Sunday 8th July–Seville and Jerez

There is nothing quite like starting the day not knowing whether you are more sick or more hung-over. It was a pretty average morning, I could have slept many more hours! Nevertheless, I was downstairs with the others at 9am and we all headed back to the bus station. A three and a half hour bus trip followed, back into Spain again. We moved our clocks one hour forward and concentrated really hard on changing our ‘obrigado’ into ‘grazias’ again.

At 3pm we arrived in Seville and Jaimen gave us the option of staying there for a bit, even though it wasn’t officially on the itinerary. We ended up being in Seville for four hours – because it was 37 degrees and in the middle of Siesta time it was a bit of a ghost town. Still, I really liked it there – the little shopping streets, the flowers and trees, the cathedral, the old city wall. We spent sometime inside the big church and I dragged myself up the bell tower to see the pretty view. We also went to check out the palace which was beautiful – clichéd fairy-tale like, really ornate, covered in tiles and with its own little canal out the front. I really liked the town and would be keen to come back to spend some proper time there in the future.

    

At 7pm we were at the train station again, ready for some more travelling. This time it was an hour and a half train ride to Jerez – we arrived just after 9pm. Our stay over in Jerez is essentially just that – a stop over before we head to Morocco tomorrow. As such it wasn’t much of a surprise to find a quite run down unexciting town. We checked into our hotel and headed out to dinner at 10.30pm, working on a true Spanish schedule. Walking into the main part of town we discovered that this place is actually very cute and charming. We ate at a really beautiful dinner spot, outside amongst spindly trees, next to a lampost. The food was all very delicious, although Andy and I didn’t like this salmon coloured creamy pate thing so much. After eating a bit of it Jaimen told us it was “infected duck’s liver”…mmmmm. We arrived back to the hotel at around 12.30am to a very welcome bed – another big travel day tomorrow!