Top 10… travel hates!
Accomodation
Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not. have been to a few places that were rated by guidebooks or websites that were not as good as described.
Now tend to lump descriptions such as ‘Art Deco’, ‘Cosy’ and ‘Quaint’ into other categories – ‘In need of renovation’ or ‘Requires redecoration’.
Chuggers, lavender/selfie stick/sunglasses sellers, timeshare touts
Usually have an avoidance mechanism that’s more nimble than a rugby player heading for the touchline in order to score a try.
Always amuses me when sunglasses sellers approach those already wearing sunglasses – either specs that have Transitions lenses (i.e. mine) or those wearing Ray Bans…
Coffee
How hard is it for accomodation to provide good coffee at breakfast time?
We’ve lost count of how many times we’ve had bad coffee at guest houses, hostels and hotels – even at U.S. based name chain hotels or five stars!
Mind you, a few cafes that have had business from us following bad coffee mornings, usually just after we’ve left our accommodation.
Duff information
Or when guidebooks get it wrong. We’d checked two guidebooks about the opening times for a leading museum earlier in the year and both said that it was closed on a Monday.
It wasn’t, as we found out when we walked past it and found an open door and a full set of opening times that looked like it had been there for a while…
Fast track
We’ve found that this usually means you go a shorter way around into security to find that there’s a long queue at security because other passengers haven’t bothered to read the does and don’ts of what they can or can’t take in their hand luggage.
Note to self – stop booking Fast Track and use the money to get a coffee or a meal deal at either WH Smith or Boots when airside and in need of something to eat that doesn’t cost the earth at airport bars/cafes/restaurants or cost twice as much as it does on the plane.
Officialdom
Yes, it’s those jobsworths who are determined to put a spanner in the works when it comes to shopping, visiting a museum or wanting to put your bags in left luggage lockers.
Step forward that supermarket in Paphos and the museum in Belem who wanted me to deposit my day bag and the bloke who didn’t know what had happened to the luggage lockers, even when we were at the office that a sign on the wall had pointed us to!
Phone users
Yes, those irritating people who walk along the street glued to their phones who are oblivious to everything else that’s going on around them.
Blocking the pavement or other walkway is one irritation, trying to sent a text whilst pulling a wheelie bag along is another and then there’s those who insist on taking selfies or photograph their food before eating it.
One phone user did come unstuck earlier in the year whilst visiting the Alhambra in Granada. She was so intent on taking a photo whilst walking forward that she didn’t notice the step down.
Cue scream and a badly damaged/potentially broken ankle… Ouch!
Rain
It rained four days out of seven whilst on Isle of Man last week.
We’d gone prepared as we’d taken decent rain jackets, but it did put a dampener on proceedings. Had the same problem in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Portugal and Spain too!
Restaurant rip offs
Step forward the place in Cordoba that tried to charge us for bread, even though we hadn’t asked for a bread basket and hadn’t eaten anything from it.
Same place claimed that they weren’t doing tapas, even though there was a rather well done set of tiles outside with the word tapas at the centre.
Restaurant or tour touts
Those who try standing in front of you as a means of getting you into their cafe, restaurant or onto a tuk-tuk.
Answer is always ‘No’ and if they don’t take the hint then it’s ‘No, no, no, no, no and no!’.
Which really brassed off one bloke in Malaga in March this year.
We walked passed that establishment later on and there weren’t many in it.
Wonder why?
Spainpacking on Rohantime!
Down the avenues and alleyways in Cordoba..
As you may have gathered, Caroline and I have bought a few bits and pieces from Rohan over the years and regularly use their clothing along with items from other brands when we’re off travelling or even when we’re just mooching around Yorkshire.
My recent Spainpacking post from wisepacking has been posted on Rohantime this morning along with a trio of photos that you may recognise…
Thanks again Sarah!
The links to Rohantime and Rohan’s sites…
rohan.co.uk
Mezquita
Mezquita on the right, and a few potential visitors too
Yes, you’ve guessed it, another queue!
The outer walls of Mezquita – and a couple of horse drawn carriages too.
Puente Romano with Torre de la Calahorra over the bridge
Down the alley
And into the main square
After the Alcazar and a spot of lunch, it was time to head in the direction of Mezquita to have a seat, relax, buy some tickets and head inside.
With the ticket machines out of order when we looked, it was join the queue time again as I mentioned in yesterday’s post. The ticket seller was grumpier than one of the Seven Dwarves, but we thanked him anyway and headed in the direction of the Mezquita’s main entrance.
Whilst there’s photos on here of scenes around the Mezquita, there are no shots of the interior, largely because of the No Photography sign that I’d seen on the way in.
