Sevilla!
03.12.2005
17 °C
We´re now in Sevilla - got in today at about 3:45pm after a 3 hour ride on a train to a great hostel (no one else on our floor and not on a busy road - heaven!!!). We´re paying about 45€/night on average. Not too bad. We talked our latest hostel into dropping the price as everyone is hiking things up a bit for upcoming holidays to about 55€/night. From our short walk around the old city, Sevilla is great so far! Beautiful! Tons of old buildings..... sigh!!! We´ve decided to be total tourists and are taking a double-decker bus around the city tomorrow to see all the sights. We´re all very excited about this. We just finished eating at an Irish pub - god, it was good in a greasy, sauce-laden kind of way. We all wanted ¨comfort¨ food (i.e. something homey and not a tapa). While we were eating outside, we met a Canadian couple, probably in their late 40s, from Spruce Grove, AB (near Edmonton). Almost every Cnd we meet is from Alberta (probably because they´re the only ones that can afford it!). There are two big holidays coming up on December 6th and December 8th, which means that everyone will take December 7th off. We´re going to travel to Barcelona on the evening of the 5th. We´re a little trepidatious (spelling?) about this (Barcelona, trains, holidays....). But, you can´t always live life worrying! We´re hoping to take an overnight train.....
Spent two days in Granada and saw the Alhambra with Alex and also visited the amazing cathedral, built by the Christian royals. It was breathtaking and huge....gigantic, actually. The construction of the cathedral started in the 1500´s after the Christian Reconquest and finished in the 1700s. We tried to take pictures that would give a sense of the scale...hope we succeeded! We met a man named George from California who promised to send us a CD of pictures he has taken around Granada and send each of us one. I hope to get them up on my blog by mid-late December. While in the city, we had one day of spectacular weather and then two days of rain. It´s much warmer today in Sevilla (about 21 degrees).
While happy to be travelling and seeing new places, we feel a slight sadness (fondness) for Orgiva and our friends there. We hope to get back for a visit at some point.
But, I shall write more after our time in Seville.
Hope everyone is well and getting ready for the holidays. I don´t know if I mentioned in previous blogs, but you´d have no idea it was almost Christmas here.... I love it. Only small decorations in some pubs and lights across some major roads (that aren´t lit yet).
Gotta go!
