Advertisement
Published: January 10th 2010
Edit Blog Post
After Italy, Liam and I flew back to Barcelona to meet up with Conor (clearly there haven't been enough Howells overseas this year!). For just over three weeks we travelled around Spain, visiting Barcelona-Valencia-Granada-Seville-Madrid-Bilbao-San Sebastian and then back to Barcelona. There was plenty of the compulsory Howell silliness and shenanigans.
Highlights of Spain include:
- Overdosing on paella, bocadillos, churros, sangria and tapas.
- Watching numerous games of soccer at pubs throughout Spain.
- Wandering around the alleys of Barcelona and around La Ramblas. Also really enjoyed seeing all the Gaudi sites and getting the cable car up Montjuic for great views over Barcelona.
- Beaching it up in Valencia. Made even more fun by the g-string-wearing man strutting up and down for everyone's benefit.
- Visiting the Alhambra (a Muslim palace) in Granada, one of my favourite places for the whole trip so far. Granada also had great food, teahouses, architecture and really nice areas to wander around.
- Rendezvous-ing with Renee in Seville for some amusing nights out, as well as visiting the Alcazar (quite similar to the Alhambra) and the Plaza de Espana.
- Wandering round Madrid and visiting the ridiculously elaborate Palacio Real.
- Day
trips to the towns of Toledo and Segovia, both very beautiful towns. Segovia was particularly impressive because of its aqueduct - 163 arches spanning about 900m (apparently it used to be 16km long) built without any mortar.
- Visiting the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.
- The beautiful scenery and super yum tapas (which is called pintxos in the Basque language) of San Sebastian.
Continuing my love of laughing at translated menus, here are some of our favourites from Spain:
- Cod in the Catalan (jumped has the garlic)
- Green salad with crudeness
- Warm loin sandwich
- Playpig
- Sausages of pages with egg and chips
- Bulged out in
- Potatoes of bag (stock exchange)
- Bikini of ham of the country
- Squids to the Roman
- Black coffee with brandy of I grow older
As usual we had some fairly amusing encounters with the locals:
- Unfortunately we didn't get to speak to them, but in Valencia we saw a couple out walking their pig. Think that might be taking the Spanish obsessions with 'jamon' a little bit too far.
- There's a 'palm-reader' on every street corner in
Granada, which we weren't aware of before arriving. One of them accosted Liam and proceeded to ramble on at him in Spanish. When he told her he didn't speak Spanish she tried Italian and continued, despite the fact he told her he only speaks English. Anyway, the only thing we really picked up on was that he is going to have two 'bambinos' some time in the near future.
- Conor had a similar experience with an old woman in Valencia who kept talking at her, despite Conor clearly not understanding a word she was saying. We think the gist of the conversation was that Cons needed to go into the church round the corner to see the holy grail.
- At a bar in Seville we had a great chat with a man who was clearly drinking away his sorrows. He'd obviously had a bad experience at a wedding that day and insisted that we promise him we'd never attend a wedding. He showed us some of his excellent dancing skills, but then cracked the shits when he realised we were laughing at him. He told the boys they weren't 'gentlemen,' and then stormed out of the bar.
-
We had a fair bit of trouble trying to find our hostel in Bilbao due to some very shabby directions, and ended up getting off the train five or six stations past our destination. We went to the police station to get some help and they obviously weren't very busy, because half the station dropped what they were doing and came to our assistance. They spent about 15 minutes looking up the address on the computer and when they eventually found it there was much excitement and cheering. Obviously not the most action-packed day. They printed out an internet map for us, which also printed out what other programs they had open on the computer. On of which was called 'Euro Cop 2009.' Not sure if this was a computer game they'd been playing or some sort of actual police program they use.
- The good people of San Sebastian were extremely helpful in terms of helping us negotiate our way around the place. Particularly helpful was the woman trying to tell us that we had to get off the bus because it was the end of line. Unfortunately, she was a little bit overexcited and got slightly touchy-feely, groping
Cons in her attempt to get her off the bus. I think Conor really appreciated the attention!
All was going extremely well on our Spanish trip until we tried to leave the country. On the way out to the airport on the train (Liam to head back to Australia, Conor and me to Portugal), after getting up at 5.30am, we got to within a station and a half away before coming to a stop in the middle of nowhere. Apparently the train had 'run out of energy.' After 45 minutes of waiting, unable to get off, the train somehow regained its 'energy' and we got moving again. Unfortunately it was backwards. They decided to take us back to the previous station and make us wait for the next train. Consequently we missed our flight...bastards! We didn't really think we could justify the 840 euro it would have cost us to get on the next flight to Portugal, so rebooked for the next day. Wasn't all bad though - it did mean we got to fit in another paella session.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.052s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0316s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb