So far behind

I am falling further and further behind in these things. And we had a pretty epic couple of days. So I guess I'd better get this started. Apparently I haven't updated since we arrived in Seville. Seville was really lovely. We wandered around the streets all day. We saw the cathedral and the alcazar and the fancy big plaza. We stumbled across more than one little market and a festival of nations where there was an australian stand selling kangaroo burgers. We didn't try them but were tempted. Odd to have to go all the way to Spain to get the chance when we are usually much closer to the source. Took a break in the afternoon when everything was closed anyway but in the evening Catie managed to drag me along on some shopping (we didn't end up buying anything). In the evening we got some mojitos and sat up on the roof for a while. But we'd had a pretty full day so we crashed fairly early. The next day we had grand plans to go to Granada and see the amazing Alhambra. Didn't work out.  It's a giant palace. We've been to a few now. Never have I heard of such a place having a limited number of tickets each day. They were sold out before we got there. So we wandered the town for a bit instead before catching our train to Madrid. We got there late and lost the hostel (spent about an hour walking 3 different wrong ways before giving up and getting a cab. We were really close too, just could not find the right street. And the people we asked for directions either had never heard of it or were completely useless. But we got there in the end.
The next day we headed for the palace because it is free on Wednesdays but we got there an hour before the changing of the guard so it wasn't open at all. We went away thinking we would come back in the afternoon. We walked around the city for a bit. Saw some sub par gardens, a whole row of statues of people we'd never heard of, the outside of a cathedral we weren't willing to pay to see the inside of, the outside of a convent we also wouldn't pay for. Generally had a see the city without any pressure to see specific parts in a particular order. In the afternoon we headed back to the palace to find lines practically round the block (there wasn't really a block for it to go around but it zigzagged across a square a long way). We couldn't be bothered waiting. And the sight of the number of people who jump at the chance to go when things are free made us reassess our plan to go to the Prado museum in the last 2 hours when it was free. So we hopped on the metro to that part of the city and went to check out the botanical gardens (we walked around them...literally, who charges for gardens? They didn't look that much better than the Christchurch ones from the entrance and there was a free park really close by so we didn't choose to enter)  and the Prado. Which it turns out students get into for free all the time anyway. I love my ISIC card. It cost Catie €10. But she got more out of it anyway. I can only enjoy art to a certain point. Then my brain becomes saturated and everything I look at just washes over me without leaving an impression. Catie apparently has an infinite capacity for art though. After the Prado we got ice cream and sat in the free park before heading back to the hostel to make some food. Mmmmm... grilled cheese sandwiches. They were pretty epic sandwiches. Salami and olives and emmental cheese on good brown bread (we get free breakfast at most of the places we stay but it is always heavy on the white bread and we miss good bread). And a side of salad because we are good healthy people. So tasty. Anyway, moving on from the subject of food.
The next day we did a day trip to Toledo. We'd heard great things about it and it lived up to expectations. It had a free museum with a bunch of artworks and one small display case of neolithic objects. It had a massive cathedral that just kept going. And marzipan everywhere. We didn't actually eat any because we aren't really marzipan people but we took a picture of a church made out of marzipan. We also got a little lost (in a good way). Then back to Madrid for some free (but not very good) sangria.
