Spain (9/4 - 9/8)

And now for the much more interesting stuff! But first, I need to make a logistical announcement: Most of you probably already know this, but I can’t for the life of me get my Semester at Sea account (the one to which I have free access on the ship) to receive the verification emails from my yahoo accounts that needs to go through for me to be able to set up forwarding, so I’m mostly unreachable from my usual @pacbell.net emails. Instead, if you want to reach me for whatever reason, email me at n d mylastname @ semester at sea . net (but obviously remove the spaces and use my real last name).

That aside, let’s talk about Spain ! (Or Espagna, as the Spanish call it). So we arrived in Cadiz on September 4^tharound 7 in the morning. I’m not sure exactly what time we got in, since I opted to sleep in instead, but I might as well have gotten up because Michaella and Jacob decided (out of the goodness of their hearts, I’m sure) to make sure that I was up not too long afterward. After getting up, Lorelei (my RA who I traveled around southern Spain with) and I met up with two other girls from SAS to look at bus schedules and explore the city a bit. We also got some excellent tapas at a bar, which, in Spain , is more like a small restaurant or café and is not, according to one of our deans, a place to get “shwasted.” (The bar, that is. Not the tapas.) It’s amazing how much you can learn about your own culture by being on a cruise ship with several college students, since I had no idea that the term “shwasted” existed prior to this journey. For those of you who are not in the know, “shwasted” is a combination of two other terms that describe someone who is incredibly inebriated. But enough of U.S. slang, and back to Spanish food!

So, tapas. They’re small servings of appetizers, but the origin of their name is pretty interesting. If I’m remembering correctly, way back when, the Spanish used to prevent things from falling into their drinks by putting food on top, and over time that food came to be known as tapas. Anyway, the tapas we got late that morning/early afternoon were really good, even though we had to eat in a hurry because I had to be back on the ship by 1 for my tour of Cadiz with SAS. Although we had to eat quickly, which is incredibly un-Spanish, we still appreciated the food. Actually, that first meal was the best I had in Spain . We had some Iberian ham; the best pork I’ve ever had in my life, even though I have no idea what it was called; the national dish of Spain , which, by the way, I have no idea how to spell (paella?) but it has rice and seafood in it; and meatballs in “traditional sauce,” according to the English-translated menu, which apparently tastes a lot like sauerkraut. Luckily Lorelei is fluent in Spanish, because I don’t speak a word of Spanish, and neither did the other girls. (On a somewhat-related note, I really disliked being <i>that</i> tourist. You know, the one who expects everyone to speak English them. At least in Morocco I kind of sort of knew what was going on.)

So we eat our tapas and head back to the ship, and then after almost forgetting my ticket to get on the tour, I manage to successfully be on the dock when the tour starts. It was actually really cool, but of course being the awesome person I am, I forgot to take my camera with me. At any rate, our tour was really awesome. We walked around all of the Old Town , which really isn’t all that big. Apparently Cadiz is only about 10 km in radius and has 135,000 people. Its claims to fame are its beaches (where Spaniards from the big cities come to escape the tourists in their hometowns), its age (its one of, if not the oldest, continually occupied cities in Europe, dating all the way back to the Phoenicians), and the fact that it was not conquered by Napolean, so the Spanish Constitution was written there. Oh, and its venue for exhibitions and stuff nowadays was the first tobacco factory in Europe , if I remember correctly. Anyway, there are some nice shops and stuff in the alleyways and the drivers sometimes actually let you cross the street without trying to kill you, which is a nice difference from France . What I don’t understand, though, is how anyone makes any money here. It seems like they’re never working. Supposedly the Spaniards work just as much as Americans, but I find that hard to believe. The shops are only open from around 12-3 and then 5:30-9:00, which can be really frustrating. Anyway, the town has a cool cathedral and a watchtower with a great view of the city & a device that projects a bird’s-eye-view image of the city. I didn’t go inside either of them, but I did go inside the Museo de Cadiz, which has paintings, an archaeology exhibit, and traditional puppets from the region. I didn’t care much for the puppets or paintings, but the archaeology stuff was cool – there was lots of Phoenician jewelry, two sarcophagi, Roman statues, and other odds and ends, including a Phoenician baby bottle that looks like the lamp in Aladdin. According to our guide, the heads of the Roman statues were made separately from the bodies, because the bodies could be made anywhere, but the heads were carved by the best artisans who lived in Rome . I thought that was pretty cool. She also told us that this one guy dedicated his life to finding another Phoenician sarcophagus after the first had been discovered, but never found one. It wasn’t until his kids decided to demolish his house after his death that the second one was found. Talk about irony.

