Granada Part 2

Ok so it's been a long time now since Granada but here's the rest of my experience in the fair city.

Granada is geographicaly a hard city to get around on foot. It's hilly, it get's hot easily. Even in Feb - by the middle of the day we were pretty hot. However there are plenty of bus routes you can take that makes visiting the various different places of interest easier. Our first stop in Granada was the the main square where we were told at the hostel that an American guy runs walking tours of the city starting at the fountain at 11.00am. We got there a few minutes before and the fountain wasn't running. Soon there was a young looking guy standing around with a leaflet held up in the air. We walked over and gradually a few others joined. We waited and talked a little - there were 3 other Americans and an Australian. The tour guide had been one of those never ending travellers who had come to Granada to study a little and decided he liked it so much he stayed. He'd discovered there were no walking tours offered to tourists so had decided to start one himself. The fountain was turned on and he takes this as his sign that no one else is going to show so we the small band of tourists set off.

Luckily for us our guide was not an average Joe. He had majored in Theatre and had literary and artistic tendencies. This, I'm pleased to say, was all incoorated in our tour. Whilst relaying certain interesting historical facts about Granada we were all invited to 'step back in time' in a certain impro, drama type way. As in we were invited to make funny noises and wave our arms around. If you're into something a little bit different (as I am) then this walking tour is definitely reccomended. We spent about 2 hours walking all over Granada, entertained and informed whilst also orientating ourselves.

The guy worked for tips and he took us to the best place with a view to get us to give. Believe me - no problem paying the guy. Completely reasonable rates and an excellent tour. Afterwards he invited everyone to go and have lunch together at some places he knew. Unfortunately, my American friend and I had a date with the Alhambra.

The Palace and grounds are weirdly marketed. They are separate areas to visit with different prices from free to expensive. Inside is what you have to book tickets for to gurantee your visit. On these tickets they give you specific times to go. Either a morning time or afternoon. However when we arrived at our aloted time, the wardens kept on asking for another time that was supposed to be our appointment. To this day I do not know what they were on about. It didn't seem to matter anyway. There was a long line to get into the Palace and once inside I was actually quite disapointed. The rooms we were directed through were fabulously old but there was no information anywhere about the rooms. All these questions kept on popping into my head like 'when was this built?' 'What was this room used for?' 'What King used this?' After a while I got so annoyed that I just started making up the answers myself.

I suggest you spend the extra money on an audio guide. As a British tourist I expect information on the place I'm visiting included in the price of visiting. And whilst the architecutre was fabulous and the gardens amazing to walk round, I just felt disapointed at not actually learning anything about what I had just been seeing. My American friend didn't seem to mind though.

We had also been tipped off at the hostel of a fabulous Flamenco and Dinner show up in the Sacremento hills. Apparently the stage had a backdrop of a window that looked out onto the Alhambra lit up at night. After a freshen up and quick nap, a group of us from the hostel decided to trek up there to it. However we were advised to arrive at a certain time to get tickets, we didn't. We got slightly lost and once we had arived after a long and arduous walk up a never ending hill, we were told that it had allready started and there were no tickets left. Well, eventually were told that by an unfriendly hilltop barman. There were alot of small groups of people hanging around, attempting to open slightly invisible locked doors. No one really knew what was going on and all seemed a bit lost even at the supposed destination.

We slunk back down to Granada central in two different taxis and miraculously met up again in a famed tapas bar just off the highstreet. There we had lots of lovely wine from a generous selection and of course, tapas. The place was packed with fabulously looking people. I was, in my backpacking I don't give **** how I look gear, slightly underdressed. But I didn't care. The high density of people just proved the brilliant atmosphere in the place and I was lapping it up. After the tapas, a girl in group decided that her boyfriend was at a much better place so dragged us all off there. Only she didn't know exactly where it was and again, we all got a bit lost. We eventually settled on a retro looking bar to sit down at. But by this time all the walking had taken it's toll and I was titbit tired.

I headed off to Hostel (proud of myself for finding it all by myself in the dark) and fell into bed to slumber well. The beds at the hostel were extremely comfortable even though the matresses were from Ikea.

