Saturday February 2, 2008
At 6:15am the alarm clock went off and I did not want to get out of bed. After finally pushing myself to move, I headed to the bathroom to shower. Breakfast preceded my cold shower and I was off to start our trip to Cadiz. We collectively threw together sack lunches and headed to the bus stop. I’m going to conquer this bus system even if it kills me. We hopped onto the C1 bus headed for the train station. Our train left at 9am but we didn’t know how early we needed to be in the station before we left, so we planned in about an hour of extra time. While waiting for our hour to go by we spotted a group of guys dressed up in neon yellow suits (I call them the highlighter people) that were also going to Cadiz. They asked me to take their picture so I did to kill some time. We quickly learned that we had tourist class tickets without assigned seats so it was up to us to get onto the train and find a seat. Thank goodness we did because we would have been standing for 2 hours if we hadn’t. We finally arrived in Cadiz at about 11am and we were off to find Carnival. We didn’t have any maps with us so we took a picture of the huge map board in the train station as a reference if we needed it later. We head towards the city and to our surprise we stumbled upon Carnival! It was a lot of people dressed in crazy costumes, venders (kind of like at the fair but with better food, cheaper prices, and more teeth), lights and chaos. We walked around for a bit and then went on an adventure up a road, when we happened upon…the Mediterranean Sea. It was gorgeous, bottom-line. There is a large stonewall about two feet wide that borders the water. We were up high but we decided that it was a perfect place to indulge in our sack lunches. We took a few pictures and then decided that we were going to come back to Cadiz at the end of February to go to the beach, which we could see just up the road. After we were done eating we decided to walk up the coastline. On our way, Sam spotted some ancient Roman ruins so we decided to explore. There was a lady at the entrance who gave us brochures and we headed down the stairs to join up with the tour (in Spanish) that had just begun. We got to go down inside the old Roman theatre and ruins into a set of underground tunnels and rooms, one of which was used as a jail cell for Christopher Columbus back in the day. The best part was that it was a lot of culture and it was all for free! We headed back into the center of Carnival and decided that we were overdue for some ice cream. We got our cones and headed to the Cathedral stairs. Apparently the stairs are where all of the groups of people and young people gather to hang out and drink. I have never seen so many people drinking from bottles. They don’t have an open bottle law during festivals, so it was somewhat of a free-for-all. Some where in there a group of guys tried to stop me and guess where I was from because of my blonde hair. They guessed Poland, Switzerland, and Germany before I could walk away from their chaos. I was kind of happy that for the first time someone didn’t distinctly pin me as an American. After our ice cream was gone we walked around some more to warm up and then decided to stop at a café called “Catedral” (Cathedral) for drinks. While we sat and talked I got out the face paint and I painted Allison and Sam’s faces. After sitting for a while two old men, who were probably in their 70-80’s, came up to us and wanted to take pictures with us. We learned that these men were actually from Seville (small world) and we chatted with them for a while. After traveling the entire city to find a bathroom, they don’t believe in public facilities here, we finally found some nasty port-a-potties to use. We walked around and looked at shops some more and decided to stop at “100 Montaditos” for mini sandwiches. As we were walking out of the store we ended up running into Kathy and Jackie, 2 students from our program, and we went to talk with them for a while. While we sat on the steps talking there were these 3 guys in neon Afros that kept trying to talk to and bother us. I just turned my back to them, until one of them poked me. I thought I was going to kill a Spaniard at that point, but I ended up just telling them off and they left shortly after. After being stressed/annoyed about the creepers we decided that we needed some chocolate. We stopped at a vender and got chocolate covered apples and headed to the beach again. A group of three drunken Wisconsin kids came up to us and talked to us for a while and annoyed the crap out of us. They are the reason that Europeans that hate Americans, I’m almost sure of it. After walking around for a bit while window-shopping, we decided to get some churros before we left for home. I know that it sounds like all we did was eat, but lets be serious A. its part of the culture and B. we were there for 9 hours! We headed to the bus station around 7:30pm right as all the crazy people started showing up. There were thousands of people getting off of the trains now and they were all dressed in ridiculous apparel. Our costumes, which consisted of bright colored tops, scarves, masks and face paint, were bland compared to these peoples. Some of my favorites were: the Duff Beer men, the old hairy man in the belly dancer costume, the monks (who were drinking beer), and a group of guys who were dressed up as different Tetris shapes. The big “party” scene is at night and I am glad that we went home before all of that chaos started. As we started towards the train station we ran into about 7 other classmates from Simpson, they were in for a long night, and we chatted for a bit. We kept walking and just as we had arrived to the train station we saw a group of guys dressed as nuns, so we decided that we needed to get pictures with them. They were more than friendly and I had to block party my face from them. After that whole experience we were good to go home. I got a Coke while waiting for the train and we went to our platform for our train…and there were the highlighter guys again. This time they came up and asked if they could take a picture with me so I dragged Sam and Allison along. We ended up talking to them for a while and figured out that they were from Seville. We took the train back, which was 30 minutes late, and arrived at the station in Seville at about 10:45pm. We caught the packed bus back and got home a little bit later. When we got home we made hamburgers and then headed to bed! It was a long eventful day filled with our first Spanish festival and lots of crazy happenings.
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