The next day I had claimed for a free day. Do anything or nothing. I did a bit of nothing then a bit of anything then a bit of nothing again. Catie went shopping and did buy things this time and I bought a skirt that is completely impractical for traveling in. We went on a dessert hunt that night which proved harder than expected. I guess in Spain they start dinner so late that they don't bother with dessert.
And the next day was the first of two very full days. And I've been writing this for a while so I will abandon you for a bit and come back to that later.
Right, so where was I?
Yesterday. So close to caught up. Except those 2 days were rather busy. Started early yesterday (after a pathetic sleep. Here's a hint if people are sleeping you don't hold a loud conversation about it being 3 am right next to their bed) to get to the train to Segovia. The trains often sell out quite early but for some unknown reason we can't book ahead online because our cards are from overseas banks (after having trouble with the ticket machine I was told that they don't accept foreign cards because if it is lost then anyone can use it but I don't see how that is any different to local credit cards). So we had to go super early. Segovia was lovely. Very different from other things we've seen so far. They have a giant roman aqueduct and a palace that the lonely planet describes as 'fairytale'. It was more or less what you would imagine if you heard fairytale palace. More recent than most of the palaces we'd visited so far. We paid the extra €2 to climb the tower. Just a few steps. Somewhere around 150. But the view was pretty amazing.
We wandered the town without a goal for a bit too. They have a huge number of churches for a town that size. And also a large number of tourists. But we got away from the majority of them (the tourists not the churches) in our wanders.
Then it was back on the train to head back to Madrid. The other art museum, the Reina Sophia, is free on Saturday afternoons so we headed there. It's more modern art. Where the Prado had a lot of Goya and El Greco the Reina Sophia had Picasso and Dali. But mostly Picasso. The guernica has an entire room to itself but there are so many people crowded round it that you still can't see it all that well.
There were a few interesting things and a few not so interesting things. That's just how it goes with modern art I guess. In some ways I preferred the uncertainty of it to the all very comparable works in the Prado. Which might make me uncultured but oh well.
After we finished with the museum we walked around the streets looking for a decent but not too pricey place for dinner. We'd thought paella but it was a bit more expensive in that area than where we had seen earlier and we couldn't agree on one flavour to share so instead we went for the very spanish lasagne. Finally we made our way back to the train station one more time to catch a night train to Lisbon. Which is where we are now.
The night train was better than all of the night buses in Turkey but it doesn't make for the best night sleep and since it was the second night of not enough sleep we were rather weary by the time we got here. But we pushed our exhaustion aside (though not without some complaining) and after dumping luggage at our hostel jumped on yet another train to Sintra. Not a long trip but I almost fell asleep anyway. We applied caffeine before making our way slowly up the very steep town to the castle at the top. There were a lot of hills and stairs in the last 2 days. I have calf muscles. I can feel them. They were never really necessary in Christchurch.
We accidentally took the long way down, grabbed some lunch, checked out some of the cork stuff they had and headed back to Lisbon. Then we took a break and I started this epic account. Then I stopped this epic account and we went for a walk.  Oddly there wasn't a whole lot open at 8pm on a Sunday but we had a decent look around anyway. We'll see how different it is in the morning.
And now you know everything. To a very limited definition of everything anyway.