Sunday coming up in Part 3

Granada Part 1

On a temporate Friday evening, after a sing song at Spanish University choir, my American friend and I set off for Madrid's Estacion del Sur to catch an overnight bus to Granada. The journey took 5 hours and my thrifty travel companion came up with the ingenious idea of travelling in darkness to arrive at our destination at 6:30am to give us more time visiting and less money spent on accomodation. We are both EFL Teachers and had commitments Friday and classes early Monday morning. Now, for reasons only 'The Bus Story' can explain (check for later blog entitiled thus and it will give relevant background) I am not overly fond of bus travel. It's almost always too cold, chairs are either unable to recline or refuse to keep position, passengers encorach on personal space and it's boring. But in the exploratative mode I am in here in Spain I was excited of seeing somewhere new and also was accompanied by a freind to make the boring bits pass more easily.


Estacion del Sur is a large, fairly sterile building in the south of Madrid. Reached by Metro, Cercanias or local bus it is fairly accessable, with informative big arrivals and departures screens. There are places to get cash out without being charged (if you have a Spanish account) which is important as the two places to eat do not accept cards. We arrived in good time at a little before 12am and after checking bus details with Alsa (the Spanish equivalent to the British bus company National Express) we headed straight for the only Cafe open and grabbed a stool, for it was unsually busy, to enjoy food before sleepy time on bus.


Once installed on bus we noted how awake we felt for eventual napping but really it was a good time to climb aboard. I don't think it would have worked in England because of the different attitude to night life the country has compared to Spain. 12am Friday night is about the time the youngens think about going to a club in this country. 12am London, let's say, is about the time Karl and Chantelle are feeling the effects of their Carling and Vodka/Redbull hits before getting kicked out of Chicago's in 2hrs time. So the night's pretty much over at 12am back home, but here, you feel comfortably normal; you could go out, you've just eaten, you could stay on a bus and think about sleeping in a couple of hours.


I have no problem sleeping in moving vehicles. I think this is due to my parents using the car as a moving cot when I was first born because we travelled up and down the country every weekend until I was 3. I've learnt to prepare myself for the cold of the bus by always bringing more layers than you think you need. However this particular journey was quite irregular. The heaters were on so high, and I was sitting right next to them on the window side, that I kept on waking up out of thirst! Luckily I have also learn't never to travel without a handy bottle of water.


We pulled into Granada at dawn, a little sleepy but suitably pumped for the long day ahead. We nicked a tourist map from behind a closed information booth (one has to be nifty in these situations) as we had no idea how to get to our first point of call - the youth hostel. The one we had booked was our third choice. The first was one I had got information of from my Official International Youth Hostels Guide 2007 (www.hihostelss.com is the offical global website). Unfortunately this was not avialble for our weekend. The next was one highly reccomended on www.hostelworld.com, Oasis Backpackers Hostel. With an attractive write-up on the site left by backpackers who have stayed there we were dis-heartened when they had no rooms available either. Third time lucky?- we managed to book a little known hostel named Mochi Guesthouse from the same site with just as good recommendations. However we were both had no idea what to expect.


And how greatful I was of no expectations when we finally reached the hostel. As the ancient front door creaked open, and my friend and I stepped up over the historical threshold, tired from being lost for 20 mins in the interesting but narrow lanes of the Albaicin in first light - what a delight it was to be welcomed by a traditional courtyard layout. There were two sunloungers seemingly waiting for summer in the middle, looked down upon by moorish slatted wooden window shutters and timber roofed walkways. In the common room where we were lead by the mother of the lady who owned the hostel, there were traditional foot cushions strewn about the place, a battered guitar propped up against the plain and unpainted walls. The absence of decoration in this ancient room only seemed to add to the purity of the environment and add to our pleasent surprise. A makeshift bar at one end of the room was being prepared for breakfast. Next door to this was a tiny loo. Now bathroom facilities in hostels are always a canctancourous point - but this loo, and I do have to point this out, was cleanly decorated, well fitted and neat. Always a bonus on your travels.

After a short doze on the sofa, and the formalities of booking in, we settled down to a breakfast of fresh fruit, bread and marmalade, teas and coffee. Although the coffee was only filter and went cold really easily - there was a microwave to warm it up. And I was in a lovely new city so I didn't care - I just needed some sort of caffeine hit after being on a bus for 5 hrs, walking for over 1 and about to walk a whole day more.

