Sevilla so far

I feel like I can breath a real sigh of relief in many ways. It feels really good to finally have caught up on this blog. I wish I could be caught up on posting pictures as well, because I am a bit worried that after being so many places in such a condensed period, I will forget what was where. But I don't seem to be able to upload stuff on the internet center computer, so it will have to wait, and I'll have to think of other things. Shouldn't be too hard.

I'm now on my fifth day in Sevilla. To be honest, I haven't done all that much since I got here. Sunday I unpacked, did some preliminary exploring of the town, met my landlady Virginia who:

a) has a cat
b) doesn't speak a word of English
c) lives in the apartment with the rest of us
d) smokes
e) talks to her cat a LOT
f) seems very nice, even though she has posted lists of rules all over the house.

I also met the other cohabitants of the apartment. They are two eighteen year old girls from the Netherlands (which they just refer to as Holland, which I prefer, but didn't think we were allowed to do anymore). Their names are Paola and Linda. They are both taking a 3 month language course here. They're very nice, although sometimes they prefer to talk to each other in Dutch than to me in English, or locals in Spanish (but who can blame them really?). My first night they invited me to join them at the birthday celebration of one of the other girls from their program. We had more tapas! (I ordered this really nice fried eggplant thing with honey). It's great that they are so friendly and inclusive, it will make the next few weeks less lonely.

I slept early hard and long my first night in my new bed. In the morning, I said to myself, "Ok Tinkle. You're in Spain. Now write!" And I did, a little. So that was nice. I haven't written much since, but maybe a similar tactic will succeed again. I also went grocery shopping, in that I'm-an-independent-adult-who-is-going-to-eat-at-home-for-a-while kind of way. A way I have never shopped before. It was kind of cool and exciting. No, I didn't buy any vegetables, unless you count tomato sauce (that tastes like ketchup), but you can't really hold that against me. I'm on a strict budget here!

A good portion of my quest the first few days I was here was finding stuff to read, stuff to write with, and places to use the internet. I must say, this trip has been a real eye-opener to me in terms of how dependent I've gotten to be on computers. Not having them, or needing to pay for them, and carefully track my use of them will do that. I don't like to think of myself as someone who spends that much time on computers, or needs them much. But they help a lot with keeping in touch with people, writing, and finding out about/organizing fun interesting things to do, which are all things that ARE important to me. But I'm trying to strike a good balance between using computers when I really need or want to, and occupying myself other ways the rest of the time.

I've been able to read for pleasure a lot on this trip, and that's been great. It's been a while since I had the time and motivation. But I guess not being in school makes that much easier. Plus spending all the time on trains. Unfortunately, I have already gotten through the 3 books I brought with me (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Alphabet -a book of Danish poetry, and Crime and Punishment), as well as the ones I have picked up/borrowed along the way. Paola had a couple English books in her room that she lent me, but they are both how-shall-I-politely-say...not heavy lifting. Which is sort of more what I'm in the market for at the moment.

So I've been looking for bookstores with selections of English books (harder to find than you might think). Unlike much of the rest of Europe, most people in Sevilla don't speak any English at all. Spain and France have sort of remained islands of linguistic integrity. I think it's kind of cool. But it does make living here a bit more challenging for me. I am definitely going to try to pick up as much Spanish as I can, but knowing my limited ability with languages, I am not expecting a miracle of fluency.

Yesterday I had a great triumph: I joined the public library. It took me a few days to work up the energy to find it and check it out, but it was well worth it. They have computers with internet you can use for free, they have a decent collection of English books, they have English-Spanish dictionaries, they have books like Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia that I can read in Spanish because I know them by heart, and they let me join for free! I'm sure I posed a strange candidate with my Spanish-illiteracy, my US passport and UK phone number, but I had a Sevilla address, and I guess that's all you really need. So now I'm restocked with reading material.

I also had a good near-death adventure on Tuesday. It doesn't translate that well as a story, so suffice it to say it involved getting lost and highways. I'm just always impressed by my special ability to change an ordinary day into a basic struggle for survival.

