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Published: April 27th 2008
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well, there´s no way to end a trip but with excitment and confusion. So yesterday, a big group of us is sitting by the river, soaking in one of the last days in sevilla and talking about how we´re excited for the cruise when kelly gets a text from brad. ¨the cruise is cancelled.¨ we all thought it was a joke and were talking about how he must think it´s funny. but guess what. the cruise is friggin cancelled. check the link
http://easycruise.com/gb/news/archive/25.04.08.asp
so not only do i have 4 finals, packing all of my stuff, and figuring out work info for this summer to figure out. i have about a 7 day void of travelling now. we have to call on monday and figure out what type of reimbursment is going to happen: just the cruise or travel to and from athens too? brad talked to someone briefly and they said that travel costs would be addressed too, but everyone is getting there different ways. also, i booked my flights there and the cruise with one guy. cruise on his card, flights on mine. and then the flights back to sevilla are with 2 other people, on their
cards. we have a group of about 16 people all of whom have a unique set of itineraries.
second, what the hell are we going to do with the time? there have been endless ideas thrown out. We could stick with our flights and book something begining and ending in athens. the list of places is endless and some are more realistic than others, here´s a few of the places mentioned: egypt, turkey, prague, austria, russia, qatar, italy, poland, and by the end it became a joke with suggestions such as bosnia, austrailia, thailand, north korea, antarctica, afghanistan, and iraq. the major problem is that there are zero cheap flights anywhere from athens at this point and the rails out of greece into the balkans are supposed to be sketchy at best. another option would be to just base out of athens and do little trips around the area by bus, ferry, or train. problem, no one knows anything about greece beyond the parthenon and the movie 300 spartans. an alternative would be just get our reimbursement and hit all the places in spain that we missed the first time around. this one isn´t a very sexy option but
our current best desicion making technique
too bad that easy cruise missed the board on their last turn. also, easy cruise? most ironic travel company name ever, by the way. ¿como se dice false advertising? the complexity level and cost level are significantly lower. and finally the last option that is sounding better and better is to take the money and run. try to move our flights up, give up, and come home.
at this point, i´m definitly sick of the drama that travelling can bring: flights, buses, trains that are expensive, delayed, slow, early in the morning, late at night, finding hostals, people getting passports stolen, cameras broken, motion sickness, walking, jogging, and usually running to catch the next mode of transportation, waiting then waiting followed by waiting with a high probability of a little more waiting, and finally just not knowing what the hell is happening for a fairly high percentage of the time. not to mention that as of may 2, i will no longer have a cell phone to keep things even more interesting.
i was going to go to a bull fight today, just since i haven´t been to one yet, but now i feel like there are just too many other things to figure out. i still have to get some class notes from 2 weeks ago when i missed class to go to paris and i have that test on tuesday at 815 AM. but this next little thing was just the cherry on the sundae that is the gods playing yahtzee with our lives. on the weekends, we are responsible for getting our own meals from friday dinner thru sunday lunch. so we ate at some of our favorite places to just have them one more time and the last meal was going to be la cresta for tortilla de patatas, our sunday lunch tradition where you can get fed for 3 euros and leave full and content. we left the house at about noon. as we are walking we see a TON of people walking the opposite direction. did church just get out or something? i hadn´t seen groups of people like this for a long time. we get to the street that la cresta is on and a block before the bar is a church. what we saw made me sick. there was a paso in the street. actually, two. the virgin paso was 50 meters in front of us blocking our way to la cresta and in front of this one and directly in front of said bar was the jesus paso. turns out that since some of the semana santa processions were rained out, they had a raindate that just so happened to entirely block the possibility of eating at la cresta. so naturally we try and escape the paso and find tapas elsewhere. after getting blocked in by people and the pasos about 4 or 5 times we get to the alameda de hercules. only one tapa place is open, but they have good stuff, except for some reason, no hot tapas. weak, we continue to bar tino near la campana. again no hot tapas, wtf. next stop plaza alfalfa where i know i have had hot tapas during the day. we sit down ask for the menu. no hot tapas during the day on sunday. seriously? at this point we had been walking for a little over an hour and are about to go to mcdonalds but i make a grand speech about how for our last meal out in spain we can´t just settle for mcdonalds but we should continue back to la cresta and get our tortilla as planned. the guys agree and we head back to where it all began. it´s actually a fairly long walk, but we know it´ll be worth it. we get there, pick up the menu, and walk out. tortilla de patatas was always 2.50, the whole semester. we have eaten at this place probably 10 times for lunch and never ordered anything else. the price doubled, 5 euro for tortilla. this is where i gave up. we walked somberly to mcdonald´s and accepted defeat. it is now 1:45 and we have been walking since noon trying to get lunch. at least at mcdonald´s i know the prices won´t double and for 5.90 i got a big mac extra value meal supersized, (menu grande), with a coke. i hated how good it tasted.
a man can only take so many hits from a culture before he waves the culture shock version of the white flag that mcdonald´s has come to represent. it´s really a microcosome for how this trip is appearing to end. we were going to go to a bull fight today, but at this point, i´m done and there is too much else to figure out.
hopefully, i will blog one more time from spain with good news about how everything worked out and all is rihgt in the world again, but until then, adios
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