From Weymouth to Madrid

So its been exactly one year since I embarked on my voyage around the world without a plane and I think I should take a minute to relfect on what a year it has been. In short I have learn't that the Channel Islands do count as being abroad because my UK mobile network charged me foreign rates when making calls from Guernsey. Secondly Paris is much better with people who can speak French. Thirdly night trains from Paris to Madrid are not suitable for backpacks and lastly that Spanish food is much better cooked by a Spanish family mum.

So when I arrived here I was volunteering on the Spanish version of 'The Good Life' and what fun and games that was (refer back to April blogs). And the plan was to contiue doing this in other areas of Spain until the Summer when I went to Bennicasim festival. However one of the fist things I had to take into consideration when travelling was sudden unexpected changes to plans as my second WWOOF farm fell through. Desperate to get out of solitude I got the whole teaching English thing going in Madrid and moved here at the end of last May. Since then I have lived in three different flats and have learn't the art of the bin liner moving technique and living with only the bare necessities. I am still wearing the same clothes as I did on the Channel Islands with only three added items to my wardrobe since being in Madrd and coming from a room I had in Plymouth with two overflowing wardrobes - this is something to be commended.

Looking ahead quickly my plans have once again changed and I've cancelled Africa Overland for now due to lack of boats going to Oz. However I've found a thing called OzBus which is something of much the same formula as the African thing (converted bus for overland travel with specific group all mucking in on daily activites) and for less time speant on the road (Africa was 6 months, route to Oz about 3). We'll hopefully be travelling through several EU countries before hitting Pakistan and onto Thailand before reaching Darwin to continue down to Sydney.

I am hoping to explore the south of Spain from the end of May to end of August where I shall have decamped from this country ready to embark on a journey to the most southerly continent in the world by the end of August. And yes, hopefully I shall get back to London by any means other than plane (give or take a few sneaky trips inbetween for important social engagements and given I'm not going to be able to make such events for a couple of years after August, I think I deserve that).

So far away - still, remembering Vicky J

Last week I found out a friend of mine from Sixth Form had been killed whilst crossing a London road at a pedestrian crossing. She was hit by a car. Shortly after being admitted to hospital she was pronounced dead. Today her friends and family are gathering in her home of Stradbroke, Sufolk to remember what a bright, bubbly and incredibly talented young woman she was. The following is my contribute to her Celebration of Life.



You're not gone.
You're only hiding.
You must be.
You're my friend I'm having trouble finding.

You're still that bubbly thing.
I remember your awsome make-up tips.
You've still got great plans for the world.
How else can I explain this?

It must be that you're hiding.
Remember we sat together at Leavers Dinner?
I think there were 9 other tables.
Ours was the one reserved for winners.

I should ring you up today.
No, you're not answering.
It still feels like you're hiding.
To come to terms with that; I have to, is what I'm figuring.

And I don't know why the world still spins.
Because If I feel like crying.
I know you'd say something witty -
to cheer me up. See you're only hiding.

I'm grateful that I met you.
I'm not grateful that you're gone.
If you weren't hiding - think what the world would have seen,
How you could have helped, the things you could have done.

But I can't sit and wonder now.
If I do, reality will start sliding.
I'll chuckle at your cheeky ways.
Because it's as if as though you're hiding.

Of course you're in a hidden place.
I'm carrying pieces of you with me.
You're still a friend, sister, daughter.
I knew you as Ve.


Stuck in Madrid when all I want to be is somewhere else. For all those that loved her, to try and understand this is life and what has happened.

When it snows, it flurrys.

Well after the fun and games of the Christmas and New Year season, the January blues have well and truly kicked in. Everyone's back to work, well everyone except me who came back to Madrid to find my teaching hours have been cut by 80%. Oh the joys of living in an unchecked, dog eat dog industry such as English as a Foreign Language. Its rubbish. Im scraping toegether what I can find to pay the rent and cutting all social activities such as my beloved Curry nights with the girls. Oh and guess what - that financial storm that America made is just starting to blow over to Spain and the country's starting to take a battering. So job availability could go one of two ways; whilst the buisness world realises now more than ever that having Enlgish under their belt will help secure their jobs, if a company needs to make set backs - contracts with academies are going to be the first things that go.

