the next part of our spanish adventure was basically a combination of 2 things: a complete lack of knowledge about good places to go, and the realisation that we had a week left in spain and nothing planned to do... basically we hit up seville (where claire and campbell already were), to discover that the beautiful city was also the 'hottest in europe'. mm.
we arrived after a 9 hour train trip that seemed to take so long because the train would stop for about 15 minutes at every station so that passengers could get off and smoke. this would have been ok except that they also turned off the airconditioning and there was a man sitting across the aisle from us who found it funny to occasionally proclaim that he 'loooove'd us. so friendly.
when we finally got there we found that the reason it seemed so hot was because it was - one sign very nicely informed us that it was 37 degrees. at 9pm. and so we decided to be very brave and leapt onto a bus to huddle in the airconditioning.
we did have a lot of fun that night hanging at the hostel with claire and campbell and the days that followed essentially involved a lot of icecream, a few trips to the supermarket (it was airconditioned) and as much walking around the beautiful but boiling city as we could bear.
in case you're worried we spent the entire time complaining about the heat and not doing much else, i'm sorry to say you are partly right, although we did see sights as well, mostly thanks to a walking tour which took us pretty much everywhere in a couple of hours. we also climbed to the top of the cathedral, and saw the palace where the king stays 'when he's in town'. you know.
unfortunately, as you can probably tell, seville didnt quite capture our hearts as maybe it should have (a lot of people have raved about it), so we left a day earlier than we were meant to. this involved quite an exciting last minute bus change - we decided at 6pm that we wanted to leave that night, and then had to change our bus booking, cancel a night's accommmodation, book another night's accommodation at the next place, pack all of our stuff, have some dinner and get ourselves to the bus station in the space of about an hour and a half. this somewhat stupid and stressful plan actually worked so we felt pretty clever for a while after that.
an overnight bus later we arrived in alicante, essentially a stopover to catch our flight to glasgow the next night. we discovered it was full of british people, by the beach and mercifully not nearly as hot as seville. we basically spent the day having a bit of a wander and lying on the beach, but i won't bore you with the details of our endless trips to the supermarket (seemingly our new hang zone, wherever we are. we're so cool.) because let's be honest, alicante was nice, but kind of boring. we were not all that sad to be getting out of spain.
much much love
vivienne (and iona)
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