Off the Rail again. . .

As you may have noticed in our previous post, we had some difficulty with the French regional trains (The TER lines are operated by the SNCF in case you feel like sending them nasty mail on our behalf). There was a strike of a large part of the French rail system yesterday, and it made travel. . . difficult.

Thankfully the TGVs were still running and so we forked out some extra money (thank goodness we have a little flexibility in our budget!) and made it into Spain by evening.

In Barcelona we looked at our options and bit the bullet -- overnight tickets to Madrid to save us time.

We were originally angling to a trip all the way down to Algericas, on the coast, so that we could catch a mid-morning ferry to Tanger, Morocco, and a mid-afternoon or early evening ferry back. We had hoped to be able to add a new continent to our travel logs and surprise you with some fun stories as well, but fate got the better of us. We lost so much time getting out of southern France that we couldn't get far enough to ensure a reasonable trip without getting trapped in Morocco or Algericas overnight, which would push back our trip plans for next week to Pisa, Florence, and Venice.

So we decided instead to continue via local and high speed AVEs to Sevilla instead and drop in on a friend we'd seen in Paris the previous week. The AVE was interesting. We watched most of Kate and Leopold in Spanish -- Meg Ryan's Voice dubber sounds very, very different. It was odd--the service and style of the train made if feel like an airline flight at an altitude of 2 feet. Disconcerting, but very nice and quite luxurious.

We made a brief stop in Cordoba and did a little shopping and hit a little net cafe, and then were back on the road to Sevilla. We arrived and found a place to stay, then got to a web café (Internetia) and begin the long process of updating this space and contacting our friend, since we didn't have her telephone number (silly us). We dropped by the school where she was studying and got some recommendations for dinner and a Flamenco show that we might catch tonight (the 31st).

After a walk around the city and a check on the show times we found a local Tapas bar she had recommended (Taberna El 10) and had a really outstanding meal of Papas a la Brava ("brave potatoes" with a spicy mayonnaise sauce), Lagramitas de Pollo (small bits of fried Chicken and Potato Crisps) and Habitas Mata con jamón (some sort of bean similar to a lima and ham).

With our meal I had what passes for the local draft beer, Cruzcampo (tasty), and Quatre-vingts had the most over-poured Bacardi and Coke I'd ever seen. Our slightly surly but cool barista must have thought she needed to improve her Spanish via relaxation, because I swear there were at least 3 ounces of Bacardi in that glass before she started adding coke.

We meandered our way back to the hostel around 10, exhausted and sleepy, and crashed early. We didn't meander due to the alcohol though. We meandered because it is impossible to go directly anywhere in Sevilla, the whole town is just a maze of winding alleys of various sizes, and all of them change names (and sometimes directions) at every intersection! Thankfully we have a good map with almost every road marked, so navigation has actually been pretty easy.

In the next post you'll get to hear about the best orange confection in the world, and the theft of one of Sevilla's famous oranges (I don't blame you, Janet Keiller).