Wednesday I saw David Castillo and ate some pastry. It was nice to see a fellow Brownie! However, he was between trips to Portugal and Germany, so I won't see him again until next week. I also went into a hidden bar where local acts perform and do flamenco dancing for free! I have to say, the woman who was dancing was one of the ugliest people I have ever seen. It was quite ironic--you usually expect dancers to be, well, attractive. She also seemed extraordinarily unhappy and unplesant and unfriendly. But she was talented. I couldn't see her feet, and I really wish I could have, but the guitarist, singer, dancer combo and the incredible clapping and sense of rhythm were all very impressive, and felt like a good dose of real Spanish culture.

And that's pretty much what I've been up to so far. I'm hoping to catch some of the Sevilla Film Festival tonight, and I've been exploring the city a lot, trying to get a feel for it. From everything I've observed so far, Sevilla was a really good choice. The weather is pretty ideal, as is the size of the city, straddling the interesting-manageable continuum admirably. I'm looking forward to a relaxing few weeks. :)

Barcelona on

I should probably explain that at the same time that I was experiencing all this travel exhaustion and being burnt out by tourism, I was also pursuing a lead on an apartment in Sevilla, Spain. A few weeks ago I (or rather my mother, on my behalf) put an ad on craigslist saying that I was looking for a short-term lease in Morocco or southern Spain. This was always one of the important if half-baked pieces of my plan for this trip. I suspected that I would be tired of living out of a suitcase, hostals and other people's homes by the time November rolled around. I also suspected that I would want to retreat to a land of warmer weather. I also thought it would be a really cool experience to try actually living in a foreign country, as opposed to just passing through. That way I would get a really different perspective, and I could say I'd lived abroad. ;)

I wasn't sure when I headed out of Bosnia if anything like this would actually pan out. But as I was frantically trying to decide what to do with myself on a day to day basis, I was also reading a few responses to the craigslist post, some of them basically offering exactly what I wanted. The one that really caught my attention was through a company called HolaSevilla. They run a language program here, but they also set up accomodations and you can take one without the other if you like. The housing is for short stays, 2-12 weeks, exactly what I was looking for. The price was reasonable. So I went for it. I made the deposit my first night in Barcelona, as I was already making my way there.

I arranged to stay in a shared apartment in Sevilla for three weeks, from Nov. 8-29. More on that later. First, Barcelona.

It was pretty sweet. It was the first place I'd been in a while where it no longer felt like winter was approaching, which wins a lot of points in my book. The sun was shining, and there were palm trees everywhere, and lots of people outside. My first stop was absolutely a hostal with a shower, after all that train riding and wearing of the same outfit. After that I went a-wandering, and nervously entered a tapas restaurant. Nervous because I don't really understand tapas, and I didn't want to do it wrong. I wasn't sure how many items I should order, how big or filling they would be, etc. But it worked out. And it was yummy! Then I went and spent a few hours at the Picasso museum. Even with my relative apathy toward museums, and aversion to spending money, this was something I knew I wanted to do. I've always been into Picasso (and other off-beat artists and creators), and especially after finishing Gertrude Stein's book about chilling with him and the rest of the Lost Generation in Paris, I was pretty pumped about it. It was solid.

I also went to the Miro museum while I was in the city. I felt kind of the same way about Miro as I did about Picasso. He's kind of a crazy genius, doing something at the same time unsettling and hilarious, and that appeals to me. I just became aware of his existence last year, and it was nice to check out some more of his weird and wacky Spanish stuff. I think there's something about Spain that allows it's artists to use bolder colors. And you know me. I like colors.

Spain is, unfortunately, a big offender in the realm of mandatory Eurail reservation fees. But I managed to minimize them as much as possible by taking 13 hours to get from Barcelona to Sevilla instead of like 4-6. I took yet another night train on Saturday 11/7, but with the happy knowledge that it would be my last train of any kind for a while. Sunday, I found my way to my apartment in Sevilla and completely unpacked my backpack for the first time in 2 months.

It's raining. I'm going to Spain!

