I had been meaning to do an update whilst on the road but I ended up having less down time that I thought I would. Instead I've made the most of my empty hours in rural South Wales to document the events of January.
Since I had copious amounts of time with little to do I decided to head to Spain and Portugal for three weeks in January. Although I`ve already seen a large portion of Spain there are still quite a few places I`d yet to venture, and with friends in Barcelona, Valencia and Lisbon I had an opportunity to see them again before I headed back to South America, as well as having their knowledge of the respective cities.
I left the UK on the 10th January just as I`d re-entered it upon my return from Brazil in December - shrouded in darkness and shivering in the bitter cold. I was greeted with perfect weather in Barcelona - not shorts and t-shirt by any means but anything in the 20`s in January is a bonus. Having not spoke Spanish properly for 6 months I struggled at first, coupled with the fact that Catalan is so prominent. It surprised me that Barça felt more touristy than Rio, even in low season. A notable feature of Barcelona is the influence of architect Antoni Gaudi - his work at Parc Guell is impressive and some of the buildings he designed give the city a character which sets it apart from other Spanish cities.
In addition to the normal touristy stuff I was lucky to catch a football game on my last day there - Barcelona vs Malaga, in La Liga, along with 79,999 other fans. By my reckoning it's an unprecedented event that the top three players in the world (as voted in the FIFA World Player Of The Year award) play for the same team, so it was a joy to watch Leo Messi, Xavi and Andrés Iniesta showing off and playing some of the best football imaginable, taking apart a weak Malaga side and winning 4-1. Much has been made of the passion of the Barça fans but to me it felt a lot more sedate than what I was expecting. Having said that, the result was fairly predictable, so it felt more like watching a show at the theatre than a real us-against-them football match. Bizarrely, a ticket to watch the best team in the world cost less than 30 euros - only two years previously I watched Leeds United struggle past Millwall on a wet Tuesday evening for the same price.
Valencia immediately felt a lot smaller and less touristy, even if it the third largest city in the country behind Barcelona. I spent three nights there and saw the impressive beach, the fairly new City of Arts and Sciences museum and the old part of town, climbing the 215 step tower of the Cathedral in the process.
I had been meaning to try out couchsurfing for years, and this trip was the perfect opportunity. If you search for 'couchsurfing' on google, the second most popular search term related to the subject is 'couchsurfing horror stories', however my experience of it in Cartagena was very positive. After staring out of the train window for several hours admiring the landscape I arrived in Cartagena in the late evening, and I managed to find the street on which my hosts lived. Or so it seemed, but my inability to read my own scrawny handwriting came back to bite me, as I was on a similarly named street and not the road I was supposed to be on. This resulted in lots of confusing, expensive phone calls, waiting around cluelessly, and my phone battery dying. About to give up and find some other form of accommodation I tried the next street along, where two guys approached me and led me back to their apartment. It turns out that the entire family is obsessed with heavy metal, and I spend a good few hours on youtube with one of the guys, Ryan, who introduced me to some good bands, and vice versa. Their generosity and kindness was staggering - I ate and slept better than anywhere else in Spain, and was given a bike tour of the city by the mum. Cartagena seemed pretty quiet, a far cry from what you'd imagine a city on the south coast of Spain to be like. It's a city with a lot of history - much evidence of the Romans as well as the naval base which housed a number of submarines during World War Two.
Continuing the trend of travelling to progressively smaller settlements, I decided to check out Aguilas, a small town a few hours west of Cartagena. The landscape seemed to get more and more arid the further down the coast I went, but amongst the parched hills lay huge greenhouses which exclusively contained tomatoes, apparently the only thing grown in this area. In Aguilas I spent the whole of Sunday wandering the barren empty coast, listening to progressive rock and reading Into The Wild, one of the best books I've had the pleasure of reading in quite a while. It was bitterly cold and empty and I was quite glad to leave for Murcia the following day.
Murcia was no warmer sadly, except for the almost tropical micro climate of El Corte Ingles. Murcia is the 7th largest city in Spain but doesn't have a lot to show for it - the only noticeable idiosyncrasy was the abundance of tramps in the city. There was a nice medieval quarter and cathedral, but you can say that about a myriad of Spanish settlements.
The nature of spontaneous travelling is that by compromising organisation you have to pay for lack of it on some occasions. I had run out of time to see any more of Spain as I had a flight back from Lisbon on the 1st February. So I scurried across Andalucia by bus, leaving Murcia at 10pm and arriving in a dreary Seville at 6:30am. I had no idea how I was to get to Lisbon from here but conveniently a bus there left soon after I arrived, via Huelva and Faro, that got into Lisbon by 2:15. This entire trip cost me 75 euros and left me pretty shattered.
Crossing the border into what became the 19th country I have visited in my life was fairly uneventful - I vaguely remember been awoken by a immigration officer and shoved my passport at him. Due to the time difference I had an hour to kill in the pleasant town of Faro, which looked especially nice in the first blue sky I'd seen in quite a while.
Lisbon was an interesting city, full of history. It was pretty cool to think that it was once the epicentre of the world, when the Portuguese empire was at it's pinnacle. It was interesting to see the Brazilian influence on Portuguese culture - for example, the consumption of the caipirinha, the quintessential Brazilian drink. I found it funny how the cheapest and most disgusting cachaça (spirit used in the cocktail) available in Brazil was on sale in the supermarkets of Lisbon for eight euros - four times the price as in Brazil. A note on the gastronomy was the quality of Portuguese pastries - in particular, the pastel de nata, essentially a custard tart, but better in flavour and texture than anything you'd find in Greggs.
I found the differences between Brazilian Portuguese and the Portuguese spoken in Portugal interesting. The language seems a lot purer than what I'm used to hearing in Rio, with a slight Slavic tone, and less Americanisations (e.g. the Portuguese say portatil for laptop, whereas Brazilians say...laptop). As I only stayed in Lisbon for five nights I was unable to really get back into the swing of Portuguese after speaking Spanish for over two weeks.
I now have just over two weeks before I fly back to South America, for the start my second semester in Rio, and Carnaval. The media hyperbole surrounding the event has meant that anything less than four days of pure hedonistic joy will be a disappointment, so I'm setting my expectations low and taking what comes. I find normal everyday life in Rio exciting enough as it is, especially after being deprived of it for over two months.
Jack
Thursday, 20 January 2011
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