Seville 6/15

Anna enjoying the ride to Seville



Seville is the capital of Andalucia which is the southern province/region of Spain. This is the location of the majority of the tourism to Spain as it is sunny and has many beautiful beaches. Seville is about an hour away from the coast.

Krystle’s cousins were real champs as we walked around all day and saw the Alacazar Palace, La Giralda, bull ring, and other boring historical sites. Krystle had a crepe and the rest of us dined on delicious fried fish, calamari, and shrimp!

Uncle Tim pointing out a replica of the Christopher Colombus's ship


Tapestry of Spain, North Africa, and the Mediterranean Sea.


The Garden at the palace




La Giralda, the church


Seville has the 3rd largest temple in Christianity (Catholic), called La Giralda. It is unbelievable! An enormous It also has the body of Christopher Columbus within it.
The cathedral was built in 12th century and its architects built quite an impressive structure. It also had a high clock tower that we walked up and I got great pictures of the city from the tower.

The tower






Inside la Giralda (the church)







Tower views








Christopher Colombus body inside La Giralda!




A then a now look from the clock tower.
Then


Now


I guess the real highlight of the day wasn’t even an ancient part of the city. It was that a portion of the road around La Giralda was marked off for shooting of the movie Knight and Day. We were unsure if they were refilming a scene or adding footage, but Diaz and Cruise were no where to be seen. However, when we were leaving Seville at the end of the day, there was a large group of people and cameras outside a hotel that they were at. We knew they were there because we saw them being interviewed on TV with Seville in the background. Perhaps they were doing a special advertisement for the movie in Seville to promote the use of the church, city, and country in the movie.

Plaza de Espana.

Costa del Sol

The Savianos and Krystle

This starts our time with my aunt, uncle and cousins. This is my (Krystle’s) mom’s brother, Uncle Tim, his wife, my Aunt Denise, and my cousins in order of age, Katie, Maddie and Anna. They live in Wisconsin, so we don’t get to see them much, and we love spending time with them, so this was perfect to meet up in Spain on one of their many travels around the world.

How precious!!


Monday we called Uncle Tim in the morning and he came over to check out our place and our beautiful ocean view.


After hanging out for a few minutes, we headed over to their hotel, the Marriott, which was about 15 minutes down the road from ours, to swim and relax. We just had a relaxing day spending time together, walked on the beach, and swam in the hotel pool. Then we headed to the close town of Marbella for dinner. Spanairds eat dinner anywhere from 8pm to midnight or later, so we tried to start getting on their time schedule. We walked around, saw some sights, took some pictures, then sat down at a tapas restaurant and all split some yummy tapas. Then after of course we got some ice cream (remember we are with Anna and she loves ice cream)

Uncle Tim and Anna


Pictures of Marbella


Just practicing my sand castle skills, what do you think?

La Alhambra

White washed cities in Southern Spain



Moorish Artisan work




So once we were set with the car we headed from Malaga to Granada to see the ancient Moorish stronghold called La Alhambra. Historically this was the last Moorish (Muslim) stronghold in Spain. (the other being the city of Ronda which we also visited). The Alhambra had been modified by each Moorish Sultan and even later on my the Spanish Kings. It was an impressive sight to behold and we spent about 5 hours there exploring the grounds. We saw the Sultan’s palace, church, beautiful gardens, and tall towers that had views of the entire valley. Additional portions of the fortress are still being restored, which also made it interesting when considering which parts of the fortress are seen as is and which are restored and are not the original stone and artisan work.

The fortress was a joy for me to see, because this was the last location of Moors in Spain. This fortress was conquered by the Spanish Christians (Ferdinand and Isabelle) the same year Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas in 1492. The Arabic influence can be seen parts of Southern Spain still today as many signs in the cities were in Arabic and Spanish. Though I don’t know how many people in Spain speak Arabic but it’s not totally surprising that an influence can be felt considering it has only been about 500 years since their removal.


View from a tower


Wall surrounding the city


The door is 5x as tall as Krystle!


A beautiful girl in a beautiful garden

A view of the main palace and fortress


Main church in Granada

First moments in Spain

This is us in the metro, when we left the airport to get to the bus station




Chaos of a day! Having arrived in Spain, with little sleep, we headed out to yet another brave new world! We stopped by multiple information desks obtaining various maps of the city, metro, county, and having acquired the best method of getting to our bus station we were now in search of an ATM. While in Costa Rica for whatever reason most of the ATMs would not except our debt cards. So we had a routine of stopping by a certain ATM in the mall to get our money. Luckily in Spain this has not been the case, as every ATM we have stopped at has worked. However, they practically only give out 50 Euro bills, which is extremely frustrating when a vendor/restaurant is annoyed that you don’t have any smaller bills, oh well..

So despite lacking energy, we now had Euros and maps for beginning our Spanish adventure. After getting change to buy a metro pass, we jumped on board our first metro. We had to change metros once, which was a maze in it of itself as we had to walk around one of the stops to get to the correct metro. It was my first metro ride ever, so it was quite fun!

Our final metro stop was our bus station and gave us a big sigh of relief as we were concerned that we would have to walk far to find our bus station. We checked in and were told we were set and now had 6 hours to kill before our bus left. We asked around if there was a bar and found a Irish bar to sit, eat lunch, and watch the US vs England world cup match!

It was a little cold and a small drizzle of rain welcomed us as we hurried back from the bar to the bus station. We were quite early and watched the rest of the match in a cafeteria in the bus station. Boarding our bus, we put on our eye covers (from our British airways flight from Miami to London) and tried to get some sleep on our 11pm bus ride to Malaga. We caught a little sleep and arrived in Malaga about 5am. From there, we found a taxi and headed to the airport.

When traveling abroad and probably even when there isn’t a language barrier, it seems like every taxi driver is ripping you off. There were two numbers on the meter in this taxi and unbeknownst to us at the time one was an extra fee for transport to/from the airport ($8 Euros!!!) So we haggled with the taxi driver for a bit and finally paid him, annoyed at feeling ripped off especially when we were tired from 2 days of little sleep.

It was just about 6am and we had about an hour and half to wait for our rental car company to open. When waiting for something you want, it’s definitely an eternity! So when it finally opened we were set, and headed off to Granada to see el Alhambra!

Last days in Costa Rica

Here is a cloud in our front porch

Some pretty sunsets!




After Charlene left us in Costa Rica, we had about 10 days left. We decided to spend them relaxing, reading, and searching for information for Spain. We went into town a few days to get some extra groceries for Spain, and spent some time with Bob and Deb, the people we were renting from. They are both very nice and gracious, and helped us out with a lot of things. Here is a picture of us with our adoptive grandparents, Bob and Deb.

Our friends, Caleb and Jerlyn came to visit us one more time, and we had a great Sunday with them, playing Phase 10, making yummy food, and just talking in Spanish. Jerlyn loves guacamole, so we made some more of it, and then had a dinner of pasta and salchichon (sausage).

Here is us playing phase 10


After our relaxing few days, we headed to the airport on Friday morning June 11th. We were very sad to be leaving our home for 4 months of Costa Rica. We had a great time, some great memories, and definitely plan on coming back in the future. Our journey to Spain consisted of a flight from Costa Rica to Miami, then Miami to London overnight, then London to Madrid. We landed in Madrid at about 3:30pm local time. And now begins our time in Spain…


Us with Bob and Deb, our hosts for the last month