No update today

Well I wrote a nice big update on my phone but the internet at this hostel is incredibly unreliable. It took about an hour yesterday to succeed in checking just my email and bank account. So I wrote the update assuming that it would only require about a minute of connection to post it once it was written and that should only take about half an hour on this internet. But apparently by the time I started my phone only had 10 minutes of battery left. I will charge it and try again later but you might not get it until we get to Madrid tomorrow night. Also the y and z keys are backwards for some reason on this keyboard. I will try to fix all of the mistakes (I never realised how much I use y) but I might miss some because it is underlining every word in red so that will not help me. Also I cannot find the apostrophe. It is marked on the key but does not show up.

No hablo español.

If only we were from the Dora the Explorer generation we would understand so much more. But no, I watched Sesame Street and got a shorter attention span instead. I know you haven't heard from me in a while. Internet has been unreliable (and still is, I am writing this offline on the hope that I can get the connection to last long enough to post) and when we did have internet I didn't feel like writing. So let me sum up Morocco for you. It had some magic moments but in between was a whole lot of hassle. Marrakech was worth the hassle, Fes was not. By our last night in Fes we were completely exhausted with the entire country and wanted to just get to Spain. But Marrakech (after a few difficulties) was great. We wandered all over the medina, got sufficiently lost, found our way back again, ate ice cream, got attacked with henna, and watched some snake charming. The next day we visited the palaces and the saadian tombs (which were cool, the first one literally) and watched the square fill up with people from a terrace restaurant. It was lovely overall.
Then we headed to Fes on an overnight bus. Our hostel offered a walking tour of the medina and convinced us that a tour was necessary because you would get completely lost on your own. You would, but the tour turned out to be less amazing than it had been made out as. Bits were really interesting but it also included a lot of trying to sell us stuff. Why they thought people paying €10 a night for accommodation would be buying carpets for $3000 I don't know. But they tried very hard to convince us anyway. And it turned out the medina was so labyrinthine that any time we wanted to go somewhere we had to walk out to the main roads and around the outside. Also, there were a lot more creepy people. I'm fairly certain someone called me breakfast. So we abandoned Fes and Morocco. We stayed one night in Tangier (that was quite a bit better anyway but we only stayed about 12 hours). The waiter at our restaurant asked us where we were from and when we said New Zealand he said "Oh, Irish!" And when we tried to explain that it was sort of the other side of the world he told us he liked scottish whiskey.
But then we left Morocco and, after a very bumpy ferry ride with some not so pleasant background noise, arrived in Spain.
It's fantastic already. We are currently staying in Sevilla which is a beautiful little city. No creepy people staring or following us, clean, open, colourful. It is very hot. They still do the siesta here and since it is currently sitting around 35 and it's October you can understand why. But it is more of a dry heat than it was in some of the other places so if we stick to the shade it's fairly manageable. And there is a lot of shade. This is clearly a city that has had hundreds of years of experience of dealing with heat. I wouldn't want to visit in summer though. But other than the weather this is the first place we have seen that I could imagine living in. We have passed some buildings and said imagine living there. It really is a lovely place. And there are so many shoe shops. I don't know how they can all survive they're just everywhere. Catie is hoping to convince me to go shopping this afternoon. I might have been away from it for long enough to consider it.
So now you're somewhat caught up. I think I didn't go into a while lot of detail but oh well. Maybe next time. We are planning to have 4 whole days in Madrid so might have more time then. And hopefully more reliable internet. Now I have to see if I can connect long enough to post this.

