Spain & Portugal, 10-28 Mar 2001
This was originally written for my Geocities webpage in the third person - I wrote this in the name of my toy,
Piyo Piyo! Hoho! Forgive me, I was..21!! :p Too troublesome to change everything so I'll leave it mostly as is, with some edits on 2 Apr 2011.
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mf planned this trip and had some problems with the "who", "when" and "where". The final decision was made at STA when they were buying the air tickets! So mf, SX and KP were to go to Spain, Morocco and then Portugal while G and ZP were to go to Spain and Portugal.
With these details settled, they flew off to Barcelona! Where mf's wallet was gone within the first hour...!! It was a combination of bad luck and her carelessness. But well, she still had four bankers around her... =)
Barcelona was really really great, for food, for shopping and for the sights it offered. After the first two nights, they moved into a place right above the happening La Rambla! Pollo Rico was their favourite dining place in Barcelona - yummy food at cheap prices! Plus they had so much sangria (Spanish cocktail) that some people began to show it on their faces! :p
They walked a lot. First, they walked all the way to Sagrada de Familia but decided not to go in. With so many days planned for Barcelona, they even watched a soccer match at Camp Nou, which was huge!! They visited the Montserrat monastery, where they had a little picnic lunch. One whole day was spent on popping in and out of various Zara and Mango stores, much to the anguish of the gentlemen! And of course there was the famous Gaudi architecture, which mf called "ahead-of-his-time" but could look eerie to some, like a scary building of masks... But the Gaudi Parc Güell they went to on the last day in Barcelona was great fun!
It was a lot of walking though and SX succumbed to a cough and had to go back to Oxford after the first few days, leaving four kids roaming the streets...
The next stop was Madrid, inland and very very wet and cold though it was already spring! They arrived late on the 16th and was offered shelter by a pale old lady. Her place was a bit dodgy and cold too and in general, they wanted to leave ASAP!! However, Madrid was where they caught their first, and definitely mf's last (!), bullfight in Spain's largest bullring Plaza de Toros. "Gross", mf muttered in the show when she was not gaping at the matador teasing the bull... And Madrid was also the place where our itineraries were reaaranged... (Carry on reading..)
Granada and Seville were much much warmer! They were rather alike, being in the south of Spain where the main attractions were mosques-turned-cathedrals due to early Muslim influence. They spent only the 19th and 20th in Granada before leaving for Seville where they stayed at a bed-and-breakfast run by an old lady who didn't speak much English but she had a pretty dog called Chica :)
Again, they stuffed themselves with cheap yummy dishes at a student hangout, H Gomez! Anyway, later, on the last night in Seville, they checked out this pub where there were scheduled tap dancing and flamenco performances. They caught the former but flamenco came too late in the night...
It was some five hours of bus ride before they arrived at Lisbon on 23 Mar 2001. Lisbon? Well you thought they would be splitting into two groups and one should head for Morocco and the other Lisbon? Ha! On that fateful night in a Madrid restaurant, a chinese woman selling roses told them about how unsafe Morocco was, and they had better get a - get this - CATTLE PROD if they really wanted to go!!
And that's it! KP no longer felt like going to Morocco! And mf was coaxed and hoaxed to drop the idea and the whole group was packed off to Lisbon together by the kind lady's words! Oh and she even coaxed the guys to get flowers for the ladies! =P Now, after months had passed, mf is still sometimes haunted by a question, "How do you go to Morocco like this...??!"
Well, so they were in Lisbon! It was rather rainy and cold compared to good old Spain sans Madrid. They stayed on the Rossio, which was supposedly the centre of activities BUT, it was under construction!! Anyway, high spirited, the foursome headed off to THE tourist icon of Portugal, Torre de Belem, a white tower whose opening times we missed...
Next was Castelo de Sao Jorge, a castle dating from Visigothic times, for the superb views at the top.
In the evening, they took a ferry out for seafood. It wasn't exactly cheap as they were told but for the price, they got a lot of food! mf was full after finishing the crab, and the fish was not even served yet!
On 25 Mar 2001, the day before G and ZP left, the foursome took a day trip to Sintra, a little town which took the energy out of mf's poor feet! And yes, all this time, it was raining, and drizzling, and raining again. It got really irritating (and boring) that after G and ZP left, KP and mf changed their flight to four days earlier to escape the weather! (The difference was due to the original plan for Morocco...)
There was one part of Lisbon where weather did not matter and that was Parque das Nacoes which was the former Expo '98 site. mf chopped off a couple of inches of her long tresses there and it was a hilarious affair as she had to explain to the non-English speaking folks at the salon that she just wanted a trim! The whole area was wonderful and that was where the two of them roamed until it was time to leave for the UK.
And let me not miss out on this: the egg tarts were FANTASTIC!!! mf had her fair share, well, more than fair and vowed to make more back home! (Which she did!)
