Granada, Madrid & San Sebastian

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Hey guys, sorry that we have become slack with the travelblog. It has been written for a while but we haven´t had the time to type it. We are currently in MUNICH! So i´ll fill you in on the places we have been since Barcelona.

Granada

We had the best time in Granada thanks to Ange´s cousin Alan, who is studying Spanish and Flamenco guitar there - he was our personal tour guide. Granada was a really interesting city, as it is a mix of Arabic and Spanish cultures. This is because the Moors settled the city, which was then conquered by the Catholics. Of course we visited the Moorish palace called the Alhambra, which was apparently voted the 4th wonder of the world recently. The palace and gardens were extremely beautiful and took us over 4 hours to explore. It offered the best views of Granada. Afterwards, we were exhausted and sought out the nearest bar to get a hit of FREE tapas, which is the tradition in Granada when you order a drink. One place even gave us a hamburger and chips each! We didn´t spend any money at all on food in Granada, only on drinks.

On our last night in Granada, Alan and his friends from the school took us to an amazing Flamenco showin the Albacin. The dancers were a trio of grandmother, mother and daughter and were very impressive.

Madrid

Next we caught a bus to the capital of Spain, Madrid. We met up with Beth who took a 17 hour bus from Paris. For the first 2 nights, we stayed in a pretty crap hostel - no common area and no outside alcohol allowed. But we snuck in vodka and 42 cent wine and got drunk in our hostel room before going out. However, we ended up bored and sitting in Burger King at 130 am because the night life in Madrid doesn´t get started til at least 3 am. When we were looking for a bar/club, families were still eating their dinner!

We didn´t really get to see many of the sights of Madrid, but we did alot of shopping and eating. We weren´t really impressed by the city. In fact, we were amused as our second hostel (the busabout one) was on a street lined with prostitutes. People had heaps of fun watching them out of the windows and having bets on how long each client would take. The record was 7 minutes, and that includes walking to and from the nearby hotel that they use!

We also went to a BULLFIGHT, which was not the best idea, in hindsight. It was pretty horrific as the bull has already been tortured before it comes into the ring and it is the tradition in Spain to kill the bull by sticking a knife through its neck. We watched them slaughter 5 bulls and then we decided to leave, but it was only halfway through. At least we can say that we have been to a bullfight.

San Sebastian

We re-joined the busabout people and travelled to the coastal city of San Sebastian. It was beautiful and so good to be on the coast again. We had a shit hostel that was almost falling down around us. But we did lots of shopping and Ange and I bought a winter coat each. We also went for our last swim for the trip. We were luckly though, because the day before we arrived in San Sebastian, there were huge riots involving the local Basque people, who basically want to be their own country, separate from the rest of Spain. A girl in our room had found and kept a rubber bullet that was fired by the police.

We wanted to go straight to Paris from San Sebastian, but there was no accomodation available in Paris because of the Rugby World Cup. So we stuck to our original plans and went to Bordeaux for two nights. We nicknamed it Bored-aux because there wasn´t much to do. But we went on a wine tour to Saint Emillion and had a picnic in the huge public garden. But the picnic was rudely ended when two local druggies pretending to be police with a huge black wolf-like dog in tow demanded to see our id cards. When we didn´t show them, they yelled for us to leave, and screamed after us "fucking British!!". Lesson learnt: Say that you are Australian instead of saying that you speak English.

So next entry I´ll write about Paris and Switzerland!!

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Comments

[deleted_15735]

Yay for free food!
Add some photos of the Alhambra, damnit!