Sevilla Congresos Hotel Seville

... we all decided that the U.K. needs to change its border control! It wasn't fair. Other than that Gibraltar was really nice. We spent the first hour or so wandering around the town which is small and didn’t have much to do other than shopping but all I bought was a postcard. After that we met our tour bus and went up the rock. We stopped at this beautiful lookout and you could see Africa from one side and Spain from the other. It was super windy and it made ...

... is apparently common in Spain). After the tour, we climbed the Hiralda to see the view out over Sevilla, which was, naturally, beautiful and worth thousands of pictures. <br><br>We went down from the Giralda and continued on a tour of the Barrio de Santa Cruz, which is where Liz and I got lost earlier that day. We basically just rambled through the narrow, winding streets and got lost again, this time accompanied by another Fernando mumbling away in Spanish. We did see a statue of Don ...

... you would be wrong. If their is a TI (tourist Information) at the train station I always stop by bet the directions to my hostel and then hit the streets and hope that things go well. TI is usually really good, except in Spain. I have now been to 17 countries and the language barrier has not been a problem. Western Europe, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, all with no problems. Spain has defiantly been a struggle. I guess I was getting spoiled when it came to people speaking English ...

... missed out on a lot of photo opportunities. But i wandered down through some parkland to the Plaza De Espanya, a beautiful plaza with a big fountain in the middle and tiled walls featuring images from all the regions in Spain. Though some of them were in restoration the ones i did get to see were beautiful. Across the road was another park which i walked through to get down to the river, which winds its way through the city. I wandered along the banks back to the main part ...

... Spanish where a woman would present a very impressionist dance while keeping the beat with her feet and clapping or cusping her hand. The band in the background would play guitar, sing, jazz flute - etc. If anyone is interested in what it sounds and looks like, I recorded a short video of it on my camera, just ask when I return! So, that is Seville on a shoestring, laid back, great people, beautiful sights, it was honestly hard to leave this town, yet I had to see Barcelona ...

... there are the usual creepy reliquaries (not even spellcheck could help me there!) Personally the sight of a dead guy´s rib bone does not inspire me to greater heights of religious devotion. But each to their own. Seville is a quintessential Spanish city. Laid back and friendly. The only thing lacking is a decent beach. But we are making do with our tapas, terrace and sangria. I´m imagining the beach-which in in this heat isn´t hard to do! Finally the jeans and jumpers have ...

... to South America). Attached to the church is a the Giralda, a bell tower that was originally the minaret of the mosque (this cathedral was also built on top of an old mosque). The path to the top of the tower is a series of ramps that wind up to the top so that in the old days the guards could ride their horses to the top. Nowadays it's the tourists that follow that path. The bells at the top were redone sometime in the last few ...

... never live there fulltime, but I really hope I have an opportunity to spend time there. I miss the language! Spanish is a completely different challenge because I'm working on perfecting it, but Chinese was constantly a challenge just to communicate. In Spanish, it's rare I can't get my point across in one way or another. Sure, I hit a verbal roadblock with a vocab word I don't know or can't remember, and have to explain what it means, butI'm pretty good at saying, "Hey, do you have ...

... your Spanish. After we checked in, they put us in different classrooms and not with our intercambios. After a short talk in rapid Spanish (had no idea what was said), we played human bingo. There was a sheet with squares on them and each one had something on it like 'I was a girl/boy scout' or 'I am vegetarian' and then you had to go around and fill in people's names. It was pretty weird and in the last 2 minutes of the exercise, I found my assigned ...

... ending stairs that lead to the top floor of Plaza Nervion: the cinema. There is a film festival going on in Sevilla right now, and Cindy and I had planned to meet one of our friends named Robin at Nervion so we could see a movie together. The three of us decided on an English/Irish film called "True North" because it was in English (Give me a break, I watch Spanish movies nonstop!). We got snacks at the grocery store that is inside the mall, went back to the theatre and ...