After the museum, we had a break in the Flower Market, where I got some nice ice cream, and then we continued to the New Cathedral, which took over 100 years to construct. The bottom of it is made out of fossilized sand (or something like that), but the top is made of limestone because the people of Cadiz had to stop digging up the fossilized sand or else nothing would be holding up their city any more. The upper part of the cathedral is also not as nice because by the time the city finished building it, it wasn’t as rich as when the construction began (construction commenced during a time when Cadiz was the only port with access to the Americas ). We didn’t go inside, but it was still pretty neat from the outside. After that, we walked past the Old Cathedral (which was destroyed somehow and wasn’t rebuilt because they decided to build the new one instead) and then saw some sort of government building with a bell tower on top that plays a tune composed by Manuel de Falla (the composer of the broomstick piece in Disney’s <i>Fantasia</i>) every hour on the hour. Actually, we saw where de Falla was born and the house he spent a good deal of his life, too.

After the tour, I honestly don’t remember what I did…probably bought my bus tickets and stuff and ate. Oh!  Just kidding. I decided last minute to do the SAS field program where we went to a Flamenco show and saw a bull fight and equestrian show. The equestrian show was OK – it was basically a lot of dressage (which is supposed to be dancing on horseback) and some Flamenco dancing. The bull fight was more hilarious than exciting because it was actually a test run to see if these two baby bulls would be suitable to actually be in a bull fight, but I think they probably failed the test because they were much more afraid of the people and the flailing capes than angered by them. One of the guys who was maybe 16 (they weren’t official matadors) was almost hurt by one of the bulls, but most of the bulls’ attempts were half-hearted so it wasn’t very exciting. Though to be honest, after talking with a friend who saw an actual bullfight where one bull’s guts were flung all over the stadium and another was dragged around the stadium before it was fully dead, I think I prefer the fight I saw.

Still, the evening was a lot of fun, because after that we had tapas at a nice restaurant with a Flamenco show and then we danced afterward. One of the SAS kids knew salsa and I tried dancing with him but sort of failed. Oh, and the Macarena was played twice, which was kind of hilarious.

So that was all just the first day. I’ll try to be a bit more brief from here on out because I’ve already spent several days trying to finish this blog and my attention span isn’t long enough to be as detailed for the rest of this particular entry. Anyway, on the second day Lorelei and I went to Tarifa, the “southest point of Europe ,” according to a street sign. We meant to go whale-watching but it was pretty windy so none of the companies there were sailing that day, and the one that normally sails out of a different bay when it’s windy had a mechanical failure. Lorelei and I think the SAS kids broke the boat because the SAS whale-watching trip had used the same company and boat the day before. Anyway, we tried pretty much every single whale-watching place, but it was no use. We still had fun, though, because we took pictures of Morocco across the water, the Strait of Gibralter , and of ourselves touching both the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean . Funny how simply changing the name of the ocean at a specific point can seem so cool. We ended up heading back pretty early, though, because around 3 all the stores were closing and we didn’t have anything to do. But we still had a good time because we grabbed some other SAS kids back in Cadiz and hit up the beach. It kind of reminded me of the beaches of Antibes in summer (i.e. very crowded and a little dirty), but the water was really nice and it felt good to get out of the hot sun.

The next day Lorelei and I took a bus to Granada , where we ended up joining forces with 2 other SAS girls and a guy that decided last minute to join us as well. The bus ride took about a half an hour more than expected and we already didn’t have much time to explore the Alhambra (the main reason we were going to Granada), so that kind of stressed me out, but after booking the hostel and dropping our stuff off there, we were able to finally get to the Alhambra with a good 4 hours to explore.

The Alhambra was pretty interesting. It was the last stronghold of the Muslim population against the Spanish back when the Muslims ruled southern Spain . There weren’t many of the informational blurbs of the things we were looking at that you usually find in museums (either in Spanish or English) so I missed out on a lot of the history of the place, the but the architecture was still quite a sight to behold. I did see the place where Ferdinand and Isabella (you know, Columbus ’s financial backers) were originally buried, though. But the Nasrid Palace and the Garden Palace were definitely the highlights of the fortress. The intricate Islamic carvings in the Nasrid Palace and the way it was set up was so much nicer than a European castle, and I couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to live there in the…1300s, I believe it was. And the gardens and fountains in the Garden Palace were just so nice to look at. I took lots of pictures, but unfortunately my skills as a photographer are quite lacking and my camera, while nice, just couldn’t capture the detail and splendor of the palaces. When I eventually get them uploaded, I don’t think they can even begin to show you all what it was like there.

