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Iberian Spring: Day 8 Seville to Madrid
Soundtrack: Hala Madrid y nada mas (the Real Madrid anthem, as they won’t be playing it tonight at Bernabeu) We had a midday train so took the morning fairly easy. My cold turned into the annoying cough so neither of us got the best night’s sleep. So we got up, packed, and trundled our way towards the trainstation, about 2km but this ay we got our steps up. Or something. We found a little place for breakfast, they seemed to specialise in sandwiches so it was looking like L would be left with ham and eggs, but they understood “sin gluten”. They understood very well, the guy taking our order…
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Iberian Sprint: Day 7 Seville
Soundtrack: “La Isla Bonita”, Madonna Our last full day in Seville. We started with a little wandering the local streets, a bit of shopping. As luck would have it, the nearest barbershop to out apartment was the eponymously names The Barber of Seville. I’ve been holding off on the shaving so that I could get a shave here, and when they said they could fit me in at midday it was perfect timing. I just hoped there wouldn’t be any singing, or at least I wouldn’t have to sing. We found a little place for breakfast not too far away, down a side street and while they had an English…
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Iberian Spring: Day 6 Seville
Soundtrack: flamenco clapping and stomping For our first full day in Seville we booked a food tour, a mix of culture, history and hopefully good things to eat. We met our guide P under Seville’s controversial Parasol or Setas (mushrooms), a huge wooden structure that dominates one of the old squares. The square has featured a marketplace for hundreds of years, but about 15-20 years ago the authorities decided to jazz the place up, held a competition that was won by a German architect, and the result was an over budget structure now known as the mushrooms. From here we headed off into the market under the mushrooms for a…
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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…
