El Derbi Day!

When I knew I was going to be in Malaga over the weekend of the Atlético/Real derby, I posted a question on an international Atlético supporters forum I use asking if anyone could recommend somewhere in the city to watch the game, I never expected it to lead me to a seat at the game itself, but I’m not complaining!

Jaime, a season-ticket holding Atlético fan, now working in Malaga, got in touch to tell me he’d be going to the game, but asking if I’d like to meet for a drink over the weekend when I was there, I said that sounded like a good idea, and we kept in touch, then it turned out his cousin (who he goes to the games with) would be working away and therefore unable to attend the game, and I was offered the ticket – it didn’t take me long to accept!

I was picked up from the train station in Malaga just after noon for the 5 hour car journey, after a bit of initial unease (we were strangers after all) the journey ended up being fine, with me taking the opportunity to learn some Spanish football terminology, it practically flew by, and we were parked up outside his uncles home, near the stadium, a good two hours or so before kick-off, which is where the fun started. We heard a big roar and, as we parked up, saw a few hundred people, who turned out to be Real “ultras” charging down the road at the bottom of the street we were on, Jaime had warned me that something like this was very likely but, as we went to inspect what was happening from a safe distance, we saw that there were hundreds of riot police blocking their path, and it just seemed to be a stand-off with the “ultras” throwing things at the police, with a few of them getting deserved beatings.

After meeting Jaime’s uncle in a bar near the stadium for a couple of pre-match drinks, we headed into the stadium in good time for kick-off, the atmosphere was electric, I’ve been to 11 games previously at the Vicente Calderón, but never against really big opposition, and the difference was amazing. I’m obviously not from Madrid, so I can’t buy into the local rivalry, but it was impossible not to feed off the atmosphere generated and the adrenalin was definitely flowing, cranking up even more when the teams came out onto the pitch.

Unfortunately Real scored after 32 seconds, so it all went a little flat, but as Atlético came back into the game so the support came back to life. I’m not going to write a match report, the eventual 2-0 defeat was disappointing and the game petered out a little in the second half, but the atmosphere and sense of occasion was still well worth savouring, and the support was great even when the game was long gone.

One of my pet hates at football nowadays are the fans who sit there taking pictures throughout the game, but I was hoping to get some pictures of the supporters and the stadium on the day, to try and capture the atmosphere a bit, unfortunately I’d left my camera in Jaime’s glovebox when we were distracted by the “ultras” charge, so that was a minor disappointment.

After waiting for the traffic to disperse before setting off (some things are the same the world over) we finally set out for the trip back, the mood in the car was a little tired and despondent, but it perked up after a coffee stop, which I think was down to me inviting Jaime to come over here if there is ever another Bradford derby, I won’t hold my breath on that one though!

Cazorla

I feel like I need a holiday, which isn’t surprising as I’ve only recently come back from one, and that’s the way I always feel after I’ve been away.

I’ve actually been back a couple of weeks now but, as I’m so busy, I’m only just getting round to writing about it – it won’t surprise anyone who reads this blog to find out that I went to Spain again, and it will surprise you even less to hear that I started and ended in Madrid again, I won’t write about that though, it was as fun as usual, I drank a lot, spent a lot of time in the Retiro, met up with old friends and made some new ones while having lot’s of fun – so just the standard trip to the city then!

Most of my trip was spent in a small town in Andalucia called Cazorla, the reason I ended up there as I did another Pueblo Inglés program, just like the one I did in La Alberca last year and, despite some reservations, and almost dropping out, I’m very glad I went as it was just as much fun the second time around, though it was very different.

The town itself was typical of small town in this part of the world, surrounded by olive grove after olive grove, with the usual surprises you unexpectedly seem to encounter in these parts, a seemingly unspectacular and little-known town just happened to have a castle and the ruins of what must have once been a large cathedral, back in the day.

