I had a quick stay in Florence, and I think a day and a half was the right amount of time for the city for me as I’m not overly interested in museums and galleries. When I got here, I went straight to the market to get some lunch and ended up with pasta… again. This was probably the best meal I’ve eaten off a paper plate.
I arrived in Rome on Easter Sunday and I knew it was going to be busy, but didn’t expect it to be as busy as it was. I did the usual drop by bags off and walk around the city thing and made it to quite a few of the tourist attractions. I ended up finding a corner shop open and bought some gnocchi for dinner.
I’ve spent a good few days doing day trips as opposed to staying a city. Pompeii was my base mainly because the hostel was €15/night rather than €30+ in Naples. It took six hours to get down to Pompeii.
I realised that the hostel has quite particular opening times when I spent half hour pressing the doorbell. Whilst I was at the hostel I had to bugger off at 10am and a not allowed to be back until 2, the problem being that I’m barely out of bed by 10.
Yes… I’ve finally made it out of Spain.
I booked a flight to the wrong destination, so at the moment I should be in Venice. When booking, I hadn’t actually noticed until a good day after when I checked my emails. At first I was a bit annoyed as I was going to try to change it, but I thought two words – the second being ‘it’ and booked up a hostel and a train to somewhere I actually intend to go this time. It’s proved to be not much of an inconvenience as I’ve had a pretty nice day. And a really bloody good pizza.
Six weeks ago I boarded a flight to Málaga and have since have travelled throughout more of Spain than I have England. I’m pretty sure that my feet have finally stopped hurting now which I’ve been waiting to happen for a while now.
It’s been probably nine months since I thought about going on a small Europe trip, and over the space of time I expanded the’small’ to ‘ridiculously long.’ I’ve worked ridiculous hours so that I can travel for as long as I can/want to and have even worked with at least 20 stitches on/in my hand. All of that has been worth it, just for this leg of the trip alone and I can’t see what is left to unfold over the next few months.
There’s quite a few highlights from the past six weeks. Seeing the Barcelona match at Camp Nou was one, eating until I can manage no more in San Sebastian (which is an impressive amount of food for me to do), the Seville tapas tour and visiting the Taylor’s port factory in Porto.
Over the next three weeks or so I have a fair bit planned but not yet booked. Hopefully, I’ll manage to take part in a cooking class and I’m seriously hoping for weather that is a lot better. I’m not too sure whether or not I’ll be able to top Spain, but I’ll certainly give it a shot.
On Monday, I arrived in Valencia for Las Fallas festival. I didn’t really get up to much apart from having a quick look around the city and had some lunch/dinner. Once again, I had a bit of a death trap of a top bunk. Tuesday, I went on a tour around the city based on the festival, and it seems like it is based on the concept of burning the problems from the past year and starting on a clean slate. The tour also went into detail about the costs of the Styrofoam sculptures, some around the €200,000 mark, the outfits worn and the events over the week. After, I went into the main square to watch the daytime fireworks, then spent the rest of the day walking around the city, finding a lot of the fallas.
I definitely had one of those ‘less than one hour to get out of bed, packed and on the train to Barcelona God-help-me’ mornings. Somehow, I managed with 20 minutes to spare and six hours later I arrived in Barcelona.
To get to the north of Spain, I had to return to Lisbon and catch a night train that took 12.5 hours – in total, it took around 20 hours from one hostel to another. I have no idea how people get a decent nights sleep on a train as I felt as though I was trying to fall asleep on a roller coaster.
What made me laugh on the way here was that whilst I was living in London my biggest concerns would be whether or not I could find matching shoes and be on time for work, whether or not my cut fingers would need stitching back together and whether or not to bother getting a Sainsburys meal deal for lunch. This time on my way to Spain, I faced the slightly bigger problem of will I wake up in Spain or France and I thought that it was a bit of a non-issue.
The train to Porto had free wifi so I had a look over the past entries – I’d been away for just over three weeks at this point but seems longer as I’ve done so much, my body is definitely feeling it now. I arrived in Porto on Wednesday afternoon, sorted the usual stuff out then went to explore the city. The journey is mainly downhill, but it’s the kind of thing where you have to be mindful that the way back will be completely uphill. I had a look around for an hour or so, did a bit of food shopping then came back for dinner and a rest.
The next day I was feeling less shattered so I went for a walk into the city. The food market was shut so instead I went for a walk then went on a boat ride. The boat ride was nice but as I’ve come to find, people and their bloody cameras annoy me a lot.
It was a lovely day and the views from the side of the river are so nice that it’d be rude not to have lunch there. I’d been so excited to try Franceschina – a sandwich with sausage, bacon, roast beef and I think one more meat, topped with melted cheese and a fried egg, which I left off as I don’t like them, served in a generous serving of beer sauce, with chips. It had actually been reccommended by vegetarians and was amazing. Basically, if you want a heart attack then this is the way to do it.
After this, I crossed the river and went for a factory tour to Taylor’s port cellars, which was €5 for entry and three small glasses of port. I was genuinely interested in the process of making port – not the ‘I’m here for the wine’ kind of thing and it was pretty interesting to hear about how controlled everything is, besides the climate for growing the grapes. We got to taste the port made with white grapes, which surprisingly was my favourite as I strongly prefer red wine to white, the standard port you’d find in most places and a 10-year one that had been aged differently to the others. After this, I went back to the hostel.
The next day I woke up and it was raining, so I went out anyway as I needed to buy train tickets to get back to Spain, and I prefer to do this in person as opposed to online. It the started to rain pretty heavily, and as I could really do with a bit of a break from the whole travel malarkey (#firstworldproblems), I thought it do me good to stay in for the day.
I’m heading back to Spain which will take around 18 hours to reach the Basque region, which takes a bit less time than flying from London to Australia. I’m not terribly excited about the journey, but I am excited to get back to Spain.
There was a 10 hour train journey to get to Lisbon. The compartment I was in had four beds, less than half the size of my studio flat in London and I had it all to myself. I got a solid 4 hour sleep on the journey and passed the time watching Family Guy, reading and of course, wondering if the train would go fast enough to make me fall out of the top bunk.