a place that was recommended by our host. It was a fair haul to get there, but we were up to it after a short rest.

The walk there turned out to be the best part of the day. Much of the route took us along the river, then across the beautiful Puente de Triana bridge. There was lots of  river traffic, from kayakers, to rowing teams, to tour boats. Once across the river, we entered a much more “real” part of Seville. You could tell there were way more locals than tourists here.  

We arrived at the restaurant to find it closed until 8 . Checking the menu, we decided that we weren’t up to dining on the house specialties which were things like “smoked eel eyeballs” (or similar fare). We stopped into a little bar and had a drink next to a table full of middle-aged guys who were clearly all good buddies. I really enjoyed the atmosphere there. Then, we started heading back toward the river. Carla spotted a burger king. She was hungry. The type of hungry that is dangerous.  So in we went. Don’t judge us.

After stuffing our faces, we continued walking back toward the other side of the river. As we crossed the bridge, I noticed a  bunch of guys with fishing rods  down below . As we stopped to watch, I could see that a couple of them were exchanging words, which quickly escalated into fists. One guy was clearly taking more hits than he was giving, but he seemed completely unfazed. They moved apart but the verbal exchange continued. Once we were across the river, I looked back and could see the two of them still waving their arms and yammering away at each other. We continue walking, slowly, until we got back “home”.  

Tomorrow, we leave Seville. We didn’t see it all, but we saw a lot, I figure.  Soon we will be reunited with our friends Dan and Fran who will arrive later in the day to Granada tomorrow.

Oh, and Westjet: You can go eat a giant bag of donkey dicks.

Day 19 

We woke this morning to the sound of rain. This is not a sound that makes you want to hit the ground running, not that we’ve been doing that exactly, but it makes for a good excuse to sleep in a bit.

We had picked up a few groceries the day before. Breakfast items, like beer. Seriously though, you see people drinking breakfast beers all the time here. What a country. After some toast, fruit, yogurt and coffee the rain had stopped and we headed out. 

First stop was the nearby Cathedral. This is the largest gothic cathedral in the world. Construction took over 100 years, from 1401 to 1506, so slightly less time than Edmonton’s LRT system. It sits on the site of a mosque that predates it by about 300 years and incorporates some of the structures of the original mosque such as a 300 foot tall tower.  Inside, it is astounding. The massive stone columns, the stained glass, the arches. It was built as a symbol of Seville’s wealth at the time. 

Outside the cathedral, an ultra-modern  tram runs silently by every 10 minutes or so. I wonder how many people get killed by this thing as they are gawking at the sights around them  and taking those perfect instagram photos.

A brass quintet was playing and we stopped to listen to them for quite a while. They were amazing. Intonation, dynamics, expression were all there. A fun repertoire as well. They gathered quite a crowd and the Euros were flying into their open suitcase.

We walked a while, getting thrown off by my incorrect entry to the Maps app trying to find some of the attractions. It rained again, heavily and we ducked into a restaurant for a beer until it stopped. More walking followed, more rain, more beer, it was kind of a pattern.

Eventually, we had our 10,000 steps in so we figured we’d have a siesta and we retreated to our tiny pad for a while. By this time was about 5pm.

The weird thing we are finding is that it’s always later than you think it is here. It’s also kind of strange that it stays light as late as it does here considering we are very close to the southernmost point in Europe. In fact, we’re just a hop skip and a jump from Africa here.

After resting up, we headed out again and found a place to have dinner. It was a magical setting sitting at an outdoor table on a narrow street, with throngs of  people walking by, a crescent moon overhead and the lit up cathedral behind us. 

All in all, an amazing day again despite the rain.

After a restful night, we were still not in a great hurry to get going this morning, so we spent some time just hanging out in our tiny but comfortable space. Eventually, we showered and dressed.

Before we headed out for breakfast, we attempted to wash some clothes. The washing machine in this tiny place looks like something from soviet era Russia, complete with frayed wiring and rust spots. We threw in a load and when we returned it was still  soaking wet and we were not convinced it had actually been washed.  I once again found myself looking for the manual online and managed to put it in spin mode, but things were still soaking wet after that. We wrung them out as best as we could, and hung them on the lines that were outside our tiny apartment on a slight higher terrace. To get there, we had to go down a  flight of stairs, down a long hallway, up a flight of stairs and then another walk to get right back to right around where our apartment is, just slightly higher. How bizarre!.

Following the host, Manuel’s recommendation, we wound up at a tiny little cafe that was crammed with people. We ordered a couple of breakfasts including what they call locally an omelet, but is more like a potato-egg dish. We also had Churros and chocolate sauce again. These were different from the ones in Tarragona; much lighter and more porous. Not as sweet, either. But oh so good.

After breakfast, we wandered the streets , visited shops, and looked at the sights. We were not particularly interested in doing any tours. Not yet, anyway. We saw what was obvious a bunch of young guys out on some sort of stag pub crawl. The groom to be was wearing a ridiculous pink outfit and his buddies wore matching shirts, Speaking of clothing, there are so many beautifully dressed people here. Fashion is clearly more important to Spaniards than it is to us in North America.