It was a nice enough place to walk around, with a couple of nice shady squares and would be worth a day or so if only for the walking possibilities in the surrounding Sierra de Cazorla, and the national park – which we paid a visit to on an excursion from the course. Like all towns in this part of the world the threat of over-development for the needs of foreign second home-owners is hanging over the place, with newer buildings springing up around the centre but hopefully it won’t suffer for it like some places have.

A few pics I took of the town and the national park can be found here.

A(nother) week in Spain

Well, I´ve had a nice relaxing week over here, unfortunately I have to fly home tomorrow, and the flat situation still hasn´t been sorted, so god knows what I´m going to do with myself for the next few days until it is (I can´t afford to stay here unfortunately).

First up was Valencia, the weather wasn´t great so I couldn´t sit on the beach for the weekend, so instead I became culturally active and filled in all the gaps I missed from my first visit here almost two years ago. I won´t bore you with the details of photography exhibitons, art galleries and the like, but you get the picture. Highlight of the weekend was probably taking in the Valencia v Sevilla game at the Mestalla. The stadium is ageing and looks a bit shabby, but it is a great place to watch a game and the atmosphere was superb, no doubt helped by the fact the hosts won 2-0.

On Monday I headed up to a small town in Eastern Spain, Teruel, it´s the least visited province in Spain which probably makes this town a bit of an undiscovered gem, it´s full of remnants from Roman and Moorish rule despite its small size, and it was well worth the few hours I spent there. I spent the night in a cheap pension in the town where I had a nice little balcony to myself with a fine view of the place which I used to sink a bottle of wine while doing a bit of reading and writing, which was nice.

I left there early Tuesday for Zaragoza, which is somewhere I´d always wanted to visit for the odd reason that I used to talk to a girl on yahoo messenger who was from there, how that came about I don´t know. It was a pleasurable enough city to walk around, but not overflowing with sights and, after failing to find anywhere cheap to stay, and being turned away from the HI hostel for not being a member (despite non-members rates being advertised on the wall) I decided I might as well head to Madrid in the evening and stay in a backpackers place there, rather than stay in an overpriced place in Zaragoza only to leave early, so thats what I did, arriving just in time to pop out with some folk from the hostel for hot chocolate and Churros at San Gines, which was nice!

So, Madrid yet again. I´d actually never been here on a Wednesday before (apart from a couple of times when I was leaving early) so I hadn´t visited the Royal Palace (Wednesdays being the free day), I thought I might as well take the opportunity to pay the place a visit, so I did, and very impressive it was too – actually one of the best of the many I have seen in the last couple of years. On a roll I then headed to Aranjuez, a town about 25 miles away, where they have an impressive palace of their own as well as some superb gardens where I whiled away a couple of hours before a short stroll around a pretty unmemorable town centre.

After a moderate night out last night with a couple of Germans I met in the hostel I spent today just lazing around and relaxing, though I did visit the City museum which was a little interesting. I´ve spent a couple of hours in the Retiro topping up my tan and doing some reading, and I´ve just got back from doing likewise in another quality Madrid park the Campo del Moro. My flight back to East Midlands departs at 630 tomorrow morning, so I´m going to hang around the hostel and catch the last Metro up there at 2 and try and get a bit of kip in the airport (how backpacker-y!) before flying home. Before then I´ll just head back out and catch a bit more Madrid sun.

Nine Days?

With reference to my last post, I was yesterday told that we couldn’t return to the flat until a week on Friday.

Sod that, it was a tight decision, but for the sake of my sanity I fly to Madrid in the morning!

See you all later!!

Option 3

Would heading to Madrid and just lounging around until I run out of money be THAT bad a thing to do?

A quick scour of the ryanair and easyjet websites shows me that I could head off tomorrow and be there by the afternoon for less than £50.

Why does life have to have so many options?

Seeing the sights in the worlds biggest village….

So, I´ve been back in Madrid these last few days and I´ve decided this place has to be the worlds biggest village. Since Thursday I´ve bumped into no fewer than seven different people I´ve met in hostels over the last few weeks in Spain – that has it´s advantages and disadvantages, though I guess it´s a side effect of spending such a long period of time in the same country out of season.