Ataturk and lokum

So we caught an early morning bus to Ankara. We'd heard it wasn't worth a whole lot of time so we planned to get there early afternoon and leave on the evening bus. That should have been enough time to see the main sights of Ankara: the mausoleum of  Ataturk being the biggest one and a couple of museums nearby. Ankara is more modern history than the rest of  Turkey. It wasn't much before Ataturk came along but he put a lot if work into it so they have a lot of stuff about him. It would have been enough time if we'd thought to look up how to get there before we left. Instead we stared at the metro map until we spotted something that said museum then assumed we could get directions from there. But the further inland we got in Turkey the fewer people spoke english and when we asked for directions to the museum we didn't understand the answer. So we wandered Ankara. Found a pretty park to eat lunch in, followed some signs to not a museum, found a could be a museum but couldn't find the entrance. Sat in the shade for a bit trying to find some free wifi to figure out where we were and how to get to the mausoleum (which was the thing we were most interested in) and managed on my phone to find out where we were and on Catie's laptop where the Mausoleum was before the internet disappeared. But we couldn't figure out how to match them up and get from here to there. So we spent a few hours wandering around Ankara, seeing the city if not the sights, then headed back to the otogar for our bus to Safranbolu.
We had decided before we left NZ to go to Safranbolu because it is something like number 2 on the lonely planet top places to see in Turkey. But oddly when we were talking to other backpackers about it most of them hadn't even heard of it. But the turkish people we talked to said it was great and told us to skip Ankara and spend more time in Safranbolu. Good advice. Safranbolu was beautiful. It's this town that had been basically preserved from ottoman times. Cobbled streets and shuttered windows and little alleys. And the middle of this old town is sort of like a permanent market with little shops of hand made goods and cafes. Wooden boxes and mirrors and decorations, metal tea sets and vases, ceramics, shoes, clothes. All through these little cobbled alleyways that don't have space for cars. And on every street there is at least one (but probably more) turkish delight shop. Safranbolu is famous for lokum (the turkish name for the delight) and it was pretty fantastic. We only wanted to get a little bit to try the different flavours but their idea of a little bit lasted us all day and onto the bus to Istanbul the next day. It is not really like the stuff they call turkish delight in other places. You can see the resemblance but mostly in the way that you can see how what you get in NZ is an attempt to make something like lokum but they don't really know how. We ate quite a bit of it. I kind of wish we had some left but since we ran out 3 days ago we wouldn't have any left by now even if we'd bought more.
So we spent the entire day just waking around the old city of Safranbolu, enjoying the sights and sounds and especially tastes. Then the next day we took the morning to meander a bit more before catching our last bus back to Istanbul. It took most of the day and we didn't get back to our hostel in Istanbul until after 9pm. The bus was full of children some of which were supremely annoying (if your child is being a brat take away their toy gun, don't just talk to them and then ignore the fact that they are still doing exactly the same thing) but others were completely adorable. Luckily the little girls who were practicing their english on us came after the little boy who was try to shoot us so we ended the trip feeling more endearing and less irritated.
The next day we got up early to hit the post office then went to the archaeology museum. It was pretty impressive. Living in NZ you don't really see a lot of the results of archaeology in person. Canterbury had the logie collection which was one of the best collections of classical artifacts in the whole continent, and fit into one not so large room. The Istanbul archaeology museum is just so close to everything. They have a neolithic section and a paleolithic section and an early orient section and a greek section and a roman section and a ceramics section. They need 3 whole buildings and then the less interesting stuff is left in rows outside because 3 buildings isn't enough. I won't gush too much more but as a classics major it was pretty fantastic.
But we didn't have all day so we didn't linger. We grabbed some traditional ice cream since we hadn't gotten around to trying any yet. It was odd. Almost chewy. But pretty tasty. Then we packed everything up and headed to the airport.
I won't bore you with the details. It was an average flight. Lots of waiting before, lots of waiting after. But we got to Casablanca and they let us into the country. Found our hostel and basically crashed. It was pretty late for us by that point.
This morning we walked down to the 3rd biggest mosque in the world and back through the streets of casablanca. Not the greatest tourist destination. Which is why we are now on the train to Marrakech. Which should be much nicer. I don't know when I will next have internet to post this but hopefully soon.

Goodbye Turkey

I know I haven't finished updating you all on 2nd latest events but it seems I won't be doing it today. Instead just a quick note before we leave free internet to say that we are leaving Turkey for Morocco today. Talk to you all again from there.

Not much of an update

Well I started writing a big update on the bus yesterday but it seems to have disappeared. I didn't get very far anyway. But Catie has put photos on facebook. The public link is https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2337743050292.133853.1451350354&l=364a32f00b&type=1
I will try to write a proper post today or tomorrow. There is getting to be quite a lot to write.

Churches, fairies and brownies, oh my!

