Sevilla y Granada

Europe » Spain » Andalusia » Granada
March 6th 2008

Published: March 15th 2008

Edit Blog Post

pmertens

Sevilla Cathedral

Well, I'm home now, but I think I'll try to do a quick recap of the last part of the trip still. Most of this blog was written over the past weeks but I couldn't find anywhere to add pictures so I never posted it. Anyways, here it is...

Alright, so this is the final stretch. It has been going very well I would say. I took a train into Sevilla, beginning to cough on the way, and got in sometime around 8 at night. Hostels always have directions posted online as to how to get to them, but they are often in pretty poor english and involve paying for a bus to take you about 3 blocks. So I decided to just go ahead and walk from the train station to the hostel. Well, it was farther than I thought and I managed to get to my hostel around 9:15 (with a good 20 minutes of that being spent walking the wrong way then circling back). That was a longer walk carrying all of my stuff than I would have liked, but oh well, not too bad. My hostel was pretty good. It was small but personal with free

Sevilla

Alcazaba(palace) gardens

breakfast, free internet, and a nice rooftop terrace that even had a number of hammocks set up for our enjoyment. Pretty cool. Walked around for a little while, found some food, then hung out with a couple Canadian guys who were in my room before going to bed. Backstory: upon being shown to my room, there was a small bag on top of the empty bed and the hostel receptionist moved it to the floor and put my sheets on that bed (nothing unusual at the time). Then...at about 3 in the morning I am woken up by someone talking in front of me. I am on the top bunk so it turns out to be a German guy face to face with me asking me questions in German. Takes me a while to figure out what's going on enough to tell him I don't have a clue what he's saying. Turns out he knows some English too and is asking if I reserved that bed because it was his and that was his sleeping bag the receptionist moved to make way for me. I told him I had no idea what was going on and that she put me

Sevilla

Gardens

there etc. etc. Although there were a few beds in our 10-bed room not in use, they hadn't been unmade so he didn't want to use any of them so he went around the room shining a flashlight on all of the beds, inspecting them, and then coming back to shine his light on me. Eventually he went away and spent the night in another room apparently. Gotta love hostels. The next day was another "typical" day in Europe for me, involving lots of walking around the city, seeing the typical sights, and enjoying the atmosphere. Sevilla is a wonderful city, maybe a little over-touristy, but not too bad. The weather was incredible, some thermometers were reading above 80 but they were in the sun. Either way, it was sandals and t-shirt and still a bit hot. The city had a cathedral which was very large, pretty cool, and apparently houses the tomb and remains of Christopher Columbus (even though some country in the Carribean also makes that claim). Most impressive though was the Real Alcazaba (royal palace). This was a large, walled-off, section of town which used to be the houses of the government/royalty and a large expanse of

Sevilla

awesome bridge

very well maintained gardens around them. The buildings were very ornately decorated and the gardens were just huge and absolutely beautiful - trees covered with blossoms, fountains, pools, and waterfalls all over. An added bonus is that it costs €7 normally, but is free for students (which I obviously still am thanks to my dateless UCSD ID card). After the Alcazaba, I walked around some other sections of the city which had been recommended. The best spot of this was Barrio Santa Cruz which was a maze of small alleys which were not well marked and the streets did not make a grid at all so you had to randomly turn very often trying to keep your sense of direction. Anyways, this section of the city had beautiful little buildings, shops, and tiny plazas full of tables from bars and cafes which would be nearly impossible for me to describe how to get to to anyone else. The Canadian guys had checked out of the hostel and there was nobody else there so I figured I might be spending the next couple nights taking it easy with nothing to do. Luckily for me, as I was about to set off

Sevilla

from that bridge

to walk around the riverside watching the sunset and then doing some shopping, a girl from Alaska came into the room and it turned out she had similar plans so we decided to head out together. This was very nice, we got along really well and were both rather sick so spending a more relaxed night together was probably a good change from typical hostel life. Oh ya, turned out she kinda knew the German guy and that morning he had told her the story of finding someone in his bed the night before. The next day she headed off for her first flamenco guitar lesson (I'm rather jealous) and I had another day in the city. There weren't really any "sights" left to see so I just walked through the other nice plazas, spent a lot of time in some really large parks, walked along the river, and browsed the cities entire selection of books in english. Again, gorgeous day. In Spain, like most of Europe, they don't use subtitles, they just dub over everything, which is rather annoying, both as a selfish American in Europe and someone who thinks dubbing absolutely ruins a movie. But Sevilla happens to