Mostly I have just acknowledged the person, or maybe had a quick chat but I had a pleasant suprise this afternoon when I was wandering around the Reina Sofia and bumped into Clara, a girl I spent a couple of days with in San Sebastian and Bilbao. I was at a loose end and she and her friend were first-timers in the city so we spent a pleasant afternoon strolling around the place, drinking coffee and they enjoyed/endured the benefit of my knowledge, it was a nice, relaxing way to spend an afternoon I had no other plans for, especially after last night….

If we count the four separate periods I have spent in Madrid on this trip independently I´ve now visited the place nine times over the last 18 months or so, as you´d expect I have now seen pretty much everything – although last night I saw something new, and it wasn´t particularly pleasant.

It was a typical mad Saturday night in Madrid, I´d hooked up with a bunch of people from the hostel and we´d headed out to do the Madrid “thing”, jumping from tapas bar to tapas bar eating early on, before heading to a couple of drinking bars, at about 230 we hit a so-called “discobar”, and that´s when the fun started.

A discobar is so-called because basically it´s a bar where music is played and there is a dancefloor, the particular bar we went in has windows looking out from the dancefloor on the same level of the street, we ended up by the window next to a group of three local girls who were dancing, giving a bit of a performance for the passers-by, many of whom stopped to join in, make fun of and generally just have a bit of a laugh with the girls and us from one side of the window to the other, all except one drunken/drugged-up/mentally disturbed tramp, who took things a little too far.

Having lived in Bradford, Salford and Hull I thought I´d seen it all when it came to deviant behaviour from scrotes, but this guy took things to new extremes – it started off harmlessly enough with lewd gestures in the direction of the girls, but then things took a sinister twist when he removed his trousers and stood there dancing in his lovely grey y-fronts. Before too long it became obvious that he was getting, erm, excited by what he was doing but he got a little bit too excited, the y-fronts were cast aside and, for want of a better way of explanation, the guy starting pleasuring himself while looking into the bar from the street. Which was nice and like I said, a sight I hadn´t seen in the city before despite my many visits – and it´s one I hope I don´t have to see again.

So, it´s back to Bradford in a few days and decisions will have to be made about what I am going to do come January, am I any clearer than I was six weeks ago? Not really and I´m just going to forget about it for the next few days. I´m about to head down to the Vicente Calderon for the Atletico v Getafe derby game then tomorrow it´s on to Barcelona and another little reunion, though this one planned, with a girl I met in Madrid a few weeks back. It should be fun but I doubt I´ll see anything to top last night!

The Joys of Hostel Life, part deux

Regular readers may recall this from a couple of weeks back, one of the best aspects of travel, and backpacking in particular, are the people you meet. That day was a great example of that, Wednesday night in Bilbao was at the opposite end of the spectrum.

I made the decision not to bother heading to Madrid overnight and getting my head down for some sleep instead, so I trundled back to the hostel I´d stayed in at the weekend, walked into my room to be confronted by well, basically a scally, straight away I could tell he was Brit and he sported the oh so fashionable combination of a Ralph Lauren (knock-off) shirt, tracksuit bottoms and big shiny shoes. Unfortunately I hadn´t had time to come up with some story about me not speaking English before he introduced himself and I had to admit I was a fellow Brit, big big mistake.

Within minutes he was giving me a sob story about how he had “lost” all his money after being ripped off by some Spaniard so he had been unable to make it to the airport to catch his flight home, he spent the next ten minutes or so giving me a sob story about how no-one back home would help him out, his mother had abandoned him to live by himself in a crack-house at the age of 12 and so on and so forth, my heart was bleeding (honest) as he basically asked me for money without explicitly doing so, but I just played dumb and didn´t refer to it, much to his disappointment as he kept banging on about it being great to meet another Englishmen because no-one else here would help him.

