Dec 2006

quick post. Internet is expensive here.
I'm lost.
My phone died, and i seem to have misplaced my australia-europe adaptor. wE BOOKED A room at MIJE, but changed it yesterday cuase it was too expensive. Can't find lisa, phone died.. apparently her friends aren't at the mije hotel where she said they would be.
i'm wondering around paris with my backpack.. damn it's heavy! Don't have lisa's mobile number and my sim card won't work on a paris mobile (tried it with a nice person on the street)

HOpe lisa's not freaking out too much.

I´m pretty sure you guys are sick of my long tedious posts. So here´s a short one.

Barcelona rocks!!!
Found some food markets which have loads of fresh fruit, meat, and seafood.
La Rumbla has lots and lots of different buskers. Every 10m therés a different one.
The clubs are open very late, we finally got kicked out of one at 5am. Although the guy to girl ratio is very very high, and it makes us girls a bit scared. That and the fact that spanish guys don´t seem to understand ´no´. They just come up to you and maul you! It´s scary, a polite ´no´ won´t work, neither will running away, pushing them... nothing! They just don´t get it!!!! GET OFF ME!!!!!!!

we also met two actuaries. What are the chances?!?!?!?!

Seville was alright. I preferred granada better. Probably because we weren´t very long in either city we weren´t able to really enjoy it to its full potential. The hostel we stayed at was practically empty, and we got to know the other backpackers pretty well. There was Barney & Charlotte from Melbourne, Geoff from the UK and Madeline from South Africa. Madeline was in a room with us, and she´s been travelling for a few months on her own now. Looks like travelling through europe on your own isn´t such a big deal after all. Makes me think i can do it. Makes me want to do it. One of these days i think i will.

We also found out that granada is the only place left that does free tapas. We did go to a tapas bar in granada, but we left around 12 cause we were pretty tired from the night before. If i´d have know it was the only time we were going to get free tapas i would´ve stayed up later! Doh!

There was a cathedral and alcazar in Seville, the cathedral is meant to be the third biggest in europe, and it probably was. But cause we´d seen the one in granada already it didn´t seem all that impressive. It was very similar, absolutley huge, big columns holding it up, lots of intricate sculptures and carvings on the walls and ceilings. But it was made of some darker stone, and i just wasn´t as blown over by it as i was by the one in granada. There was an alcazar too, which is meant to be another muslim palace. Apparently it has the entire koran carved into the walls. But we ran out of time and didn´t get a chance to check it out. From the postcard photos it looked alot like the alhambra, but minus the magnificient view of the city of granada. So i wasn´t too fussed on not seeing it.

Seville is meant to be the bullfighting and flamenco capital of spain. Since it wasn´t bull fighting season we wanted to at least catch some flamenco. Geoff from our hostel pointed us to a flamenco bar close by. It didn´t open until 12am, but it was pretty good once it did get going. It was free, which is what we were looking for (cheap), but not so fancy as the more expensive ones. It was just a cute cosy pub with a few middle aged guys playing instruments and singing. I think they did about 3 or 4 dances. Not many, but it didn´t feel really touristy. More relaxed and groovy. There were a few backpackers there, not many though.

Every hostel we´ve stayed at has aussies. It´s crazy! Everywhere we go it´s full of aussies, canadians, and american students who have finished their semester abroad and are travelling a bit. There are a few guys from other countries, but not many.

Went to the Alhambra this morning. Kinda woke up late, and didn't get going until 11 which was probably later than we wanted. Lisa let off a sigh of relief once we finally got on the bus, but a second later i realised i'd left my camera back at the hostel (not locked away). I had to run back to the hostel and hope to god that no-one had stolen it. Thankfully the receptionist at the hostel had it. Wow! that NEVER happens to me. Every time i´ve ever misplaced something it gets stolen within 5 minutes never to be seen again. My luck must´ve turned! *touch wood*

There´s this palace in the Alhambra. And for some stupid reason it´s only open half an hour at a time, and you have to buy tickets to go into each half hour session. We got tickets to the 11:30 session, and it was 11:25, with the actual palace apparently being a 10min walk from the ticket booth. So in typical cathy style, we were running late, and had to make like maniacs to make it there by 11:30. We sprinted off towards the palace, and didn´t even have time to get an audio guide. I swear i´ve never run that much in so many clothes before!!! I had on my thermals, my big down jacket, and almost every other piece of clothing i owned.

The alhambra is a fortress-place-thing. I´m still not completley sure exactly WHAT it is, but it includes a palace, a summer palace, as well as a fortress. It´s very beautiful. The palace dates back to the 13th century (forgive me if i´ve got any of this wrong, i´m just going by what i remember. we didn´t get the audio guide so we just walked around the place oohing and aahing without any real idea what it was we were looking at).

The palace is heaps beautiful, in total contrast to the royal palace in madrid, there´s no marble, no fancy carpets or paintings. Just plain and carved walls. Really intricate carvings that you would expect on some small ornament, not a whole bloody wall! Lots of arches, old doorways, water fountains. It looked like it was from a much older era, where things had more of a simple beauty. The Generalife (a place where the sultans would go with their harem) was my favourite. Just really nice gardens and fountains. Very calming. I almost wanted to just sit there for hours and soak it all in. The Alhambra is also a fortress, so it sits at the top of this mountain looking down-across at the city of granada. The view of granada is breathtaking!! Rows and rows of little white houses along the side of the mountain. I swear i took like fifty bizillion shots of the city!
I have to say it´s my favourite place so far. A pitty we only stayed there for one day though. I think i will have to go back one of these days.