Sevilla

Plaza de Espana

have a theater that plays movies in their original versions with spanish subtitles and Lou (the girl from Juneau) knew about it so we went and watched Juno (kinda funny, eh?) that night. It was wonderful. Afterwards, due to my superior ability to recognize Dwight from the office, she treated me to a few beers at a few different tapas bars. We got a full range of service, from being ignored and given rude looks when we tried to signal the bartender, to much kindness, and even to a little platter of free shrimp and crackers with our beers. Great fun. We were the only ones in our 10-bed dorm room that night (at least until around 2:30 or 3), which was nice due to our lovely coughing and sniffling fest. The next morning I said my goodbyes to Lou and to Sevilla and hopped on a train (within a minute of departure) for Granada.

Alright, brief overview of Granada: it is a fairly small city at a decent elevation very close to Sierra Nevada, the highest mountain in Spain, and is known for being a very laid-back city, and home to the Alhambra. It is full of young

Sevilla

and again

people (many are college students), street musicians, and people with dreads, and people take the "siesta" time of day very seriously (as in, you had better not be working between 2 and 5 and you should really be drinking or smoking). There is also a section of town for the more serious, commercial sorts too. Granada is also well known for being one of the last places in Spain where you get free Tapas at bars with your drinks. Tapas basically means appetizers, and there is a wide variety all over Spain, but here in Granada whenever you order a drink at a bar (priced the same as in other cities), you get a tapa with it. Some bars just give you something of their choosing, usually starting small and working larger as you buy more drinks, but some bars let you choose your own tapas from the beginning.
So anyway, upon arriving I walked around this little section of the city and then came back to the hostel and started meeting all the english speakers. This hostel is really well set up for socializing. There is a guy who works for the hostel who cooks a different Spanish

Sevilla

in the park

dish every night for dinner and you can buy drinks from the hostel so everyone meets up on the patio - and then the indoor section of the roof when it gets cold - around dinner time and eats and meets up to make plans for the night. A group of us somewhat formed up which consisted of a girl from D.C., a woman from Australia, and a couple German women. We ended up sitting around talking and drinking during dinner and then we went out to some tapas bars with an Israeli guy who has been here for a month and a half looking for work so he spoke Spanish very well and knew the best places to go. The bars were a lot of fun, except a bit crowded, and they had a number of people bringing their own instruments in and random music (mainly flamenco) sessions would be played and people would dance. There were also a lot of dogs on the street that would come inside looking for food and a lot of people selling drugs, but this just added to the atmosphere of it all. Favorite tapa so far has been a crepe which was

Granada

Alhambra palace

filled with ham, cheese, and vegetables.
The next day in Granada was highlighted by my visit to the Alhambra. The Alhambra is the fortress on a hill above Granada and is rather famous for it's Muslim decorations and extreme amount of detail put into the palaces. This stuff was definately cool, but it's best feature is overlooking a flat plain with Granada on it and having great views of snow-covered mountains around. Although I am pretty indifferent to taking pictures of everything I see after so much of it, I still ended up taking many pictures this day. I toured through the palaces, around the fortress' walls and towers, and through the gardens for many hours before heading back down the hill into town. The Alhambra was really nice itself and it's views were great, but it's one of the most famous and most visited sites in Spain which I think might be a bit overrated. That evening, our hostel cook made a giant pan of paella for us all (the pan was about 4 feet wide), and we got to sit around enjoying lots of paella and mojitos that he made for us too. Paella is probably Spain's

Granada

Alhambra palace's fountain

most famous dish but it's everywhere now and this cook's opinion is that the paella at all those tourist places is "shit"(said in his strong accent with much anger) so he made us some real paella. It was definitely good. After a large, filling dinner, a bunch of us from the hostel just sat around in the hostel bar/lounge and talked about just about everything, especially our favorite cartoons and tv shows from our childhoods. The next day almost everybody that I knew in the hostel checked out and so I had the day to cruise Granada alone. I climbed up some hill overlooking the town, checked out the churches, fountains, and any other cool buildings, and managed to do a bit of reading for the first time in a few days. Overall, these 2 cities were probably my favorite places in Spain, Sevilla for its beauty and weather and Granada for its relaxed feeling, mountain views, and alternative culture.

Additional photos below

Photos: 23, Displayed: 23