I soon made my excuses and left to check out a bar or two, and luckily when I got back to the room at about 1am he was asleep, I called it a night and was asleep too, until about 230 when I was woken by someone shaking me, the someone being him, and he proceeded to ask me whether I wanted to buy his three “genuine” Ralph Lauren shirts for €50, I politely refused but was kept awake for a further ten minutes as he did the same to the other two blokes in the dorm, none of whom were impressed by the interruption.

The rest of the night passed with me sleeping with one eye open in fear of my possessions with this dodgy guy on the prowl until I was again awoken at 7 with him now offering me his oh so tasteful thick gold chain for the bargain sum of €30 – I wasn´t so polite with my refusal this time but that didn´t stop him continuing to try and hawk his stuff to the other guys in the room, again with no success.

After finally raising myself for the day I had to endure another sob story from him as he again tried to swindle some cash out of me “if only I could meet someone who could help me out, as soon as I get back to Nottingham I could send them the money”, “I can´t ask my parents, my mum has disowned me and I haven´t seen my dad for 15 years” there were even tears at this point until he finally sensed he was getting nowhere with me and came out with, what was apparently, the truth – he´d recently been released from prison back home and was in Bilbao to do some sort of drug deal which had gone wrong and left him penniless, I resisted the temptation to laugh, falsely wished him luck in his quest to get home (not that the Spaniards deserve to endure him) and quickly got of there!

It´s always interesting to meet a character, and he certainly was that! Anyway, I headed back to Madrid on the bus yesterday and I´m firmly planted here now for ten days or so, I´ve arranged a meeting with some kind of agency next week who place English speakers into teaching jobs and I´ve even found out about a couple of jobs going for English speakers (basically administration) which I´m going to investigate further now. I´m still not 100% sure about what I want to do after Christmas but at the moment I´m leaning towards heading off and seeing a bit more of the world, after all Madrid and Spain will always be here if and when I get back.

The week that was

Well, here goes – I haven´t had much chance to get online over this last week or so, so this is going to be a bit of a mammoth update I´m afraid.

Last Tuesday I spent my last day (for now) doing my normal mooching around Madrid, in the evening a few of us who had taken part in the Pueblo Ingles program met up for a meal and a few drinks in an Asturian restaurant in the city. It was an enjoyable night, and it was good to see people outside the constraints of the course. After the meal a few of us more hardy souls ended up in Bar San Diego (or something like that) which is where the A-listers of the Madrid set are usually to be found, I didn´t feel at home, I´m still amazed I got in and I didn´t see anyone famous – only a few football journalists who had been covering the Real Madrid Champions League game.

The worst thing that happened on the night was one of my irrational fears about life in Spain being realised, I don´t worry about much but I am always concious of getting the whole cheek-kissing greeting and goodbye wrong. Whenever I sense it´s about to happen I tend to watch and learn while others get in there first before taking the leap – I managed to get through the first few without any problems but when I got round to Amy (American girl from Seattle previously mentioned for being on the Pueblo Ingles programme, doing my laundry, and from the day in Retiro Park) we managed to misread each others intentions and ended up making lip to lip, rather than cheek, contact. A simple misunderstanding perhaps, but not as big as her then sticking her tongue down my throat, which clearly isn´t the done thing (ok, that might not have actually happened until I was dreaming later on)!

As I walked back to the hostel from the last bar I managed to bump into a Danish guy who I´d met in Madrid about 15 months previously while he was staying in a hostel while in the city looking for work – we hadn´t stayed in touch and it was a totally random meeting, but we had to then catch up on what had been going on, which involved drinking in a bar just off the Gran Via until 5am which, usually, would have been fine – but I had to be up at 7 to head to the airport and catch my plane to Lisbon.

I made the plane without any problems, but it just meant that I was absolutely shattered by the time I arrived in Lisbon and the first day was pretty much a write off as I spent my time sleeping. That wouldn´t have been so bad apart from the fact that the next couple of days were mostly spent sheltering from the hideous rain which prevented much sightseeing. Darren flew in from London for a couple of days and we managed to see bits and pieces of the place, which seems nice enough, but will probably require a further visit in more favourable weather when I get the chance.