Later that night, we spent a very significant amount of time trying to figure out traveling logistics for the next day and trying to figure out how the guy we were with, who decided to go off on his own that night, would meet up with us again to get the train together. I think this trip taught me that I worry a lot more than I ever thought – I was constantly stressing out about getting to the trains on time and making sure we saw everything. I still had a lot of fun, but I’m thinking that I will do more SAS-organized trips in the future or simply visit fewer places in each country, because I think that will be much less stressful.

Anyway, after finally figuring out our plans, we got dinner at this really cool restaurant that had probably 50 pig legs just hanging on the ceiling. I ordered an assortment of meats (I have no idea what they were), and it was really good. Well, except for this really strange black meat that tasted sort of like it had been pickled and fell apart in your mouth. After that, we got ice cream from this really stellar (I’m running out of adjectives here) place. The displays there were awesome – the watermelon-flavored ice cream had an actual watermelon in it that was carved like an animal, and there were actual fruits on top of the fruit-flavored ones and candy bars still in their wrappers perched on top of the candy-flavored ones. It was a good marketing strategy, because seeing the actual thing from which the ice cream got its flavor right on top of the ice cream just made me want the ice cream even more.

We eventually finished eating, headed back to the hostel, and got ready for bed/went to sleep, although not much sleeping occurred because the room was stifling hot and I was freaking out about the kid who wandered off (he was staying in a mosque, but he was super reckless and didn’t really seem to think things through, and I could definitely see something terrible happening to him because he wasn’t coming back until 6 in the morning or so). Eventually the kid came back, and then about an hour later we called two cabs to take us to the train station so we could catch a train to Sevilla. We were about an hour early because we wanted to be sure we could get tickets for the train, so once we had our tickets we had about an hour to kill. We decided to use this time to get some breakfast, and luckily there was a little coffee place in the station. I had some donuts (very Spanish, I know). The train ride itself was pretty fun – four of us had seats facing each other, so we chatted for a bit before passing out because of the lack of sleep from the previous night and the fact we had had two early mornings in a row.

Once we got to Sevilla, we wandered around kind of aimlessly. Well, I really wanted to see the Alcazar (another Moor palace thing) and the cathedral, but one of the other girls wanted to wander, so that was kinda lame that we had pretty different agendas. We also had to meet up with two other girls from SAS, but we weren’t sure exactly when or where we were going to meet up with them because we weren’t sure if they had gotten our email the night before or not, but luckily we ran into them when we were wandering around. We never did end up seeing the Alcazar, but Lorelei and I saw the inside of the cathedral, which is apparently the 3^rd-largest in the world. Christopher Columbus is buried there, but I forgot that at the time, so I didn’t really look for his resting place. I did notice the organ in there, though. It was huge, and its pipes took up a huge portion of the center of the main room. The ceilings were really awesome, too, and the view from the bell tower was something to behold. We also wandered around the Spanish Plaza , which I mistook for the cathedral (this was before we had found the cathedral) and the other girls thought was the Alcazar. Apparently it was actually built in the 1900’s for something (I don’t remember what), so we were both wrong. Regardless, even if it was a newer building, it looked really cool and I took a bunch of pictures before my camera died. The other landmark we saw was the university, which used to be a tobacco factory but now just looks cool/is a place to learn.

Anyway, I had originally planned to spend the night in Sevilla, but I decided to head back early with the two girls who had hung out in Granada with Lorelei and I instead. They were really loopy off of sugar the whole way back, and we kept taking silly pictures, eating candy, and giggling on the train. When we got back to Cadiz we tried to find someplace that was open to eat, but Spain (or, well, Cadiz , anyway) has terrible hours, so nothing was open. At that point I met up with Michaella and Jacob and we wandered around for awhile and eventually found a club/bar place where some of the other SAS kids were. We stayed for awhile and then walked back to the ship and went to bed. The next day was our last day, so Michaella and I walked around, went to a grocery store to pick up some things, and took some pictures. We got back onto the ship about an hour and a half before we had to be, just to be safe. Around 8 p.m. we finally left the port, and when I woke up I was in Morocco .

Yes! FINALLY done with this entry! I’ve been working on this for days. Don’t expect as much detail in the future, because finishing this was painful. Anyway, I hope now you have a better idea of what I’ve been up to recently. Hopefully I’ll get an entry on Morocco posted around Friday or so, but until then, adios!