So I find myself trauling through the back pages of 'In Madrid' magazine looking for academies to send my C.V. to with the same amount of hope and vague possiblity I clung to whilst looking for flats last September/July and May. It's all getting a tad boring now and having spent most of my time off back in London, living it up with my horrifically settled friends I can't help but wonder maybe I should try my luck there. Maybe this whole 'round the world without a plane challenge' thing just isn't worth it. I have spent the best part of a year trying to find details of freight liners that would take me from Cape Town to Australia after my African Overland experience. I thought I was a step away from getting it nailed when I made contact with a specialist agent called 'Strand' in London. Only they replied telling me Cape Town have stopped taking passengers in that direction. Again with the sarcastic oh joy, back to square one.

Friends though as supportive as they are, keep telling me how amazing it is doing what I am doing. Which I try not to fully believe because if I do I just get completely overwhelmed by the enormity of my task. The best thing to do I suppose is find more ways of getting through the immidiate problems that I face and hope the other logistical ones eek out in time.

Ps, word from a friend of a friend in London who works for a publicity team that has sometimes delt with Ewan McGreggor says that actually he puts on that whole family man image (the one I talked about in my last blogg) for the cameras. Apparently he took a stylist with him on 'Long Way Down' for the photo shoots and socially is a complete arse who sleeps with every female co-star he has. I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this tit-bit of information but I think I prefer to believe his nice 'actor turned real' image. And lets face it - I can. Hell, I don't know the guy.

Abono and a bit of Bono

"I'm not afraid of anything in this world.
There's nothing you can throw at me that I haven't allready heard.
I'm just tryin' to find a decent melody,
A song that I can sing, in my own company."

Lyrics courtesy of U2, listening to one of their later albums (the only one I know)one afternoon before catching the several trains to my English Classes south of Madrid.

I am a full working resident of Madrid now and all the signs are there. I have a season travel card called an Abono which lets me use the Metro, the busses and Cercanias which are local trains that connect the capital with the suburbs. The Abono is essential to the equipment of an English teacher as apparently the focus seems not so much on how many classes you have but where they are and how long it will take you to get there. The considered rule is if it takes longer than the class to get there then howabout nooooooooooooo. TEFLers should invest in a B1 for classes a little further away but worth it if 'block hours' or intensives. What ever those are I'm not sure I have coz I have to travel 30 mins south of the city from Atocha for 3 hrs of class Mon-Thurs which would be worth it would it not be for the following: They keep on changing my classrooms, sometimes I don't have one at all, sometimes I'm locked out of the area I'm supposed to be teaching in and I don't have any facilities at my disposable. I'm lucky if I can use the whiteboard baisicly. Which whilst nigling at first has now served to well and truly piss me off. Options are being considered.

The other sign that I am part of the urban system is that I have taken up the habit of going for Curry nights with the girls. It is one of the highlights of the week as somehow 5 mins after our international group has got together, our conversations decend into something that you might generally watch on Sex and the City - it's hilarious and I love hearing all the stories brought to the Indian table. Best place for random cuisine and an immense scene - Lavapies, Madrid. Go there, it's cool. The last place we went to was a small little colourful joint with old pictures of Ghandi and the Himilayers on the wall. It was extrememly hippy and had a lovely cosy atmosphere. Amongst the Indian dishes they offered were Thai and proclaimed 'European' dishes also.

