carnaval (+/-)

Today I am sitting in the Plaza de la Catedral at a cafe drinking a café con leche and some orange juice, which I expected to be fresh, since it always is here, but this isn't. A couple of German women just sat down at my table. It's funny, actually. They're dressed really conservatively, but one of them has super long metallic blue nails. And they just ordered some kind of alcohol with their espresso. There's a man that keeps walking by trying to sell lottery tickets. Everyone is ignoring him and he keeps saying "Ay, no vendo nada...no vendo nada." I think he even tried inside the cathedral...that doesn't seem right though. There's also a man with an accordion. I hope he doesn't come over here. It seems like they always play whatever song is most stereotypical of the country you're in. Like in Italy they always played the Godfather theme. Here, I don'tknow what the song is called, but it's always the same song. And it was the same story in France.
Last week was Carnaval, which according to all the guide books is this incredible event, you must see while in Cádiz. I saw about 2-3 hours of it, and that was more than enough. But I will come back to that...
The week before Carnaval I left Cádiz to meet Hans in Sevilla, and to travel up to Barcelona and Paris. I have to say that I was a little nervous at first because I've never even planned a trip just for myself, let alone for someone else, too. But for hte most part it worked out. I've found that the things that didn't work out how I expected have fallen to the background.
In Sevilla we stayed at a hostel called Hostal Van Gogh. For some reason there were a lot of these...Hostal Picasso, Hostal Velázquez, Hostal Zurbarán, Hostal Da Vinci, Hostal Goya... The hostel wasn't quite what I had expected, but it was situated right next to Alcazar and very close to the cathedral and the university.


We didn't manage to go into the cathedral, but it was interesting just to walk around the outside and look at the architecture and ornaments. And I really liked the university. It was built in the 17th or 18th century, and from the outside looks nothing at all like a university. In fact, before I got to the hostel and found out what it really was, I thought it was some sort of government building or palace.

We visited Alcazar, which was really beautiful, and wandered a lot around the city. We also visited the Plaza de Toros where the bullfights take place. I don't think that I could actually go to a bullfight, but it was interesting to see the ring.

After 2 days in Sevilla we took the train down to Cádiz for the day. It was the Friday before Carnaval, and everywhere they were setting up booths and carts with chuches (candy), snacks, and Carnaval masks. People were walking around dressed as different things (lots of smurfs). At the end of the day we went back to Sevilla for the night, to catch a plane to Barcelona in the morning.
In Barcelona we had an apartment that was a short distance from La Rambla and the waterfront. It was a really nice apartment, but very small, and the way it was set up made it difficult to get around in it. It had an elevator that opened right into the room, and to get into the building you only had to touch the key to a pad on the outside, but once in the elevator, you had to turn the key in a keyhole. I thought that was kind of weird...
[A couple just walked by dressed entirely in white, both with perfectly white hair.]
While in Barcelona, we walked around a lot, and got to see some parts of the city that I'm pretty sure not many tourists see. They definitely aren't in guidebooks...But it was really interesting to see. Also, it contrasted a lot to Cádiz, where you would have to walk for hours to come to a part of the city that you "wouldn't want to be in," and by that point, you would no longer be in Cádiz anymore. However in Barcelona, it seemed as though we just turned a corner and were in a kind of sketchy neighborhood. On another note, we did the typical touristy things, as well, like visiting the Picasso Museum, Park Güell, and Sagrada Familia (Which we did not go into - I had forgotten how much I didn't like it. Parts of it seem so kitschy to me, like how it says "Sanctus" all over the towers. I hate that. Hans was right - it seems like they've made a cathedral into some sort of Disneyland.)

The food we had in Barcelona was the first actually good food we had. We found a take-away restaurant called Pim Pam Plats, that was amazing!! Everything they had was delicious, and while it wasn't exaclty cheap, it was no more expensive than anywhere else, and the food was the best (I highly recommend it...).
After about 4 days we flew to Paris for the remainder of the trip. I loved Paris, but it was really difficult and frustrating not being able to communicate. And it defintely seemed like people weren't as friendly to us, maybe since we didn't speak French. Again, I loved the food. I miss it. I'm so tired of fried fish... The salads were delicious. No more iceberg lettuce. I had a list of things I had to try, including hot chocolate, a croque monsieur, a ham and cheese baguette, madelienes...the list goes on. It was, however extremely expensive. While in Cádiz the most expensive coffee I've found was 1.60 euros, in Paris we paid 8 for two coffees on more than one occassion.
Our hotel was in Montmartre (Le Regent Montmartre) and was... NOTHING like the pictures they had on their website. The website made it look like a really nice place, but when we arrived it was far from nice. It defintely could have been worse, but their website was extremely deceiving. And it was the most expensive place we stayed. On the bright side, we somehow managed to get free breakfast the whole time we were there. I definitely got my money's worth back in packaged Madeleines... We visited the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay...


We climbed to the second level of the Eiffel Tower (and there had cheesecake and coffee). From the top of the Arc de Triomphe we saw Paris at night, the Eiffel Tower lit up with the searchlight turning round and round.


We were there for 4 days, and I was very sad when it was over and Hans and I had to go our separate ways (he to Amsterdam and I to Sevilla). I was especially sad when things got complicated and I was travelling on my own back to Cádiz... I had many flashbacks to my first trip to Cádiz in January....

I had been travelling with Hans for almost 2 weeks, and when I finally got off the train from Sevilla and walked into the first plaza I came to (Plaza de la Constitución), it was like I had hit a wall. Of... stench. The entire city smelled like pee and stale beer. There were hundreds of people out in the streets, mostly drunk. The ground was completely covered in confetti and streamers, and there were tractors all over that were pulling carts full of musicians. When I stepped out of my building, I found that the street was completely blocked by probably 100+ people all crammed into the narrow Calle Arbolí, watching an unofficial "chirigota," a satirical group, usually all male that dresses with a common theme, and sings songs based around that theme. It's very typical during Carnaval to cross-dress, but this group was dressed as angels and were joking about God creating the world in their lyrics. After watching for a while, I only managed to move to another street when the chirigota finished performing and moved on to their next location, the crowd of people following closely behind them.


All over the city there were similar groups posted up, the official ones pulled by tractors and the unofficial ones packed into the streets. All over there were people throwing (maybe more accurate would be dumping) confetti on their friends and their family and everyone was singing along to the lyrics of the chirigotas. There were cotton candy stands, candied nut stands, miniature donut stands, beer stands... There were half drunk bottles of Cruzcampo everywhere, and plastic cups scattered all over that the wind would pick up and blow into little piles in the street corners and at the base of every tree and trash bin. And nowhere could you esccape the lovely scent of pee and stale beer...