The one thing I can say with confidence about the place is that the 50´s are alive and well in parts of the Barrio Alto, which is the main area for nightlife in the city. Darren and I spent Friday night savouring a few bars in the area with some girls from our hostel and at about 330 am we headed back to Jurgens Bar, which had been the best bar we had visited earlier in the night. At the time of our first visit it had seemed quite a “cool” place with chill-out and dance type stuff being played, on our return we found the bar full of young Lisboeta´s with slicked back brylcreemed hair, turned-up jeans and the like dancing wildly to old “rock and roll” music, even the Stray Cats got an airing but the place really kicked off when Elvis hit the airwaves. It was bizarre watching it but it´s got me thinking that it might be worth a visit in 20 years time when they will have discovered punk.

On Saturday Darren and I went our separate ways as I´d agreed to go to Sintra with the aforementioned Amy who, after our first meeting in the hostel the day I arrived in Madrid, had conspired to follow me to Pueblo Ingles, to a different hostel afterwards, then pretty much everywhere else in Madrid and was now in Lisbon in my hostel – not that I mind, if you are going to be stalked an attractive 23 year old female is probably about as good as it gets – and it was well worth the trip.

The town was a haunt of the Portugese royal family back in the day and consists of a number of palaces and castles set in a beautiful part of the world up a bit of a hill. We arrived on the train from Lisbon and decided to walk to the main palace not realising it was 5km up the hill until we realised noone else was walking up the winding mountain road we were hiking up, and there was a steady stream of buses and taxis making their way past. It didn´t spoil the day, in fact it made it all the more fun, and it is a place I would heartily recommend to anyone – the rain also held off for us while we were there, which topped the day off nicely though we did get caught in yet another downpour after we got back to the city and went for something to eat.

So Sunday came around and it was time to leave Lisbon and I headed for Porto, no need to guess who I had for company on the bus, and after a bit of a struggle to find a hotel and get a room we headed out to discover the place. My first impressions were that it is more user friendly than Lisbon and, though smaller, has more of a bustle about it – which isn´t necessarily a good thing but makes the place seem more lively. We (I) spent the evening getting drunk while watching a succession of English, Spanish and Portugese football in a bar and when we finally dragged ourselves out of bed this morning we were once again greeted by the omnipresent Portugese rain; Sightseeing was a bit of a write-off again but we did manage to visit one of the wine cellars for the museum, tour and free Port samples and enjoy a nice lunchtime drink and bite to eat in a riverside bar.

Come 330 it was time for us to finally go our separate ways forever after three weeks as Amy headed off on an overnight train to France, so I spent the rest of the afternoon walking the streets in the rain, seeing what I could of the city and of course pining after the girl. As with Lisbon it seems a nice place with some great buildings and public places but I´d really like to be here in decent weather to do the place justice, it´s continued to absolutely throw it down into the evening hence I´m on here doing this and drinking Superbock, which is delightfully cheap in it´s home country but somehow tastes even better.

So when tomorrow comes I´ll be heading back to Spain and to Salamance before, probably continuing up and accross the North, then again if this rain keeps up I might find myself heading South and chasing some late year sunshine. It´s good to be free, but not so good to be saturated.

The Joys of Hostel Life

Before I travelled last year and had stayed in hostels I have to admit I was pretty wary of them, everyone has heard stories, everyone has their pre-conceptions, but apart from one or two incidents I haven´t had any real problems in them wherever I´ve been.

I still meet people, and talk to friends, who would like to travel more, but are put off by the fact that they would have to stay in hostels for financial reasons but don´t really want to, I´d strongly urge everyone to do it because they are, in the most part, nowhere near as bad as you think and usually lots of fun.