As I am now officially a commuter again, I am getting through an awful lot of books. I'm finishing off at the moment 'Long Way Down' by Ewan McGreggor and Charley Boorman. I watched parts of their journey back in March when I was staying on Guernsey. There is an immense sense of adventure with those two that somehow for me became all the more real with the insight into the workings of a famous 'celebrity'. There I was watching (reading now) a guy I ascociate with 'Trainspotting' and fancied in 'Moulin Rouge' talking about how fascinated he was with the African landscape, how moved he was at landmine injured children, how frustrated he was with the road conditions and how dedicated he was to his wife and daughters. This wasn't an article in Hello magazine saying 'newsflash' Ewan McGreggor loves his wife - this was an insight into a celebrity's life and mind. Something we as the public aren't privy too although we are under the constant impression that we are. Apparently we know everything about them, we know who they are, who their familly is and what they do thanks to the constant barage of photoinfo we are subjected to. But we know nothing about them and have no right to either. They're famous because they are good at something and we should be satisfied with that - not famous for the way they live their life and who they live it with. What I am left with is the incredible respect I have for Ewan McGreggor by the touching ties he has with his familly and friends (and a little bit of laughter when I see his fragrance ad) but I long for the same sense of adventure now.

When in Guernsey, my friend who was my host, and I imagined how amazing it would be for us to go riding deep into nowhere we've known before and how we'd manage. But that excusrsion I think is saved for another time at the moment. Now though, working for the weekend, feeling a little bit trapped in the city, I crave something to make the weekly rat race worth while. Geographiclly I find Madrid very closed-in anyway. To the north we have the mountains and south becomes a bit of a waistland. But I know the landscape here has so much to offer, especially compared with Britian. Even the sky here looks wider than in the U.K. A couple of weeks ago I was all set up to enjoy what the mountains had to offer in an excursion with my fellow TEFLers named 'Treetop Adventure'.

We were off to an obstacle course set high in the trees of a National Park north west of Madrid. I was extreemly looking forward to it - it had been a long time since I'd done anything physical and it was just what I needed to get me out of the concrete and into the green. Everyone was aprehensive about the heights we'd have to overcome but I didn't share their concerns, at first. My reasons were that I seemed happy enough to the chance of a group outing and that I was always doing this kind of thing as a kid and I enjoyed it then. We arrived to get kitted out with harnesses and clips I'd worn a thousand times before but then slowly my attitude towards the activity started to change. The catalyst was a small expectation of mine - that there would be monitors on the stations in the trees to make sure we doing things correctly. Guess what - this is Spain and Health and Safety isn't really much of a concern out here. It started a quiet aprehension in me. After signing my life away to not sue them if..., we underwent a 10 min training session. 5 mins on what to clip on to what wire and which way it should go and 5 mins of going round a dummy 3 station course not 2 metres of the ground. There was a big group of us and it seemed to take ages for all of us to get through.

Lining up I was one of the last to go. I had deliberately placed myself there - the course was obviously single file and we were only allowed 3 people to a station and I did not enjoy the thought of having a backlog of people waiting to go if I was going at a speed they didn't like. I was managing quite well, my initial concerns were with clipping myself into the correct places in the correct way and crossing the wire and getting off the zip wire was whilst a little bit cumbersome not impossible. I trundled off to the real thing, the least challenging course out of several inc. one marked 'extreme', with a small section of our party. I was in a nice order, right in the middle - there were people I could follow but people behind me so I was not the one 'trying to keep up'. Suddenly the height hit me - shit. I'm not feeling too safe up here I thought, even though of course I was strapped in to everything properly. The rope was wobbly, the wooden planks were shaking, the possiblities of what I thought I could physicially achieve were being challenged. A constant internal dialogue was going on: I'm not a screamer, I don't voice my fears I just get on with it. I thought, 'why does this seem so hard, I used to do this kind of thing so easily, I must keep on going, I can do it.'

There were people at the back of the line that were seriously struggling and those that were in front decided to hang back at certain stations to help them along. The change in line lead to me being in front. For some reason it was extrememly unsettling to me to be put as 'leader'. There was no one in front showing the way, it was all down to me - if I did it wrongly - the consequencs could be dire. At this point my only thoughts were of sort of stopping this and getting off the ride. I felt assured that most of the others were thinking of doing the same thing. We noticed an escape ladder ahead - and I focused on that. It didn't seem like the end but I got down anyway, relieved on firm ground. However the rest of the group decided to go on. A monitor came up to me and told me I could go back up the ladder if I wanted but by this time, the wobbly group had established a sort of pace and the idea of me trying to insert myself into that when already feeling shaky didn't appeal. I just kept on thinking if I could do it in my own way, at my own speed, with none of them being part of my own challenge then I could get through.