I was ready to leave Venice when my 5 hours were up. Shortly thereafter, I got on a train to Florence. I got to Florence in the evening, and still didn't know where I would sleep. I meandered my way to an internet cafe, got on Hostelworld.com and found a pretty reasonably priced place that ended up being totally great. It's this semi-chain, the main one was the Emerald Palace and I made my way there first. They had this awesome elevator, one of the really old kind with a metal grill you open yourself. The kind in old movies. Nice. But I wasn't destined to stay there, they sent me back to one of the other locales. Still really cool, with lots of fun Aussies and Americans and other people and computers with free internet access. The staff was really good too. I ended up staying there a second night last minute, because I thought I would take an overnight train to Barcelona, but then they wanted me to pay 57 Euro for the tickets even though I have a Eurail pass, so I ditched that plan.

Because I decided last minute to stay an extra night in Florence, they almost gave me a private double room! They were worried they wouldn't have enough dorm beds, but they were going to give it to me for 20 Euro, instead of the 13 it would cost for a regular bed or the 35 it would usually cost for the room. In the end though some of the other people who came later agreed to take the double, and I got my public bed and lower price. I thought it was cool how flexible and accomodating the staff of the hostel was though.


I explored Florence a bit the one full day I had there. I went to a few of the big old churches. One of the less famous ones was shockingly beautiful on the inside. The really famous one was kind of boring on the inside and there were MILLIONS of tourists, but there was this really cool crazy painted dome you could climb up to if you paid, which I didn't. I felt about Florence kind of the way I did about Venice. It was pretty, it was obviously very old, there were definitely a lot of great pieces of art hanging around, but it didn't really feel like a place I needed to spend much time especially with a non-existant budget. Maybe I'll go back some time and see the David and some Leonardo's and all that, but not this go round.

I left Florence early Thursday morning. I spent a good chunk of that day riding trains toward Nice. The route was pretty much right along the Mediterranean, and the views were beautiful and awesome, except that we went through a shit-ton of tunnels, so they were intermittant. In the early afternoon, the train stopped in Genova, Italy and I finally got to experience a bit of the country free of rain. I went down to the waterfront, where there was this huge kind of Disney looking pirate ship. I'm not sure what it was there for, but it made me smile. There was also a big statue of Christopher Columbus, which I thought was a little random.


I made it to Nice around 4 or 5 pm and I booked a night train to Barcelona that would be leaving around 10. I decided it wasn't worth it to check my backpack at the station, since the luggage area closed at 7 anyway, so I wandered around for most of the evening with it on my back. I walked to the water and dipped my feet in the sea, but instead of sand the beach was made of little pebbles and it wasn't that nice. I saw the sun set, but after that I was wandering around in the dark. I had a truly delightful and delicious dinner of my sweet chocolatey crepe, but after that I started descending into a completely irrational frame of mind.

There have been a few times during this trip when I have become vaguely obsessive about not spending money. It's been pretty muted when I have been staying with people, or rather it's been less of an issue. When I don't need to pay for lodging and mostly don't need to pay for food, and I need to pay much less for transportation because I'm staying in one place, it's pretty easy to stick to a travel budget of 100 dollars per week. Once I got cut loose and needed to pay for hefty train reservation fees, lodging, food, internet and phone use and any kind of entertainment, that budget quickly became unreasonable. But I sort of kept trying to stick to it anyway, which meant that every time I paid for food I got stressed out, and I felt too guilty to do anything like go into museums.


I realized later that this was pretty silly. I came to Europe to see and do things and have experiences, and as long as I have more than 50 dollars in my bank account, I really shouldn't be starving myself, literally or experientially. So what if I come back poor? I can always make more money, right? But anyway, the amount of travel, moving around, making decisions about which city, country and bed to sleep in in that intense pocket of days added up to make me go a little crazy while I was wandering around Nice. I also didn't have a map and got worried I wouldn't find my way back to the train station. But eventually I did, I got on my night train, and I tried to relax.

The night train could have been better. I was in a pretty uncomfortable reclining seat, directly behind me there was this guy who was talking on a cell phone for HOURS, and I think there was a crying baby too, though that may have been one of the other trains. I managed to scrape a little sleep anyway. I had to transfer trains in Toulouse early in the morning, but I also got to eat a croissant or two and brush my teeth, and my mood improved. Then, at last, Friday morning I was on a train to Spain.

Fine dining- of a kind

In a 24 hour period, I had a foccacia bread sandwich in Genova, Italy for lunch, a nutella crepe in Nice, France for dinner, a croissant in Touluse, France for breakfast and tapas in Barcelona, Spain for lunch. Although this fact in itself is what I would classify as "badass," it also reflects my completely insane lifestyle from last week.

