Pamplona

From Erti:
"Pamplona' awesome. Its nice, very easy to get around, kinda cozy!! Va says its generally a quiet little town, but the running of bulls makes it pretty razy!!!

As soon as we got off the worst bus trip ever (an overnight from Sevilla with the loudest most terrible voiced person in the world - who also smoked all night long) we were greeted by singing, dancing, and copious drinking! (also, after the bus trip, me Va and Joj were all ridiculously tired and jealous of David's superhuman ability to sleep through anything!!!)

We arrived pretty early, before the run, on friday! We huffed it to the hostel and ditched our bags and tried to find a spot to watch the run from... This was kinda tough! Every bit of space with a view was´taken up and anything that could be climbed had already been clumb. (or climbeded, whichever you prefer) We found this one little spot where we could each stick our heads in and see through about 4 by 4
inch windows. We saw lots of legs and a few bulls!! It seemed not too wild or dangerous - and we felt pretty god about our ability to brave the toros!!!

Anyways, we followed that up with a huuuuuuge nap to make up for the bus ride. The nap lasted roughly 6 hours, though david and joj got up and scouted out the town for the last 2ish hours?"

Ok, David here, and our time is running out, so this is going to have to be a to be continued...but:
- we didnt get to run with the bulls
- we all got poked and even hit with police sticks
- people are still drunk and in the streets being loud at 11am...amazing!
- knechtel says pamplona is a lot like mardi gras, sans all the boobs...
- we head to barcelona on a night bus tonight (leaving at 1am), then two days in barcelona before a night bus to madrid, a day and night in madrid, and then our flight home!

Greetings from Sevilla!

Those of you who are familiar with our planned itinerary might be a little surprised to find us in Sevilla at this particular moment in time. So, I might add, are we. Ha!

Let me start out with a little story which might tip you off as to how this happened...

Some of you may remember "the South African dude" who we met in Berlin. He told us this funny story of two guys who arrived at the airport, went to check in, and discovered that they unknowingly had arrived two days late for their flight. Now, we all know that people are late for their flight, get the wrong time, la la la, but we thought this was hysterical and have since talked about it regularly. As a result we decided to check the date of our ticket and we were surprised to discover that we were running 2 days early! Good thing we checked.

So, Milan, the 4th of July, we roll up to the airport with plenty of time, congratulating ourselves for succesfully navigating subway and airport bus without speaking Italian and proceed directly to check in. We waited for EVER but finally arrived at the desk, and boldly displayed our confirmation number to the airline guy who looked it up and proceeded to regard us with what must have been a mixture of pity and humor and informed us that our flight departed exactly one month prior.

OOPs. So now both David and I have made our error which is already quite humourous. So. All the flights to Barcelona were full until Saturday (and ridiculously expensive we might add) and we began to inquire about other destinations in Spain. Sevilla had much cheaper tickets for whatever reason so we bought tickets for the next morning and proceeded to camp out in the airport for the night.

After dinner, David and I camped out in the airport where he continued to beat me mercilessly in NERTZ while Erti and Josiah went in search of beer (alas all the gelatto and beer places in the airport closed before we finished dinner) at some supermall which looked deceivingly close. They came back about an hour later with cold fries and fanta from McDonalds where they had feasted on Big Macs or some such meaty entity.

We spent an exceedingly uncomfortable and sleepless (except me) night on metal and concrete, me very thankful for my sleeping bag. And the next morning we boarded our flight for Sevilla!!

So. We are in Sevilla, it is still awesome and I thimk we are enjoying ourselves pretty well all things considered. OUr hostel is cheap in the Bario Santa Cruz, super close to everything and it is rebajas in Spain or big sale time for those of you who havent experienced them. We went to the Cathedral and the boys took a siesta while I went to try to find my Señora (no such luck, no one answered the door and I don´t have her number) and shopping.

Last night we went to Tex MEx, watched the Yankees game for a bit, drank beer and ate MExican food before heading to la Carboneria for some Agua de Sevilla and flamenco music.

Today we had breakfast at Cafe de Indias, where Nikki, Melanie and I had coffee nearly every day while I lived here, and we are about to go do some shoping and exploring and make a new plan for getting to los San Fermines in Pamplona. All this makes me exceedingly happy.

Salud!