After wandering for a while, we went back to the apartment and just in time, because a big thunderclap signalled an incoming rain. I wasn’t in a big rush to pull the stuff down off the lines, but Carla’s instincts were spot on that we’d better hustle. It started raining pretty seriously. We pulled everything down and brought it inside to hang it on a drying rack inside. It’s odd to us that dryers are not a thing here, Imagine never putting on a pair of underwear right out of the dryer, or having a warm fluffy towel.

We hunkered down to wait out the rain and watched some Netflix. The thunder was constant for about 45 minutes. I had never heard such continuous thunder before. It was like being in God’s bowling alley.

After the rain, we headed out to buy a few groceries with stops for a beer in both directions. OK, there were tapas as well. So much for maybe coming back skinnier from this holiday.

The good news is that our clothes are drying quickly and we still have a couple of days to explore beautiful Seville.

Another big travel day today. As I write this, we’re about 2/3 of the way to Seville, By that, I mean we are  on the third of three trains we have to take today.

The first was the metro from l’Almir to Alicante. Our host, Gary graciously arranged for a friend of his,  a barrel-shaped Englishman whose name I unfortunately did not catch to drive us to the metro station in Benidorm. He’s been living in Spain for 30 years, but his accent was thick enough that you needed a chainsaw to cut it, so I didn’t catch everything he was telling us. Nice guy, though.

We felt like pros as we bought our metro tickets and found our way to the right platform. An hour or so later, we were back in Alicante. Thanks to Carla’s impeccable sense of direction, we found our way from the metro station to the Alicante train station in no time. 

With an hour to kill, we went to Tim Hortons at the train station for a coffee. The signage there advertised it being Canadian but those of us in the know are aware that Burger King bought Timmies for 11 billion dollars and now both are majority owned by some Brazilian mega corporation. Oh well, the coffee was predictably mild. Quite a change of pace from the  Defcon-9 caffeine level coffee we’ve been served in many places in Spain. There was a public piano in the station which I attempted to play, but what keys weren’t missing were broken inside, so that was a bust. It saddens me that people would mistreat and neglect a musical instrument of any kind. Savages.

The ride from Alicante to Madrid was uneventful. We rolled through mostly agricultural land. Things are looking much greener after th. e recent rains. I ventured into the cafeteria, bar car to get us a couple of beers. It was a real party atmosphere in there. Only one guy was working the counter and he was up to his ass in alligators thanks to a trio of twenty -something young guys who were ahead of me in line ordering enough food and beer for a platoon. It was wild being in a bar moving at 300km/h.

We had to change trains in Madrid. We’d been to the Madrid station before . That was on the way to Barcelona, where I thought I had left my phone on the train. On that occasion, we had exited the platform area into the terminal, then walked to another platform entrance on the same level. The doors opened automatically and we boarded our train. Easy peasy.

Figuring, stupidly, that we could just do the same thing again this time, we entered the terminal, found out we were supposed to depart from platform 6, and went to that door. We walked up to the giant sliding glass doors, but they did not slide open. We could see further down the platform that people were walking toward the trains on platform six, so that was puzzling.

We approached a Renfe employee who was busy social-media-ing on her phone to ask if she spoke english, Nope. We told her we were going to Seville – platform six. “No, no no, she said and pointed to the far side of the terminal, down near the 10 yard line. She walked us partway there and pointed toward a lineup that we  joined… but these people were going through to platform 15. What the hell? We asked another employee who said “No,no no”, and pointed us to a staircase going up to the next level.  Up we went. Then back down to the end zone where we went through the now magically opening glass doors and down an escalator to platform six.  

The good news is that these trains are getting progressively more posh. The train we’re on now as I type this has nice brown leather sets and looks a lot newer and cleaner than the others we’ve been riding so far. The olive trees are whipping past us as we rocket at 300km/h through the Spanish countryside. Two hours to Seville, then, according to Google Maps a 28 minute walk to our Airbnb.

We rolled into Seville on time and Started walking. As we approached the place we booked, the streets narrowed and the density of the crowds increased. Sidewalks were virtually non-existent and all kinds of cars, scooters and bicycles were competing with us for the narrow streets. Eventually we arrived at the door, which we had to open via a link that the host texted us. That was a first. It was weird to be buzzing open this 19th century iron gate with a smartphone, but that’s Spain for you.

Our place is tiny, and old, but clean and well equipped. We had a shower and put on clean clothes to go out for dinner. There was a nice little outdoor cafe  just around the corner. A bit of a wait to get a table, but that’ always a good sign. We ordered way too much food. I had a gigantic beer (must have been about 2L). Our young waiter had obviously never opened a bottle of wine with a corkscrew before, so we watched with amusement as his older counterpart gave him a lesson on the spot.

Afterward, we walked around for a while, through the throngs of Friday night revelers, many of whom were beautiful people that were beautifully dressed. The nearby Cathedral was amazing to look at against the backdrop of the streetlights, the lights from cafes and bars, and the dark sky. It had been a long day, we went “home” to get some rest.