Granada & Seville (2005)

The road between Valencia and Granada wasn't great. We left just after 3pm but didn't arrive at our hostel until after 10pm. We did stop at a small diner outside of Jaen for a quick dinner, and we also got lost at the very end due to bad directions, but I'd say the drive takes a minimum of six hours.

Driving long the interior was pretty different from the coast. There were lots of mountains and tunnels, and the people seemed a lot less used to tourists (or maybe just Asian tourists), although not in an unfriendly way. I didn't feel like I was constantly checking my pockets anymore, but very few people spoke any English, so it was harder to get around.

The hostel, once we found it, was really nice. It was called Hostal Camino Real, it cost only 39 EUR for a double with ensuite bath. The entire building seemed new, and both the bathroom and the bedroom were spacious, with a bidet and a heated towel rack in the bathroom. It was run by an older woman who sounded American (or Canadian) and was friendly and helpful. The location was super convenient for us, since we were primarily focused on visiting the Alhambra, and the hostel is right on the road leading up to it.

We'd discovered while in Valencia that the advance tickets for the Alhambra were sold out already, for the date we wanted. Our only option was to arrive early and try to get one of the 2000 tickets which were released at 8am every day.

So, the next morning, we were up by 7am, and in line by 7:40am. We were probably around 200th in line, so we got our tickets within 15-20 minutes of opening, and were inside the gate by 8:30am with our audio tour guides.

We spent the next four hours looking around, at the Nasrid palace, Charles V's palace, the gardens, the Alcazaba, and all the other sights. We had an amazing time at the Alhambra; for me it was the highlight of our trip.









I took a whole bunch of pictures before finally exiting the area around 12:45pm, tired and ravenously hungry, since we hadn't had time for breakfast. We headed into town to grab a bite, and ended up eating at a pizzeria called "Yesterday".

By 3pm we were on the road towards Seville. Although the distance was only 265 kilometers, and it only took 2.5 hours to drive, it felt like forever; I guess we were tired from our early morning, and (again) the road wasn't great.

We got to Seville around 5:30pm and checked into our hostel, Casa Sol y Luna (42 EUR/double). After an hour or so of vegging out, we went to a local bar/cafe for some tapas and "fino", a very dry sherry. Then we walked to the Cathedral, through the Alcazar Gardens, and enjoyed an ice cream on the waterfront, before heading back to the hostel.


The next day, we dropped off our laundry with the hostel owner (10 EUR/load) and bought tickets to El Arenal, a flamenco show. We got a late brunch at Cafe Bar Campanario, by the Cathedral (cheap and delicious tapas and sangria). We decided against going inside the Cathedral itself, and did some shopping in the area near our hostel instead, until everything started to close for siesta around 1:30pm. We retired to our hostel since there was nothing to do but wait out the siesta, and went out shopping again around 4:30pm, in the Calle Sierpes area. D and I ended up buying some ceramic serving plates as gifts.

For dinner we ate at El Baratillo / Casa Cheri, a very homey paella place where one woman took all the orders, cooked all the food, and chatted up all the diners.


After dinner she pulled out a guest book for us to sign, which was filled with notes from hundreds of guests from all over the world.

Finally, at 10:30pm, we went to see the flamenco show. There were six dancers, three guitarists, and three singers. It was pretty good, but not as impressive as I'd hoped.

travel note

I want to post more last week's East Coast trip later, but one quick note: I got to use the "mobile boarding pass" system for the first time flying out of SFO on United. There was a slight hitch: only one of the security lines was set up to scan the pass, so my security guy had to hand my phone to another security guy to scan it. But, overall it was still fairly quick and totally paperless! Yay.

airline suckage redux

I've been hating on airlines more than usual recently.

Yesterday evening I paid over $1200 for a three-legged post-Christmas route between the Bay Area, Maui, and the Big Island. I'd been watching the fares since May (which was unfortunately before we decided to go for sure) and this particular route had never gone below $983. I finally pulled the trigger because they were down to three seats left on only non-stop flight between Kona and the Bay Area. Grr. (On the other hand, deals for early December are plentiful; I've seen ads for sub-$350 roundtrip flights. Darn high season.)

Then, I discovered this morning that because we'd booked our upcoming East Coast trip through continental.com (using Continental miles) on flights operated by United, we had no seat assignments. We would have gone seat-less ("you will get a [super-crappy] seat assignment at the gate") except that I pulled United Premier rank to get us Economy Plus seats. Whew.

Finally, I randomly checked our October DC itinerary online and discovered that it listed our status as "Schedule Change" instead of "Confirmed". It had a red warning that instructed me to call customer service to confirm. I spent over 20 minutes on the phone with the rep just to reconfirm that flight. WTF? Last month I got an email from Virgin America with a schedule change, which required about ten seconds and two button clicks to confirm.

