First of all I should really apologize for my lack of recent blogs. It has been quite a while but in my defense I had an entire month filled with visits from my friend, family, and boyfriend, then a week of spring break! So it has been quite the busy month of travel. But of course with travel come stories for the blog, so this is the first of many to come soon.
I'm going to start with my trip to Granada with my boyfriend Olly. We rented a car so we didn't have to worry about the hassle of making a bus or train and to have the freedom to come and go as we pleased. The plan was to leave Seville on Wednesday afternoon and get to Granada by early evening. I had google mapped the directions to the hotel, and the seemed pretty straight forward, but Olly and I soon realized that it was anything but straight forward. The Spanish road signs are quite possibly the most confusing signs that exist on roads. For example, there are signs for Exit 16 but when the actual exit sign somehow changes to Exit 17. Oh, and the stop signs. There are four per intersection: two for each direction. The far one flashes yellow and then turns green whole the close one is still red. So which one do you follow? We learned the hard way that it's a little safer to follow the close one!
Anyway, we made it to Granada with Olly's stick shift skills and my subpar google map directions, but our hotel was on the opposite side of the main street in Granada. It normally wouldn't be an issue but there was no place to turn around so we ended up driving up windy, narrow roads away from our hotel. It wasn't until some kind soul saw me looking at the Granada map in the car that he offered to guide us back to the main road. He whipped around the corners and zoomed down the tiny cobblestone roads, but he got us right back to our hotel! Gracias, señor.
After checking in, we took a bus up to Albaycin, a mountain opposite the mountain the Alhambra is built on, so you can see the whole palace, which was beautifully light up at night. Olly and I decided to get dinner at one of the (overpriced) restaurants in Albaycin before going back to the cafe across from our hotel that we had already spotted for dessert!
The next morning we woke up early to go up to the Alhambra by bus. Since our tickets were for an 8:30 entrance we wanted to be there in plenty of time. We eventually got there by 8:20ish and walked to the entrance. Strangely enough, we were the only people by the entrance. Since the guidebook says that about 14,000 people enter the Alhambra daily, it was a little bizarre that we were the only ones there. But a security guard clarified the situation when he said that the Alhambra was closed. CLOSED?! Excuse me?!
We walked back to the ticket line to see what was going on, and the other security guard told us that the employees were striking and the Alhambra wasn't going to open at all. Well great, the only day we have to see the Alhambra in Granada and it is closed! He told us that we could wait in line for a refund, so we got behind all the other disappointed and angry tourists.
As we stood in line, there was a group of about 7 people with flags who literally just stood by the entrance to the Alhambra. And they called that a strike?! I mean not only was it a terrible strike, its like they were taunting all of us! After about 2 hours of standing in line, we finally got to the front and asked for a refund. She took my two tickets, stapled it to a piece of paper and asked for my email address. Umm...ok. So how and when will I get the refund? No idea. Over a month later, I still have yet to receive my refund.
Very upset, we went back into Granada to get as far away from the city possible. We had had enough of Spain for a while. Good thing Portugal was our next destination!
So at about noon we set out for Lisbon. From Granada it was about a 6 hour drive (poor Olly...I really should learn how to drive stick. Thank goodness he's British!) I had the directions to Lisbon, too, but thanks to the Spanish road system and road signs, we got lost. When we were 18 km off track, we stopped at a gas station to ask for directions. The kind employee drew us map on the back of the receipt. Even though there were no road names and the map was definitely not drawn to scale it got us back on track!
Portugal greeted us with a 20 euro toll, and it was a good thing we stopped at the tourist office right across the border (mainly because we wanted a stamp in our passport) but we also learned that we had to pay the toll up front since it was an automated toll system. If we hadn't pulled over and learned that we would have owed a lot more than 20 euros! By the time we got to Lisbon, we had paid 40 euros in tolls, which is the exact definition of highway robbery. I mean that is more than what the rental car cost for 4 days!
Anyway, we found our hotel which was actually right on the water...that was main attraction. The person running the place spoke no English. Not a word. So Spanish became the language of communication, however, as the conversation went on I soon realized that her version of Spanish was really just Portuguese spoken really slowly as if it would help my comprehension. And I actually understood the vast majority of what she said, which says a lot given the fact that she was quite the talker!
That night we just walked around by the hotel and got dinner and made a game plan for the next day. On our one full day in Lisbon, it poured rain in the morning, but we had to suck it up and see the sights. So we suited up in our rain gear and borrowed an umbrella from the woman and set out on our journey. We went to old royal palace/castle which had a beautiful view of the city (even in the rain). We also saw the cool looking train station, the theater, the original entrance to the city, the point where Columbus first set sail, and did a lot of walking around the city. Our long and tiring day ended with a beautiful 7 course meal at a very nice wine bar close to our hotel. We returned to our hotel exhausted but satisfied with our short stay in Lisbon.
Our drive back to Seville was much more straight forward than the first two road trips, so we had very little issues. After driving 1496 km, we returned Sergio (our car) to the train station and went out to dinner at Olly's favorite restaurant in Sevilla (we were only in Sevilla for 3 nights and some how ate at the same restaurant 3 times!) for Olly's last night in Spain.