I hung around until they completed the course and some of them were scared but happy they'd completed it and some of them were less scared than they thought they would be but happy they'd completed it and then there was me. This great pretender - coz I felt nothing of what they were talking about. It was one of the group's comments about this trip being a great team-building exercise that made something click inside me. It wasn't the hieght, or the swing rope, or the zip wire that was the challenge for me - it was being in that unavoidable line of people and doing this thing as a group. Because I couldn't cope with their way of doing things, I couldn't physically fit in to their system. And I thought well if I can't do that - how am I supposed to cope going around the world all by myself - being away from my friends for so long, from a familiar support network? How am I supposed to survive if I can't stay on that hard narrow course and not automaticlly look for an exit sign?

I have ALOT to sort out in terms of funds for my overland trips, sea voayages budgeting time in OZ and USA, itinaries, back-up support before I attempt to move on. I needed to leave Britain so much I just sort of upped and left without really planning anything. But I had my ideas and I'll stick to those, they just need morphing now to fully work.

Coming back to Madrid in a People Mover I passed wonderful scenery from the countryside. I love those views, they're what I came to see. But it always seems to be at those times that I am just a passenger with someone else in the driving seat. Somehow I have to take control of the wheel.

"I never thought you were a fool but darling look at you.
Cause tears are going nowhere, baby.

Don't say that later will be better cause you're stuck in the moment.
And now you can't get out of it."
But I will.

Short and sweet...

I haven't got much to say at the mo so I'll make this short. This is probably best, I do have a tendency to go on a little. All my friends are getting married, or at least all my Facebook friends are. I know this through their facebook status. You know when they change from being 'single' to 'in a relationship' to 'engaged' with all the congrats wall posts that come along with it. Then finally (in Facebook terms) the 'married' status. This is followed up by more congratulatory wall posts from close friends who couldn't make it and those who found out too late and wondered why they didn't get an invite.

But it has come to my attention that there is a flaw in the Facebook profile status setting. The choices are 'single' for those who are ok to state that and leaving it blank for those who feel sad by not having a partner. The step up is 'in a relationship' and one can choose another Facebook contact to be in a relationship with. This is usually a defining moment in a young relationship and comes with connotations of a girl being freaked out by the speed in which the guy has announced their relationship or the guy being freaked out by the declaration. Then there's 'engaged' and 'married' for people who really know they love each other or, annoyingly, for those female best friends. Then there's two more strange additions, 'it's complicated' and 'in an open relationship'. I put down 'it's complicated' once and one of my friends demanded to know who was the guy I was referring too. It was no one in particular, just the general description of all my relationships.

But in a world where most people who get married in their twentys WILL be divorced by their late thirties I see no Facebook status option of 'divorced'. It seems to me they've missed a vital demographic here. Or maybe Facebook users are all under 35? Maybe they could argue that no one in their right mind would like to share the fact that they're divorced but my argument is this: When greeting card manufacturers are producing 'Congratulations, you're divorced' cards I see no reason why this status should not be included as an option.

Some friends of mine have recently changed their relationship status to one of being married to each other and this is what popped up on my Facebook Homepage "...made a lifetime commitment to one another, and let everyone on Facebook know." Note: Lifetime Commitment. So we're all aggreed - we all still believe Marriage is 'till death do us part'. I believe this may be a reflection of how the world likes to see marriage as opposed to the reality of it. The engagement phase and wedding is a magical time, special, when two people who love each other join together (sometimes in front of God even though they don't believe) in official matromony. Except people fall in and out of love with each other all the time. What makes a precious metal ring on a finger mean it's going to last forever? I think the vows should be changed to 'in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer, for however long we feel like it...' None of this forever sharade.

If we all just accept the option that marriages don't always last forever then I think that the meaning of a marriage wouldn't feel like such a sham. I do love the dresses though, and the cake, and the flowers. I'll probably get married one day just to have a good party. I dream of a world where I might be able to get away with the line "Great wedding, can't wait for your next one." and where the Facebook Homepage states 'Bob Jones has changed his relationship status from Married to Divorced.' Wall post reads 'Congrats on the divorce Bob, I never liked her anyway.'