Day Two Off The Island

Right. Well, here we are. Day two of my travels.

Yesterday was quite mediocre: Woke up before 4am, travelled to shithole Stansted via the vomit and piss-stained streets outside Liverpool Street Station. Arrived in Jerez, south Spain, had to loiter under the midday sun as I waited for a train to take me north to Sevilla. (Seville, in Spain.)

Got there much earlier than I had arranged to meet the owner of the apartment I´m sleeping in. Thus, with my giant sack (weighed down by eight weeks worth of poetry and literary fiction, plus 500ml each of contact lens solution, shower gel, toothpaste and Regaine) I had to hang about, sitting against a brick wall reading Roberto Bolaño´s The Savage Detectives. The book´s great, but the situation was far from ideal. Once the bag was finally deposited, I went and looked around the Alcazar, Seville´s  very own Alhambra-rivalling Moorish palace. That part of the day was excellent, the Real Alcazar being a stunning, very decorative construction covered with patterned tiles, geometric patterns, Arabic etched into stone and huge, huge, HUGE gardens (within which I went twenty minutes without seeing a human being, I mean without seeing another human being). Beautiful place.

In the evening, though, things really got bad. I spent an age searching for Wi-Fi, eventually unable to find it anywhere but at the shittest of shit, scummy, overpriced tourist trap restaurants. However, the three  AWFUL tapas (plates of tapas) and the caña (I think a little more than half a pint) of beer I had came to just over 11 euro. Which is still pretty bloody cheap. As are, surprisingly, many places in Seville.

It is a beautiful town, lots of lovely buildings, but very few places to sit in the cool during the heat of the day. Hence why I´m using a free internet terminal in my language school at three o´clock. My plan to go read in a park fell quickly apart when I realised that if I did that for more than ten minutes I´d probably shrivel up and disappear. Which is, of course, my intention for the END of the trip.

Highlights so far: The Alcazar, the prices of things, having managed to successfully get through a few conversations fully hispañohablante.

Lowlights so far: The lack of shade, the shit meal last night, the fact that the holiday-treat pills I´ve bought to make me piss less make bit drowsy when I wake up.

It´s all going OK…