Bye Bye Algarve

Once we left the beautiful town of Lagos we took a 3 hour bus ride to Faro. The plan was to hang out there for a day or two and then take a bus to Seville, Spain. Once we arrived in Faro we learned that the bus to Seville on left on certain days and NOT the one we wanted to leave on. So...we decided to skip Faro and take the bus that same day late afternoon. Since we had a few hours to kill, we decided to take a 30 minute cab ride to the fishing town on Tavira.

Once we arrived there we roamed around the cobblestone streets, admired the residential architecture, window shopped and had lunch at a nice lil' cafe. This is quite the quaint little town and I really liked how the houses differ based on the different painted tiles.

 
A lot of people still had their Christmas decorations up. We saw these Santa's everywhere hanging from people's balconies. I think they are so cute!

 
It was nice to see an abundance of flower beds in the middle of January!

Canadian vocabulary all the way in Tavira!

We got back to Faro just in time for our 3:30pm departure and we arrived in Seville, Spain a few hours later.
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SEVILLE, SPAIN

We arrived at the bus terminal around 8pm, went towards the city centre and were on a mission to find a hotel. We walked around and walked around some more in search for the word HOTEL. No such luck until we came across a woman sitting outside a Flamenco bar. She spoke very good English and guided us in the right direction. The first couple of hotels we popped into were way over our budget. Even some hostels were pricey. Finally we came across a hotel called the Monte Carlo and since it was in our price range we booked it for a night.

From the beginning I had a weird feeling about our new accommodation.  The guy at reception was odd, the bell boy was nice weird, we could never get into our room so we had to swap keys each time, voices from the hallway seemed to quickly disappear as soon as my mom was present, and after dinner that night we had a *new* key in our light (= 3 keys when we were only given 2). I was royally freaked out and my mom couldn't stop laughing at me. She asked if I wanted to find a new hotel, but I was sooooo tired I couldn't be bothered. Needless to say we slept with a door wedged under the front door handle. Safety first....hahahahaha!

The next AM we woke up and tried to find a travel agent/tourist office to give us some information as to how and when to get from Seville to Algeciras so we could take the ferry to Tanger, Morocco. It was really hard to get this information as almost no one spoke English. Eventually we found a nice lady that told us a bus to Algeciras left the next morning at 9:30. As for the ferry times, she didn't have that and told us we had to get that info from the ferry terminal in Algeciras.

We decided to spend the day in Seville doing as much touristy stuff as we could and then check out the next AM. We found Spain to be fairly $$$$ compared to Portugal, so that pretty much solidified our decision to leave.

The first thing we did was made our way to Plaza de Toros de la Real Maestranza (aka - bullring). Bullfighting is still extremely popular in Spain and the season begins on Easter Sunday and continues to October. This specific bullring was constructed in 1761 and finished in 1881! Talk about taking your time! We did not see an actual fight, not that we would have wanted to, but we did set foot in the bullring for a tour.

This one and the next one were taken inside, but oops...I forgot my flash :(

After the bullring tour we got on the city's hop on/hop off bus. This was a good way to see the majority of the city. The only down fall was that I couldn't take that many pictures because we were moving and it was bumpy, therefore blur...yuck!

One spot that we got off at was the Real Alcazar (aka - Royal Palace) - one of, if not the, most famous tourist attraction in Seville. We were told that George Lucas filmed one Star Wars scene here!

After taking in the sights of Seville we went back to our hotel room to get ready for our night of flamenco dancing! I have seen flamenco before at the KINO cafe on Cambie street downtown (highly recommended), but I have never seen authentic flamenco dance. We went out for dinner and then made our way to the club. We were the first 2 people to be seated and thankfully another couple came in shortly afterwards. The place probably holds 100 people, but that night it held five. That couple, my mom, me and a guy from Japan. Those poor dancers! The look on their faces when they saw that they were performing for 5 people!

The athleticism these men and women have is AMAZING!!!!!! Just when you saw them start to sweat a bit and thought the number was done, they would keep going. It was beautiful! We were allowed to take pictures, but I didn't want them to get annoyed with flash, flash, flash. They would totally know it was me since the other four people didn't have a camera! So this is all I have...

We got home just before midnight and hit the hay right away as we had to get up early the next morning to pack and head to yet another bus station and make our way to Algeciras. Morocco here we come....