Taco Town

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Recovery

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Benelux

Paris in 4 Hours for Dummies

TBD

Barcelona

coming to a theater near you

US > London > Spain (seville & madrid)

Oh where do I begin... Before we left on our journey Ivan's parents paid us a visit to wish us off well. Actually, we almost didn't go on the trip because there was a health scare in the family, but we won't talk about that. Anyway, Ivan, Sof, and I trekked out to my parents house where my mom fed us with cheesy gooey spaghetti and chicken. mmm...

Then they drove us to the airport (thanks mom and dad!). When we got on the plane we all sat in seats apart from one another and we pretty much dozed in and out of consciousness to a plane that wasn't taking off.

The woman I sat next to lived in NJ but was originally from Argentina. I told her that I knew she was from Argentina from her Spanish that she was speaking on the phone. She said that she eventually wanted to moved back there with her husband because here it's harder to raise a family because there's no help. I totally knew what she was talking about; back where my parents come from there are always "help" who did all the cleaning, the cooking, the laundry, and entertaining of the children...all of which is more than reasonably affordable (think about paying 10 USD/month to have all that done...). Pretty much when you have a job and are living on your own you have to do all that stuff by yourself. No wonder everyone doesn't move to America.

Anyway, by the time we got to London, we missed our connection flight! The airline booked us for the next flight and while we were entertained by London Medics trying to diagnose some Russian man who was pretty much passed out on a chair.

London Medic (animated with thick British accent): do you feel a strong crushing pressure on your chest?

When we got to Madrid we took a bus to the city and a train to the station nearest to our hotel and from there we walked...

And here is where we encounter our first lessons learned from out trip:

Lesson #1: If you go backpacking, invest in a backpack that has a waist strap.

We did not have this and I'm sure we would have appreciated the torque it would have created in bearing that load. But, no worries, we used the wheels when we could.

By the time we got to our hotel, it was time to totally wash up. This is where we come to...

Lesson #2: Unless you go to maybe a 5 star hotel, Eurpoean hair dryers area joke. When I was a kid I had a toy vacuum cleaner where, if I was lucky, it would possible pick up crumbs. Put it in reverse and EUREKA! you have a European hair dryer!

Good news was that it was so hot and humid, I didn't even bother to dry my hair most of the time. Oh well... So then we made our way to the train station to make reservations for the Saturday train to Seville (as per Sobray's recommendations...and a few others later as well). But good luck doing that since they were on strike for the rest of the evening.

Anyway, the trainstation on the outside had a lot of construction going on (probably from evil-doer's crimes) but the inside had beautiful palm trees and flowers.

So since these Spaniard ticket agents didn't want to do any work, it was time to eat! We walked over to a place called Do Salmon that our Madrid book recommended.

The noise level there was pretty low and the food was pretty good. I had the salmon and it was alright.

Here we sampled our first pitcher of well-deserved Sangria. Upon finishing, we cabbed it back.

On Saturday we woke up and went to the train station to, again, make reservations for the train to Seville...and guess what? It was sold out! The closest train we got was at 14:00, which brought us there by 16:30. *sigh*

So, trying to keep positive, we walked around Madrid for a bit to take some pictures and kill some time. We passed by the colegio (shown below).

We got to Seville around the time it started waking up again. So it worked out perfectly. I loved it!

If I had to do it again, I think I would have stayed there instead of Madrid. Many of the streets we made of cobblestone and it reminded me of Salvador, Brazil. So apparently Seville is known for their fancy tile work...and we bought a very small set of tiles (remeber, this has to fit in our backpacks...) that spelled out Unit #2. =)

A friend from work told me we had to try to Paella off the streets... I didn't find any paella off the streets, but we did go to a restaurant off the street and had some of their paella, which is probably more hygenic. =P

I don't remember the name of the restaurant we went to, but we had some calamari which was HUGE, garlic chicken and the paella, of course. My favorite was the garlic chicken and the paella. Mmmmm... The paella's prawns weren't deshelled so I helped Ivan open some of his and showed him how to do it before he played with too much of them (best viewed in IE):

The people who sat in the table next to us were from Australia and California so Ivan helped them trakslate to the waiter what they wanted and what the menu said. =) by the way, you can see them laughing at us in the background of the video.

Afterwards we walked around some more to take pictures of the beautiful city and when Ivan sat down...well...let's just say that it's time for the Ivan-got-pooped-on-action-sequence!!

Either way, Sevilla gets two thumbs up from us. The train ride back to Madrid was cool and relaxing and we brainstormed what we would do when we got back to Madrid at 00:35 on Sunday morning.

When we got back to Atocha, Madrid's train station, we ended up walking over to the seemingly lively area and caught a jazz band.

I have to get back to you on the name of this place, but here we discovered the best coffee drink EVAR! It was called a bombon and it was coffee (or expresso) on top of a layer of condensed milk.

So that was day one and day two of our trip. It was a struggle to get back into the blog of things.