Hola España! (Hello Spain!)

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Big day of travelling ahead of us today. Our breaky that was supposed to arrive at 6am didn’t turn up, and neither did the porters to collect our bags at 6:20am, perhaps the Kenyan guy reminisced too much last night and forgot to put the requests in…

No worries, we can have breakfast at the airport and since we don’t have much luggage we usually take it ourselves anyway.

Jump into a taxi to the airport, there are plenty waiting of course, it’s Dubai!

The flight to London is over 7 hours but there’s plenty of movies and tv shows to keep you amused, even Tim’s works this time, usually he gets the only one on the whole plane who’s is broken! We sit next to a really nice lady from London who has been living in Dubai for the last 14 years with her husband and absolutely loves it there, so unlike the couple from South Africa who were counting down the months until the could leave. It’s funny how people can have such different experiences and opinions of the same place.

We are held out of Heathrow for quite a while and so do a few laps in the clouds - there is a lot of cloud!

Finally we’re given the all clear and make our way in. We fly over the River Thames which is awesome a preview of what’s in store for us in a couple of weeks! And it’s made even better because the lady sitting with us acts as tour guide and points everything out to us, the only thing I made out for certain on my own was the London Eye and Hyde Park…

After we land we are stuck on the plane for another half and hour waiting for buses to take us to the terminal. We have a connecting flight to Madrid so we’re getting a little nervous this may be our first missed connection…

But never fear, even though we first have to catch a bus to terminal 5 and then another to terminal 3, we make it with plenty of time before boarding. Although we are told our luggage will not be on our flight and when we get to Madrid we need to put a claim in and it will be sent through to Seville - we hope!

We’re flying with Iberia to Madrid and then onto Seville, unlike all the other flights we’ve been on, I guess this is a budget airline here so food needs to be bought, not much of a range but enough to fill the empty spot.

When we get to Madrid, we are told our luggage is indeed still in London but everything will be organised for it to be taken to our hotel in Seville. We are given toiletry bags that have deodorant, toothbrush and toothpaste, a brush for me and a comb in Tim’s, moisturiser for me (Tim not happy he missed out - sexist he thinks!), pyjamas and even sexy (not!) disposable knickers! A lot more than we got from Egypt Air when they lost Tim’s bag!

So we check in for our flight to Seville, we hoped to catch the 8pm flight, but because of the flight delays and sorting out the missing bags we are now on the 10:45pm flight which eventually gets pushed back to 11:30pm.

It was easy enough to kill time as Spain was playing Portugal in the World Cup s we eventually found 1 tv that was playing it, so unlike everywhere we’ve been where you can’t go 10 feet without seeing World Cup stuff. We couldn’t even find a store selling anything for the Spanish team in the airport. So we saw Spain accept victory, much to the large loud and happy group that had gathered to watch.

After an uneventful flight to Seville we catch a taxi to the hotel. Our taxi driver speaks zero English and I feel maybe this is a sign of things to come… There is also no meter so we’re already tired and thinking no way do we feel like arguing about the fare after the day we’ve had. But when I ask him to turn the meter on he gives us a piece of paper with loads of info on it in teeny writing in the dark, but eventually we work out that it’s 35 Euros after midnight from the airport.

The drive to the hotels something else, I’d read that the streets of Seville are narrow and easy to get lost in, but that was an understatement! Considering we had absolutely no idea where our hotel was and I’ve far too many horror movies a lot of images flash through your mind! Some streets were only barely wide enough for a car and he was screaming though. There were hundreds of people still pouring out of the bars after the World Cup match so it made it slow going.

Eventually we arrived at our hotel, The Dona Maria. We were given the only room on the ground floor and it was huge! It had a walk in wardrobe, a sitting room, bedroom, even the bathroom was divided into three rooms; shower, toilet and basin.

But we were so tired all we cared about was pillows and doona, both of which were great, unless you used the extra spare pillows, they were as lumpy as an Oreo McFlurry!

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Comments

[Kylie Moores]

Sam, You're commentary is hilarious. You write exactly like you talk. I can hear your voice in my head as I'm reading! It sounds as if you are having a great time. Enjoy!! Kylie xxx PS. I thought I was the only one who took photos of hotel bathrooms! lol