Well, if you're regular readers of our blog, you've probably noticed that our updates have been not so regular lately! But let us fill you in a some of our travel tales from Spain, the country that never sleeps and, in my opinion, must be a little malnourished from the lack of variation in their tapas! We began our visit in Valencia, quite a pretty walled city. Here we quickly learned that Spanish people don't eat until about 11pm and they don't go out to bars or clubs until about 1am! The tapas was a little disappointing unfortunately. A lot of fried fish and calamari and not much else. So we tired of that pretty quickly! But the night life was a lot of fun! We spent about 4 days in Valencia, then headed south to Andalucia. Over about a week, we visited Almeria, Granada and Sevilla. Southern Spain is quite beautiful and rugged. There are huge mountains near the sea that are so barren you feel like you are somewhere in the Middle East.
Spain is very different to the rest of Europe. It really is a country that you can't take at face value and first impressions don't always last. Most of the cities have a new part and an old part. You really need to spend a few days exploring the cities to find their beauty, and when you do that, the country really grows on you. Almeria was a seaside city, while Granada and Sevilla were further inland. Granada was very laid back and full of hippies. All of Andalucia has quite an Islamic influence which makes the cities quite unique. And each of the places we visited had huge muslim fortresses that are now ruins, and are quite spectacular.
After Sevilla, we continued our bus trip around Spain and moved on to Madrid. Madrid is a beautiful city! Spanish architecture is quite unique and in Madrid the buildings have been looked after so well. The city felt so alive, with the streets full of people day and night. Here we met up with Javier and Benito, some friends of a friend from home. They took us out on the town and showed us that Madrid is a place that you can party in, no matter what day of the week! The nightclubs are full of people from Monday to Sunday, until 6am or whenever they close! How anyone gets any work done I don't know, but it's great for people who are on holidays like us! We also discovered some great restaurants in Madrid, sampling spicy Ecuadorian food for the first time (a taste of things to come)!
From Madrid we went to Morocco, but that's another story to tell! So, our Spanish story ends in Barcelona, yet another amazing city. Barcelona is like no other place, which is largely due to the wacky, 'Alice in Wonderland' style architecture of Gaudi. We spent a lot of time walking and riding around the city, finding as many buildings as we could that were built by him. He even built a park (Parque Guell) which has the house that he lived his last 20 years out in (now a museum, filled with furniture and other things designed by him). We were lucky enough to have another host to look after us in Barcelona (Carlos). He took us out to some great eating spots and bars. We spent about 4 days there, soaking up the cosmopolitan atmosphere of this city where the mountains meet the sea. Then we geared up to farewell the sunshine and boarded a plane for Switzerland, our last country in Europe!