Caroline and I adhered to this, unlike quite a few others who were using cameras and phones to take shots inside the building. Not only that, but there were also those who were sending and receiving texts or even calls inside Cordoba’s Mosque/Cathedral.
Now you may have realised by now that I’m not a fan of visiting churches etc and it’s usually Caroline who heads inside whilst I take a wander around the local area either taking photos or reading/chilling out with a coffee or beer as the case may be.
I was intrigued by Mezquita though, especially as it’s a former mosque that’s been expanded since becoming a cathedral.
Yes, it was busy, but we decided to look around Mezquita in an organised way rather than heading off in the haphazard manner that some were heading off in. We were surprised by the amount of noise and vacuous conversations that some were indulging in as they wandered around looking at their mobile screens rather than at the building’s historic surroundings.
Although there were many aspects of Mezquita that I found fascinating, there were others that I just couldn’t relate to at all, even though there were plenty of people looking at these Christian elements of the interior.
As it turned out when we swapped thoughts later on, Caroline hadn’t really related to these elements either, just as she hadn’t with some aspects of the Cathedral in Seville when she’d visited that building a few days earlier.
I decided to take a seat while Caroline wandered back to an area that she hadn’t been able to look at a few minutes before and I could’t help noticing how many were glued to their phones or making/taking calls inside the building rather than waiting until they got outside.
As a non-believer, even I know that there is a time and a place for using a phone and that a Sunday afternoon inside of Mezquita was neither the time nor the place…
When Caroline arrived back, we decided to have a seat somewhere and relax for a while before heading back to the hotel for a siesta, shower, change and evening meal.
We ended up in a bar/restaurant that I’d been into a couple of hours before and I was rather surprised to find that the barman was already pumping up a glass of beer for me. A second was ordered and paid for so Caroline and I swapped notes on Mezquita and did a spot of people watching too.
One thing that Caroline and I both agreed on was that if we do go back to Cordoba, a night visit to Mezquita is definitely the way to go as a means of having a quieter, less intrusive experience.
Although we headed out for an evening meal, everywhere was busy with it being Father’s Day, so we ended up in once of the few places with room to spare at the tables in their courtyards.
It wasn’t the best meal we’d had on the trip so far and it was a good job we’d got a large bottle of water with our first drinks as service for both food and drinks was a little on the slow side.
Desserts didn’t come into play that night and neither did a drink at the Irish bar just around the corner from our hotel. Although there was a rather large display in one of the windows of the bar, it wasn’t possible to get one of my favourite Irish beers or one of Caroline’s favoured whiskeys, despite their brands being heavily promoted in that display!
So it was to be an early night rather than the one that we’d planned. Bags and clothes were prepped instead for the next day’s bus ride to Granada…
More on Monday!
Father’s Day in Cordoba…
Another day, another queue!
It did fill up, honest!
No, not a queue, just a party heading for the gardens
One of many vistas in those gardens
Columbus, Fernando and Isabel. Fernando wasn’t hearing the drums…
More of the gardens.
After finding our way around Cordoba without an Apple Map on Saturday night, we had a fair idea of where we were going on Sunday morning.
The breakfast at Hotel Serrano was OK, but the coffee and non-serrano ham left a bit to be desired.
Something Caroline noticed though was a couple of blokes adding four sugar sachets to their glasses of orange juice. Yes, we like sweets and chocolate, but neither of us have taken sugar in tea or coffee for years (it’s over forty since I last put sugar in tea or coffee).
I can still remember my reaction when I’d been given the wrong cup of tea at work a few years ago (Hi Carole!) and a cup of sugared Nescafe in Cyprus ten years ago, so putting sugar in orange juice was definitely a no-no!
Anyway, the coffee in the hotel ensured that we had a cafe stop on our way to the historic part of Cordoba. Mezquita was open for services on a Sunday morning, so we decided to head there in the afternoon once we’d been to Cordoba’s Alcazar and had lunch.
Yes there was a queue to get into Alcazar de los Reynes Cristianos (to give it its full name) and guess who was in that queue? The couple who had been decidedly frosty in the restaurant we’d eaten in on Saturday night…
Although there were rooms to see in Fortress of Christian Monarchs, the main attractions on this bright and sunny day were the gardens.
Which were busy as families were out to celebrate Father’s Day.
Once away from the entrance to the garden complex, there were ample opportunities to just wander around and admire the gardens, fountains, flowers, shaped trees and what looked like giant stone chess pieces placed on top of plinths. They were in fact depicting the Spanish Royals meeting Christopher Columbus at the Fortress back in 1486.
Our wanderings were tempered by a few opportunities to sit down, top up the fluid levels from our water bottles and top up the sun protection from pocket packs of Nivea SPF 30 sun cream.