After all the rushing around to get there, they didn´t end up kicking us out of the palace at 12 like we thought they would. Must be that they only let people in between those hours, but once your in you can hang around as long as you like.

There was also lots of cats at the palace. Not sure if they were there for a reason, but they were really cute, and i couldn´t help taking lots of photos of them either! Especially the little kittens.

We went to the local cathedral after the Alhambra. IT´s MASSIVE!!! So huge it´s kind of insane. think the caves of Moira from Lord of the rings. A huge room/cavern with massive pillars olding up the roof. It honestly hurt my neck to look all the way to the top of any of the 2m wide pillars. The alter is also huge and decorated all around with gold edges, paintings and other fancy things. The organs are about 5m off the ground, and the doors to the outside of the chapel are almost 10m high! Even the books containing the organ music were a metre tall! I felt like alice in wonderland having fallen into some wierd ´giant´ world. Being in a place like it gets u thinking about god. He sure has it good! Convincing mere mortals to build you such huge and extravagant houses. I sure wouldn´t mind if someone built ME a house like that! I just totally couldn´t get over the size of it. Crazy stuff!!

I´m constantly amazed at how different lisa and I are. Especially when it comes to organising stuff and packing. She likes to book in advance, and know where we are going, what we are doing. I like to just wing it. For example, i booked the granada hostel online. But forgot to write down the address or the phone number. Luckily lisa went and looked them up later, otherwise we wouldn´ve been in a bit of strife. So having learned my lesson, when i booked the hostel in seville i wrote down the phone number, the address, and even the directions! I was so proud! Except that i forgot one tiny detail which is the name of the actual hostel. Lisa just kinda gave me that expaserated look and shook her head. Luckily we met two aussies at the train staion who were staying at the same place and knew the name of it. But honestly, if you have directions and a phone number is the name really that important? hehe, okay, i admit it. i´m just hopeless!

Another fiasco with the spanish rail system.
Yesterday me & Lisa decided to go see some actual historical sights in madrid. Mainly the Prado and Thyssen museums.

The prado was ´nice´. Lots of old paintings, never seen so many depictions of christ, the nativity, the virgin mary, the crucifiction, or the lamentation in one day before!!! ChRIST! After a while i kinda got sick of seeing just the same scenes over and over again. There was this one painting by some dude (i suck at remembering actualy names of stuff), but it was a three piece painting depicting the garden of eden, earthly pleasures, and hell. It had lots of fantastical animals, and scenes, kinda like an ancient where´s wally where you look for the man eating tree on two legs, or the two people making out in a bubble, that kinda thing. Unfortunately there were no cameras allowed, so i can´t really explain what it looked like.

The thyssen was laid out chronologically, but we didn´t realise, and kinda went backwards. Oh well. Otherwise it was heaps smaller than the prado, and there were a few too many landscapes for my liking.

We had planned to catch the 5pm train from Madrid to granada, and get there at 11:50pm. Got to the station around 4:20 so we wouldn´t be late. AS i said before, there´s there´s three train systems. The middle one is called the ´cercanias´. Turns out this train was a cercanias train, not a Renfe train as i had originally thought. So we spent about 20 mins figuring out exactly where we should be boarding the train. Unfortunately, when we tried to show people our tickets they just kept pointing us in the direction of the information office (where no-one spoke english), and the guys at information just kept just made hand guestures for us to stay there and saying ´no mobil´. With 5 mins to our train we were getting kinda worried we´d miss it. Some random chinese girl came up to us and started talking in chinese. Her train to some other city was delayed since 4pm, and she was hoping we would help her out. We have no idea!!! do we look like we know what we´re doing??? Stupid woman! We don´t even speak spanish!

Eventually a kindly old man who spoke english informed us that a truck had fallen on the railway tracks. Okay... so that means???? The train is delayed? cancelled? People kept telling us ´el tren es demorado´, which wasn´t in my spanish phrase book and we eventually found out it means ´the train is delayed´.

So we were just waiting around the station with no idea what was going on. We found two other english speaking backpackers who looked just as lost as we were who were also going to granada. We all sat around looking lost together. Strenght in numbers and what not. Alex (from melbourne) who can speak french, and Leslie from Canada. Eventually the nice old man told us that we could catch a train to chamartin (another station), catch a bus from chamartin to the station after where the accident happened, and then catch the train the rest of the way. yay, we could actually get there tonight!!!!

When we got to chamartin we found lots of spanish people looking just as lost as we were. I found the whole thing kinda funny, but i think lisa was freaking out just a little. Her 35Kg´s of luggage meant that it was kinda hard to move around from one station to another. So i just started going up to people and saying ´granada?´. If i got a ´si´, i would follow them. Sounds stupid i know, but it kinda worked! There was a cranky businessman who helped us out and spoke a little english. We also found two more canandian backpackers from quebec who were also heading to granada. We all just sat around waiting for the bus together. Lisa wasn´t being very social, which i figure is her way of coping with being stressed out. But the other guys were pretty fun.

In the end the bus eventually came, and we left madrid around 7ish. On the way to granda the quebec girls taught me how to say ´du e la station du tren´, (where is the train station) in french. Sweet, now i know how to get around in paris!

Eventually got to granada at 3am. Whoa! what a long day!