SPAIN! (part one)

Spain. Was. Awesome. I can’t believe that four days can go by so fast. I am a journalist, so I will try and tell you as many details as I can and, keep in mind that that means this post (or possibly the next few posts, if I decide to break it in parts). I am also safely back on the ship and we’re headed to Gibraltar to refuel – I hope we get to see it from the deck.

We pulled into port Wednesday around 7 a.m. and I woke up early enough to get breakfast and watch the ship pull into the dock in Cadiz. I was so grateful to see something other than ocean, then, to actually to be able to get off the ship – that was even better! If you’re planning on traveling overnight off the ship, they recommend that you take your passport, so they call people by “seas,” which are like floors – I’m in the Mediterranean Sea – and after that you are allowed to disembark the ship. As soon as we were called I was packed and ready to go. I met Jordan and Shannon, who I was traveling with, in line to get off the ship and shortly after found Sara and Jane, who we had also planned to travel with. Sara and Jane are roommates on the ship and Jordan and Shannon are boyfriend/girlfriend from Connecticut. We walked through Cadiz and stopped to get some coffee, or café con leche, before heading to the train station. Then we got the train from Cadiz to Seville. On the train, a girl sat down near us while we were practicing our Spanish with a Spanish/English dictionary. Then she joined in on our conversation, which was a lot of fun! Her name was Cristina and she is a student in Seville, but is from Cadiz. She was helping us with our Spanish and we helped her with her English. She told us that she learned English after taking 9 years of English and French in grade school. So we talked then, when it was time to get off the train she even was nice enough to direct us to a taxi. That left all of us feeling good about our next few days in Spain.

We then settled into the hostel, which was actually really awesome. It was pretty modern with white marble-like floors and glass and steel stair railings as well as three computers with free internet, a nice lobby with lots of travel information, and a kitchen and rooftop terrace. We stayed in a room with three sets of bunk beds, so it was just the five of us until we came back from dinner and another girl traveling from South Korea took the sixth bed. Each bed also had a small safe in a bank of them outside each room that you could set a code to open and close. I really enjoyed our night there and was only disappointed that we couldn’t stay longer. We ventured out to see some sights in Seville, but ended up just wandering for most of the afternoon. We did see the Plaza de Espana, a huge building in a semi-circle shape that opens into a tiled plaza with a fountain, man-made waterway and bridges crossing them. Then we walked through one of the gardens of Seville to the cathedral there, except that we didn’t make it there before it closed at 5 p.m. But the outside was impressive by itself. We got some dinner and came back to the hostel after walking for a long time through the streets of Seville. We visited a department store, called El Corte Ingles (literally “The English Cut,” as in the English cut suit) that has a supermarket in the basement with housewares on the two upper floors. We bought some bread, queso manchego (“cheese of La Mancha”) and drinks and went back to the hostel. We enjoyed chatting and eating for a while, before deciding to go out again for some more tapas and retiring to the hostel once more.

On Thursday, we decided to go to Cordoba. We took the train from Seville to Cordoba shortly after getting some breakfast. After that we found the hotel, which was only a few more euro than the hostel. There we had two separate rooms, one that was a double and the other was a triple – and the bathrooms had bidets in them! (I meant to take a picture, but forgot). We wandered through Cordoba for a while, until finding the Mezquita (the “mosque”), which is actually now a cathedral. It was mind-boggling. The mosque was originally built in something like 732 and taken over as a cathedral in the 1200s. Really? I can’t even wrap my mind around something like that. They were doing some sort of work on one section of the building, so it seems like they’re continuously working on it. The sheer age of everything just is incomphrensible. The building is also enormous and is about 10 degrees colder than the outside. The huge arches throughout the entire inside are really cool looking because they’re striated in two different types of stone. If there’s anywhere Uncle Al is looking to vacation I would definitely recommend Spain, just for the religious relics and buildings. The entire building is also bordered on the inside by altars or shrines to matyrs and saints. Most of them were amazing portraits or statues in these sort of alcoves blocked off with wrought iron gates. The Mezquita also had a beautiful court yard with orange trees and this patterned stone pavement. It was probably the best thing I saw in the last four days.

There’s a bit of an update, although that’s not the whole trip. I will continue in the morning because I need some rest.