After a while though, our thoughts turned to Sunday lunch. No, not roast and veg style, just something more in keeping with the surroundings.
The Father’s Day crowds ensured that most places were full – even Burger King. A short beer stop quenched the thirst and we headed off and found a place that looked inviting and had plenty of covered seating.
We sat down at one table and were promptly moved to another. Choices were made from the menu, but a brusque waiter made it plain that we couldn’t have tapas, so I made do with a bowl of gazpacho soup and pondered the word on the wall outside the restaurant’s front entrance.
Tapas.
With food and drinks consumed, we asked for the bill. The requested bottle of water hadn’t turned up and wasn’t on the bill, but the unasked for (and not consumed) bread basket was.
Given the brusqueness of the waiter, I ended up querying the bill with just one word using the inflection of Manuel from Fawlty Towers…
“Que?”
I reverted to English to explain that we hadn’t ordered or eaten any bread, so the waitress went inside and brought us a new bill that was bread-free and a few € less than the original.
As Mezquita didn’t open until 3pm on a Sunday, we still had plenty of time to wander around some more, so a beer break was called and followed by an ice cream break. With the electronic ticket machines labelled as being out of action, we had to join the queue to get tickets. Once bought, the law of sod was invoked once more as guess what happened?
Those out of action labels were taken off those ticket machines…
As we made our way to the entrance queue proper, we did notice an interesting example of Girl Power as a couple of armed police officers were stationed nearby.
And it wasn’t the bloke who was toting the machine gun…
More tomorrow!
Bye, bye Seville, hello Cordoba!
After one last tapas meal at The Seven Bull’s Heads
Queuing for the Alcazar? That was so yesterday!
Time for breakfast…
We’ll be back…
Seville’s bullring – we gave it a miss
Cordoba by night, and yes, that’s Mezquita in the floodlights
If it’s Saturday, it must be the day to move on.
We’d enjoyed our few days in Seville and another good night in a tapas bar, but it was time to find breakfast and then the bus station so we could make our way to Cordoba.
One of the topics discussed during our previous night’s meal was whether we’d go back to Seville on another trip. As ‘Yes’ was the answer to that one, I suspect that we’ll have another night or more in Bar Pelayo (the real name of The Seven Bull’s Heads), more time wandering around the Alcazar and more of those posh ice creams we had on our first full day in Seville.
And more breakfasts in Taberna El Papelon.
We will however look for another place to stay as we weren’t overly keen on the pension that I’d booked us into. Where will we go? I suspect that there may be some consulting of guidebooks and asking questions on travel forums as well as a closer perusal of the comments made on various accommodation finding sites.
The walk to the bus station gave us a chance to stretch our legs before hitting the bus station and getting the bus to Cordoba. This was the most expensive bus ride on the road trip, but as it was a Saturday and we’d got bargain tickets for other journeys we had, we weren’t complaining.
Until we got to Cordoba. Exiting the bus station and finding our way out onto the main road via the railway station was the easy part.
Following the printouts from Apple Maps wasn’t…
We’d got into the right street, but could we heck as like find the street that Hotel Serrano was on. We walked, we looked and we walked some more, but it wasn’t until around 30 minutes later did we realise that we’d missed it, so we backtracked, found it and headed in.
After getting up to our room, there a plan was hatched. Shower and change, do the clothes washing that we needed to do and then head out to stretch our legs once more and find a drink or two.
That set us up quite nicely for the evening. Once the siesta was out of the way, it was time to head out and see what was out there.
Darkness had fallen, and as we headed out, we decided that we were just going to go with the flow, so we did as a steady stream of people headed down towards the river.
Whilst we spotted a few likely places to eat, we headed down to and over Puente Romano. Whilst there was no luck finding an eating place on the other side of the river, we headed back into the centre, took a few photos and then spotted a sign regarding night tours of Mezquita.
We hadn’t heard about these, but a door opened to let some people in so we asked the lady at the door about the night tours, but this one was full.
We did find a restaurant eventually (at one point there was a running joke about having a romantic Saturday night meal in the branch of Burger King that we passed a couple of times), but we hit gold.
No notes were made and I’ve misplaced the receipt that bears the name of the restaurant we ate in, but it was cool (in more ways than one!), the food was good and so was the ambience – apart from the rather frosty faced couple we’d been seated next to…
Once fed and watered, it was back to the hotel for a good night’s sleep in readiness for what was going to be a fairly busy Sunday wandering around Cordoba, another Alcazar and the Mezquita.
On the Spanish version of Father’s Day…
More tomorrow!
wisepacking 
You must be logged in to post a comment.