Hello again! I am writing this on the bus to Ankara so I don't know when I will be able to actually post it. The hostel we have booked for tonight didn't say that it had internet so I might have to wait until we get back to Istanbul. But probably we will hunt something up in Safranbolu if we have to. So last time I left you with the preview of a grand tour of Cappadocia to come. Well it was pretty awesome. It started at 9.30 and we didn't get back until after 6pm. And it was no where near enough time. The first stop was the Goreme panorama where you can see the entire valley. I think any grand vistas I see in the future will be ruined now. I will look at massive mountain ranges and just shrug and say "but it's not Cappadocia".
I won't even bother trying to describe it. I wouldn't know where to start.
After that we headed to Derinkuyu which is one of several underground cities in the area. Derinkuyu is the most touristy one so it is well lit. Some of them aren't lit at all and it would be pretty awesome to go to one of those but we just didn't have the time. We've been doing a bit of "when we're rich" planning in Goreme. I think we could probably spend a whole 2 weeks just in Cappadocia.
The underground city was pretty impressive. It was started in the 7th century BC by the Phrygians but was added to for a long time. The early christians used it as a hideout around the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. It goes down about 85 metres. Some of the tunnels are so short that it might be easier to crawl. My backpack was often scraping on the ceiling, if I hadn't been wearing one I probably would have hit my head a lot more.
It was really good to have a tour guide there because there wasn't a lot of signage but we could have spent much more time there. We didn't get to see everything because we didn't have enough time.
The same was true of the next stop, Ilhara Valley. It's this smallish valley cut into a fairly flat landscape so it isn't all that visible from far away. Which would be why the early christians thought it would be an awesome place to hide from those pesky Romans. There are dozens of old churches cut into the valley walls. We only looked at 2 of them. And we had to stay on one side of the river. If you were doing it without the tour group you could easily spend all day there but it would be a bit of a mission getting there and back. As it was we got really irritated at this supremely slow couple. We walked 3.5 km through the valley (which was nice, green and shady unlike most of the area) at quite a slow pace but those people somehow managed to fall about 10 minutes behind everyone else. And since the restaurant for lunch was at the end of the walk we were pretty hungry and pretty impatient by then.
Lunch was decent, and reviving after quite a stair filled morning. Then we headed to the Selime Monastery. I don't remember any of the details about when it was from but it is basically a giant church complex inside of a hill. There's a chapel part and a school part and a kitchen and lots of great views. You have to be somewhat intrepid to get to parts but it is totally worth it. We went pretty much everywhere. Including the part with almost no light coming in. We were told we only had 10 minutes to explore on our own but after waiting so long for the slow people at other places (they also managed to get lost after coming out of Derinkuyu) and our general experience of turkish time (they tend to say a certain amount and it end up a fair bit more) we decided to take our time. When the guide told us to gather we looked at one more thing and on the way down we detoured to a different part, secure in the knowledge that the slow people would take that much longer coming down.
We were all a little tired by that point after crawling through tunnels (which included a lot of stairs) then marching through a valley (which included a fair number of stairs) and clambering over a monastery (which had some stairs and more footholds that may or may not count as stairs and a few slopes that could have used more stairs). So many of the people slept on the next leg of the drive. But they all woke up for pigeon valley. Which (oddly, considering the name) has a whole lot of pigeon houses where they used to keep pigeons back in the day when they were useful for communication and painting.
But that was just a short stop before heading to the final part of the tour. The part where they try to sell you stuff by taking you to an onyx factory. But (thanks to those incredibly slow people) we were given the choice of heading to the factory or just heading home. We were unanimous and headed back to Goreme.
We were fairly exhausted by then so after a stop for water (and cherry chocolate brownies) we settled in for a quiet evening.
The next day we had a plan. Which failed pretty much straight away. We intended to get up early (set an alarm and everything) and get to the Goreme open air museum by about 8.30. So at about 10 we actually got up meaning that we got to the museum at the same time as a few dozen tour groups. At one point we were found ourselves stuck in a small courtyard with at least 50 people (no I'm not exaggerating) with a small tunnel in and a small tunnel out (both completely blocked by people). But we did see some cool things. Again, lots of old churches cut into the cliffs and fairy chimneys. There were some that had quite detailed frescoes with recognizable bible scenes and others that were just decorated with geometric patterns in red ochre. Outside of the museum is a massive one with amazing frescoes but where they have chipped off you can see ochre patterns underneath. Which makes me wonder how they decide which date to put on the signs. They said 11th century on that one but is that when it started or when it finished?
That afternoon we just wandered around Goreme looking at shops and watching the antics of a possibly mentally challenged cat. We had planned to go on a horse trek but it was threatening to rain and the idea of horse riding in the rain was not appealing to us.
And that was our last day in Cappadocia. The next morning we got up at 6 am to watch the balloons (dawn hot air balloon rides is a thing, an expensive thing) and catch a 7am bus to Ankara. Where I started writing this. But didn't finish writing it. It has taken me about 2 days to write this whole thing which means there's now 2 more days to write about. But you can wait a while longer for that. I'll give you a sneak peak. It involves more cats, more brownies and a whole lot of lokum.