Iberian Spring: Day 5 Lisbon to Seville

Soundtrack: “Cross the Border”, Icehouse

Portuguese trains are confusing. Well not so much the trains themselves, just the systems in place for catching them. Yesterday we had a the adventure of the identical tickets that didn’t work identically (what’s possibly even dafter is these tickets are apparently rechargeable, but it seems that once the get pre-loaded with one type or another that’s it). I may have found the Paris metro annoying from the challenge of finding the right station entry with the ticket machine, but once I had a ticket at least it seemed to work okay everywhere.

Portugal, not so much, and that was just an introduction to trying to navigate the system. Today we’re taking the train to Faro in the south of Portugal, then a bus to Seville, as there’s no trainline between the two. We said goodbye to our apartment, taking the lift to floor 0 for the last time. We got to the station in plenty of time, partly thanks to our Bolt driver knowing where the best drop off point was for Entrecampos station (the app wanted to drop us somewhere much less convenient). We even had time to pop into the Lidl at the station where I got the cheapest pastel de nata of the trip at a whole 39 eurocents. I was tempted to buy a bag of jamon ham flavoured crisps but they only had huge packs (which reminds me, last night at Taberna Londinro they were selling francesinha flavoured crisps by the bag).

At various points around the station there are little sheets posted with train schedules. There doesn’t appear to be a big board anywhere that shows train departures and platforms however. We found platforms 1-4 up an escalator, for all we know there might be other platforms hidden in the station somewhere. Each platform has screens to say which train is next, but nothing else. There are trains and schedule announcements over the PA, in Portuguese. Given there was at least one tout operating the station, offering to show the tourists to the correct platform for a small “gratitude” I’m going to guess that confusion is the name of the game. One of the announcements appeared to suggest the train to Faro had been delayed by maybe twenty or more minutes, but most of the translation was guesswork based on recognising “Faro”, “vinti”, and “minutos”. When Faro did come up on the platform screens, it only had the original time of departure, no info about new departure time. I get that we’re in Portugal so Portuguese is the language of the place, but some additional signage wouldn’t go astray.

Once the train arrived there was more confusion. Pre-booked train tickets only show the carriage number and seat number in very small print. At the same time the carriage numbers are not large, and for some carriages, only appear next to one of the doors (and I couldn’t see them inside the train either). Seat numbering appears to have been done when the carriages had a different number of seats, so some numbers just don’t exist (L and I had seats next to each other that were numbered 14 and 16, no idea where 15 went). While my language skills aren’t great, I’ve got numbers sorted so was able to find our seats, though sadly a USian family had got confused and were occupying these. They moved, but got even more confused about where they were supposed to sit. Eventually they worked out they were in the wrong carriage.

There wasn’t much to see out the window due to rain, so I won’t bore you with descriptions of rolling hills and stuff like that. I’m sure there were such things, a few times I had enough visibility to see various fruit orchards, but a lot of the time the train is winding through the ravines cut to make the line in the first place. Not great for views, nor for phone signal. We did get to go over the 25 April Bridge, the big suspension bridge in Lisbon that looks a bunch like the Golden Gate — I guess there are only so many designs you can use to make a suspension bridge.

I doubt the Lisbon to Faro trip will ever make it into anyone’s list of top rail journeys. It’s not fast, and the 20+ minutes late at the start blew out to over an hour late by destination. We’d planned to have an hour or so wandering the town but sadly were left with only enough time to grab a quick lunch courtesy of the clown. Even casual readers of this blog will know that eating with the clown has all the appeal of a Tom Cruise movie marathon or a Michael Bolton B-sides album to me, but in Portugal they have gluten free buns and we didn’t really have time to look around for food. Portugal, like France and most of the rest of the world uses metric, so there’s no funny business of quarter pounds here. I went with the royal with bacon, and got pretty much what a paid for: a tasteless burger with a weird sauce and bacon cut so thin you could almost see through it. Add to that a large serve of fries that weren’t properly cooked and there you have it, a poor life choice.

There seems to be some sort of bus rivalry that goes on in Faro, as our bus was obviously from the wrong company. The main bus station had signs saying they didn’t deal with our company, and when I asked an employee where the bus stopped she was incredibly unhelpful. Eventually we spotted the bus across the road and dashed over. The bus was mostly full, and not incredibly luxurious, but the seats were comfy and it was better than a my Cambodian VIP coach experience.

So Faro not so good. Based on the 50 minutes we spent there I’m tempted to add it to the list of places I feel no need to come back to, but I guess it’s not fair to judge the place solely on rainy day first impressions and poor life choices. Maybe one day I’ll be back, the sun will shine, the food will be amazing, and I will love Faro.

We had a bit of excitement when we crossed the river into Spain, grabbing pics out the window, however that was when it started raining again. So sometimes at least the rain in Spain falls on the valleys. I then dozed until we got to Huelva, a town know if nothing else than where the decoy body from Operation Mincemeat was brought ashore.

Seville, home to the mad barber, birthplace of flamenco, and possibly something to do with oranges too. The rain falls on it too, but I know enough about statistics that just because some rain falls on cities, it doesn’t mean that there may be more rain falling on the plains: anecdotal evidence doesn’t equal proof. We’re staying in what I assume is the older part of the city, as there are lots of narrow streets and old looking buildings. This part of Seville at least is flat, a welcome relief after Lisbon.

After unpacking we took a stroll to a nearby restaurant that had a menu which actually showed glutenous and gluten-free dishes. More places here do at least seem to have some extra allergy annotation to their menus that we noticed in Lisbon. So far it seems many places offer two different service sizes, tapas or platas, I guess we’ll see over coming days how that plays out as while our dinner was a mix of the two sizes, all the portions seemed decent. We started with what was possibly the charcuterie of the day, a delicious sausage of some kind. Then came the absolutely stunning artichokes cooked in a pedro ximenez confit with prawns and jamon, and this was so good, rich and full of umami and we were close to ordering seconds. Finally were pork cheeks slow cooked in pedro ximenez served on patata fritas, also exquisite and flavourful, almost as good as the artichokes. We’ve been fortunate to have some really good vegetables on this trip, and the artichokes are the best so far. For cerveza I tried a Victoria, a pilsner style beer from Malaga, smooth, balanced, quite drinkable (for better or worse, Malaga and lager only rhyme with an Australian accent).

Our walk back to the apartment took us past several gelaterias, so we had to stop and partake. I had a taza pequena con dos flavours, superneuvo and chocolate con trozos. I’m improving my limited spanish greatly assisted by the translation app, though even it couldn’t help me with what “super new” was as an icecream flavour, but it tasted a little chocolatey, while the trozos (pieces) were big bits of chocolate.

Tomorrow we’re doing a food tour, then I have a mission to find a barber (and yes, there is at least one shop here called “the Barber of Seville”, before we finish up with a flamenco show with tapas.