Day 14: Adios Madrid, Hola Sevilla

We made it to the Estacion Sur de Autobuses (Madrid’s provincial bus station) for our 8AM trip to Sevilla. The sun was slowly rising as we made our way out of Madrid. In no time, the day was pretty hot and sunny and we were staring at the Spanish landscape as we made our 6 hour trip to Seville, in the heart of the southern Andalucia region of Spain.

The trip was pretty uneventful, and the landscape was lined with rows and rows of shrubs growing – what is it, olives? And solar panels harvesting the suns rays to turn into power. After a short stop midway at a convenience station in Cordoba, we finally found ourselves in the city of Seville.

I’m not sure what you know about Seville – but we were expecting a sleepy town with bullfighting, flamenco plus the sights that we heard about, just enough to fill a day’s worth of sightseeing. What we instead found was a medium-sized city complete with a huge suburban area, big-box stores outside of the city center, and lots of cars with the accompanying traffic. I guess this is the Sevilla the locals know – the one that the tourists do must just be a tiny slice of the city itself!

The bus dropped us off at the station in the middle of city, funnily enough at a road called “Avenida de Kansas City” (Kansas City Avenue). As lost as Dorothy, we had no idea where we were or where our hotel was, and the information desk proudly help up a sign that it offered no tourist information about Seville, and seemed to exist just to respond to every question that it offered no information about the city of Seville. Without a map or anything else to guide us, we just hopped on the nearest taxi and asked the driver to take us to the hotel.

We booked the hotel beforehand the same way we booked everything else – going on the Internet, looking through a list of hotels sorted by price, and getting the lowest one we see. It worked surprisingly well in Madrid, and in Seville we were even more surprised – for the price of a 2-star hotel, we were actually at a 4-star hotel! When we got to the room, we were really ecstatic to find a nice, large bed, TV, mini-bar (our first one so far – not that we’d use it), large cabinets, even a sofa and decent bathtub! Once we saw our good fortune, we promptly declared the day a rest day and extended our stay by an additional night. The sights would have to wait until tomorrow – we had to rest and catch up with our writings and research!

We had run out of clean clothes by this point, and even had to buy some cheap stuff from Madrid just to have something to wear on the trip to Seville. So we desperately needed a rest day to do the laundry, and figure out what to do during the latter half of the trip. Mench and I walked around the east side of Seville (Sevilla Este) trying to find a laundromat – we couldn’t find one – and doing groceries so that we could avoid eating out in restaurants to save money.

So Mench proceeded to use our wonderful bathtub as her laundry basin and washed our clothes and we ate our cheap snacks in lieu of a proper dinner, all in the comfort of our accidental 4-star hotel as we planned out the activities for the coming week ahead.

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