Take my last couple of days as an example, after my siesta on Sunday (I´m really getting into that now) I stumbled into the kitchen in my hostel for a glass of water, this was at about 630, there was an Australian girl, Suzanne in there and 5 and a half hours later we were being kicked out as the kitchen closed. During the course of the night we´d been joined by three other girls and we´d just spent an enjoyable evening chatting, exchanging travel (and other) stories and, as it turned out three of us were in Spain looking for work, links, information and contacts. I even managed to get a free meal out of the evening as the girls raided the cupboards for the food that had been left behind by departed backpackers and cooked up an interesting mix of pasta, rice, oatmeal and god knows what else. It required minimum effort on my part though, as a gent, I did volunteer to do the washing up. If I add my free meal to the fact that Amy took my washing to the laundrette on Saturday, as mentioned earlier, I can definitely say I´ve been onto a good thing these last few days.

Everyone apart from me was actually leaving the hostel yesterday so we said our goodbyes and went our separate ways in the morning, only to bizzarely end up bumping into each other by the gates of the Retiro park in the early afternoon. After that we went for lunch, did a little bit of sightseeing then headed back to the park where we spent the afternoon lounging around in the sun, chatting a lot more and drinking the occassional beer, hopefully I´ll have the pictures to follow at some point.

It was all good fun, made for a cheap night and day and is something that wouldn´t have happened if we´d all been locked away in our own hotel rooms somewhere. Most importantly of all, how else would I be able to get myself into a situation where I could spend so long in the company of four attractive young women (without paying for it)?!!

Settling in…..

Well so far I´ve eaten a lot of paella, drunk a lot of sangria and red wine, and done very little else. Which all sounds good to me, the six red wines I enjoyed with my lunch today haven´t gone down too well with my head, but since when did I ever use that?

The plan always was to potter around for these few days before heading off to the hills, and that´s exactly what I´ve been doing. Well that and going on a mad night out which ended with me finally crawling into bed at 615 this morning, but when in Rome and all that, I´ve also had the pleasure of the company of a couple of Aussie RL fans, so I´ve had plenty of opportunities to mention last Saturday, which has been a nice little bonus.

It was chucking it down when I arrived on Tuesday, and it seemed like it was never going to stop, I wasn´t properly prepared for the situation and came sin raincoat, so I set out yesterday aiming to rectify it. Buying a nice thin raincoat would surely be a simple enough task? Of course not.

The tendency of the Spanish to over-exaggerate things is perfectly summed up by the trouble I had trying to buy something to keep me dry. The temperature at the moment is hovering between 15 and 20 degrees during the day, warm enough? Not for the locals, who are out in their woolies and big winter coats even at the height of the day. It would seem wet is automatically corresponded with cold, and everywhere I went raincoats would automatically come with a thick lining. A trip down to the Vicente Calderon to buy an Atletico one proved fruitless, I had learnt the vocab, a raincoat is an “impermeable” but this didn´t stop the assistant trying to sell me a big trenchcoat, a winter bench jacket and then a tracksuit top before I eventually gave up. Six stores later I eventually found something that wouldn´t cause me to bake, then came the problem of buying it, I was queued for 45 minutes, which isn´t comfortable due to the locals strange concept of personal space (or lack of it) – the queue was so vast that people coming into the store in pairs were splitting up, one immediately queueing, while the other went round the store picking out what they wanted then coming into the line and swapping places. On numerous occassions I was tempted to forget it, but the lack of alternatives and the prospect of being soaked wasn´t appealing.

After finally buying it, then coming to the internet cafe sending emails and messages to folk whinging about the weather, the rain stopped and hasn´t been seen since. I´m not sure whether to laugh or cry. Still at least I´ve been able to indulge in my usual Madrid pastime of wandering around the Retiro

I´ve just been to an introductory lunch ahead of the programme I start tommorrow, everyone seems fine and it all seems simple enough. Some of the younger element of the participants are meeting up again later to eat and drink, so tonight should be fun as well, though I think I´ll lay off the sangria this time. It´s up bright an early for a 9 o´clock departure in the morning, then I´ll be oblivious to the outside world for a whole week, unless it all gets too much for me and I do a runner.

Find out more next week……