I left Bosnia in the early afternoon on Monday 11/2. I spent the following 24 hours getting to Venice, first on a long bus ride to Zagreb, Croatia where I had a layover, and then on a night train from there. On the bus, the man sitting next to me clearly wanted to engage me in conversation, but I didn't even know enough Bosnian to tell him I didn't speak the language. He eventually figured it out (I tend to become a mute in countries where I don't know the language, because I don't like admitting more than I need to that I am foreign and ignorant), and then he resorted to offering me these dark, sweet vaguely-licorice flavored candies for the rest of the trip. It was pretty cute.

In my compartment on the train there were two French guys and an Italian, all around my age. I could have tried to talk to the French guys, or spent more time eavesdropping on their conversation, but I decided to try to get some sleep instead. I figured I would need the energy when I got to Venice. I did talk to the Italian a little, in English. He was very nice, and gave me some recommendations of where to go in Italy (Milan, his town, Lucca, a small university city, later seconded by another traveller, and some other similar place I forgot the name of). I didn't end up going to any of them yet, but hopefully I will later on the trip or on another. He also lent me his jacket to use as a pillow. He also happens to be a music critic for Vogue-Italia, which I think is pretty flipping cool, considering he's literally a few weeks out of university.

So I got to Venice around 7 am on Tuesday. I didn't have a plan of how long I would stay or where I would sleep, I kind of thought I would take a night train out, probably to Florence, if such a thing existed, so I could avoid paying for a hostel, which were more expensive in Venice than I had found in London and Budapest (the only places I have needed to use them thus far). I stored my bag at the train, and they charged a flat rate for the first 5 hours, so I figured I might come back to the train station 5 hours later and reevaluate my options.

Sadly, it was raining when I got to Venice. It hasn't rained too much on my trip, but it is kind of a big damper to my plans and spirits. It's nice to be inside when it's raining, to be somewhere warm and cozy with a book or a movie or a friend and a cup of tea. It's a lot less fun to be randomly roaming an unfamiliar city by yourself, looking for interesting things and inpsiration.

My first impression of Venice was that it was a very wet place. It is anyway. In the place of main streets, there are canals. Often when you follow a winding street for a little while, you dead end at a canal. Then with the rain, the sky was wet, and the ground flooded. They put down all these duckboards (I think that's what they call them?) and the famous plaza was like a giant wading pond. It was kind of cool and quirky and interesting, but it was also very wet.

It was also in Venice that it started to dawn on me in a big way that I'm not really cut out for proper tourism. When it comes down to it, I don't care that much about seeing popular famous places and things and going to museums. I like to be in places where no one is trying to sell me anything, and I vicerally object to places where the opposite is true. So Venice wasn't really my cup of tea, even though it is a really unique place that is fun to explore and look at.

...I've decided to break this up into more manageable chunks, because it's going to be long. See next installment coming soon!

Bosnia, at last

I ended up spending an entire week in Sarajevo, and each day more popped into my head to say about it. I really really loved Bosnia. I am a bit conflicted about telling the world this, because one of the things I liked best about it was how unspoiled it was by tourism. I guess I'm kind of a hipster that way. I like travelling, but a place is really only cool when I am the only one who knows how cool it is. It's just that a place feels more authentic when it isn't trying to sell itself to you, it's just being itself. On the other hand, it's selfish of me to keep Bosnia to myself when its economy and government are in such shambles and could probably benefit from the profits tourism bring. But I can't help it anyway, so it's a moot point.

I was staying with the Luftman-Kleinwaks family. Eric Luftman was friends with my dad in college and he and his wife Elise are both in the US foreign service, and they just started their 2 year post in Sarajevo a few months ago. They have two daughters Gavi (almost 13) and Sarit (just turned 8). They were a fantastic family to stay with and I was genuinely sad to leave them! I sort of felt like I could stay there forever and just become part of the family posted there. :) I bonded with the girls, even though they started out calling me Miss Tinkle and eventually shifted to Miss Shana when I told them they didn't need to address me so formally. I've never felt like such a grown-up! It was a bit trippy. Gavi made dinner for the 3 of us the first night and a half I was there, so I was shamed into cooking for them shortly thereafter. It pretty much never happens that I cook at all, let alone for other people, so that made me feel a bit like a grown up too, but in a good way. It was just spaghetti though. Any fool can cook spaghetti. :P Still, it's the first step.

They both reminded me a bit of myself, in different ways. Gavi and I have really similar taste in books. Her room was festooned with excellent fantasy novels with a few things like Freakonomics and Three Cups of Tea sprinkled in, lest we should forget how smart and knowledge-hungry and precocious she is (hard to do). Sarit, on the other hand, is a crazy little ball of energy, who will not be told what to do but is very good at turning the cannon the other way. Pretty hilarious.

As for the country, each day unleashed new surprises and joys. It was totally unlike anywhere else I've been, especially on this trip in Europe. There were mosques everywhere, for one thing, which I found really beautiful and awesome, especially since they're so foreign from my day to day experience. They were also mostly built in the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s to add to their aesthetic and historic value. One of my favorite moments was when I took an expansive walk into the hilly neighborhoods of Sarajevo on my fairly foggy second day, when suddenly the iman's call to prayer came wafting up to where I was from miles below. It was quite magical and surreal.

Sarajevo's old town is a joy. It feels like a very different world, sort of the way I imagine Turkey and Morocco and parts of the Middle East look and feel like. There were all these little bazaars and shops, and there were also all these metal-workers tinkering away at these beautiful crafts they make. And they drink this crazy kind of coffee out of these weird little containers- hard to explain, but it's really sludgy with grounds and bitter and they put lots of sugar cubes in it and serve it with Turkish delight. Needless to say, one cup had me pretty well wired.

Probably my favorite day in the area was the one when I took a walk to the Skakevac waterfall. The waterfall itself was pretty small and not THAT impressive, although it was lovely and interesting. The walk there wasn't fun so much as intense and strenuous. I felt like I was battling a deadly foe, intent on my doom. There must have been about 100 trees lying directly across the path I was trying to follow in the wet, muddy, slippery forest, and each time I came to one I needed to figure out a way over under through or around it. It was no easy task, and I learned that my new shoes, sturdy LL Bean walking shoes though they are, don't tread that well, especially on wet wood. I fell hard and often and I was wet, muddy and scratched up, and very tired and hungry and cold, by the time I finally emerged from the woods. I wasn't always sure I would, but I reigned victorious in the end. I should add also that I did not see another soul the whole 3 hours or so I was in the woods. I did meet a friendly Dutch couple on my way in, but they decided they weren't sturdy enough for it. A few minutes after they left, it began to hail. I pressed on.

When I finally came out of the woods, I met a fellow who was parking his car at his house near the start of the path. He said he had seen me on my way into the forest a few hours earlier. I remembered waving to a man in a car, and assented. He said, ¨Come in and have a drink.¨ I eagerly accepted.

Some of you might be thinking that it is unusual for strangers to invite other strangers into their homes in such a fashion, and that it is unwise to accept such offers when they are proferred. In this case, I had no such concerns. I had read in the LK's guidebook that this is part of the Bosnian culture- people are very friendly and hospital and often invite you into their homes and give you drinks and sometimes food. Having read this, I was really eager to experience it for myself. And indeed, I got my chance. The man (whose name was Dragon) brought me inside and I hung out with him and his German girlfriend Hannah for about an hour and a half. I drank two cups of typical Bosnian coffee and later a cup of tea. They also had me take off my wet socks and shoes and put on some of theirs and dry mine by the woodstove while I was there. It was totally awesome.

On the weekend, my last two days in the country, I went on some family adventures with the LK's. Saturday we went to the town of Mostar, where there is a famous old bridge (that was destroyed during the war, but later rebuilt, unlike much there which is still looking bad), another Old Town, (somewhat more touristy) and supposedly one of the newest UWCs, though I didn't spot it. Sunday I took my first ever horse and carriage ride in this pretty park near Sarajevo, and also tried roasted chestnuts. In those two days I also tried nearly all the traditional Bosnian cuisine. It's very meaty and fatty, and although I'm glad I tried it, I don't miss it too much. The same does not hold, however, for my hosts and the country itself. It was a really lovely week.