Seoul, Korea: Day 1

Just before leaving Taipei, a gate announcement was made: our boarding time was delayed to 2:30pm, but we would depart as scheduled, and that the airline apologized for the delay. Our original boarding time was 2:15pm, and I'm pretty sure there's no way an American airline would bother to announce, let alone apologize, for a 15 minute delay. In the end we boarded at 2:25pm anyway.

We arrived in Seoul on time with all our luggage intact. D nearly forgot his warmup jacket on the airplane, but he remembered in the terminal and ran back to get it. When he got there, the flight attendants had already discovered it and tagged it by seat number; he showed them his boarding pass to get it back.

Everything in Korea seems to be supremely organized. The airport is clean and easy to navigate, we cleared customs quickly as there were many queues, and when we got out there was a big screen telling us where to get our luggage, by carousel number. After exiting the airport, we headed for the KAL limousine bus ticket counter, where we bought two tickets for about $11 apiece, to travel 80 minutes to our hotel, the Westin Chosun Seoul. There were probably 20 different bus stands, all numbered. Once we got into the right line, a baggage handler came by to tag our bags, and then later, a woman in a hotel uniform came by to check us off of her reservations list. There was basically no danger of us feeling lost at all.

The bus itself was super nice too; large leather chairs, tons of legroom, and a big screen TV at the front, playing Korean soap operas.

The view from the back of the bus:


The ride was nearly 80 minutes long, but it went by really quickly, and we arrived at our hotel around 8:30pm.

Apparently the hotel representative at the airport had automatically checked us in as soon as she found us, so as soon as we arrived, the bellhop whisked us and our luggage to the front desk to pick up our keys, and then we were immediately escorted to our rooms. Speaking of which, the keys worked by proximity sensor, so there was never any fiddling with the locks. Awesome.

We took about an hour to shower, change, and examine our rooms (great view of Seoul Plaza) and then asked the concierge for a dinner recommendation. She said it was pretty late for most restaurants, but she finally pointed us to Arirang, just across the street. I managed to trip over the curb on the way there and twisted my foot, which was unfortunate as we had quite a bit of sightseeing planned for the next day, but I decided not to worry about it for the time being.

Arirang served Korean BBQ; sliced beef and marinated beef, which of course came with tons of side dishes. The marinated beef and the side dishes were good, but the sliced beef was not very good at all; very fatty and hard to chew. The price wasn't exactly the cheapest, either, but I guess we couldn't be too picky at nearly 10pm.

32 hours

I just got back home yesterday night after spending a week in Peru.

The trip was really fun; the 13 of us spent two days exploring Cuzco and the Sacred Valley, and then embarked on a four day trek, hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, before returning to Cuzco by train/bus. I'll post much more later, including photos (I took over 30 GB of RAW so they're likely to take some time to process).

The travel part was horrible. We were booked on American Airlines from San Francisco to Lima via Miami, and from Lima to Cuzco and back on LAN Peru.

Things that went wrong:
- The outbound flight from Miami to Lima departed over an hour late. We were supposed to arrive at 4:10am to catch our 6:00am LAN flight, but instead arrived at 5:05am. Nevertheless, we cleared immigration and got to baggage claim by 5:15am. There, we proceeded to wait 40 minutes for our bags. Hearing several "final boarding" calls for your flight while standing in baggage claim is really frustrating. We ended up taking the 7:20am to Cuzco, and barely got there in time for our 10am morning meeting with our Inca Trail tour company.
- Because we had missed the 6:00am flight on the outbound journey, when we got to the airport to take our return flight, LAN said our reservation had been cancelled, even though we had specifically asked the agent to check that our return reservation was still valid, when she was rebooking us on the 7:20am. After some heated discussion, the LAN agent grudgingly gave us seats on our original 4:45pm flight. D and I were seated separately, but thought nothing of it until we got on the airplane and discovered the flight was only half full. We easily reseated ourselves, as my entire row was empty. I'm pretty sure that was no accident; the agent was not very happy with us after our conversation.
- Upon arrival in Lima, the American Airlines desk was not yet open for check-in, since we had arrived nearly 5 hours before the departure time for our Miami flight. We were told it would open at 7pm. Some AA employees did show up around 7pm but they spent at least 10-15 minutes setting up, and then after they opened the line, we spent another 10-15 minutes doing security interviews. We then stood in line waiting for the actual check-in desk to open until about 7:45pm, while several of the desk agents stood around chatting. We finally checked in around 8pm and were told our flight was going to be 20-30 minutes late.
- We showed up at the gate at the revised boarding time, and were surprised to see that our flight was listed as "on time". However, no one was boarding. The gate agent said the flight was still 20-30 minutes late, but didn't explain why the departures board was wrong.
- After 20-30 minutes, we were told the plane had arrived but had "maintenance issues" and the flight was going to be an additional 45 minutes late. Then, after an hour, we were told the maintenance was going to take another 2 hours. At this point a massive throng of people approached the gate desk to try to get their connections rebooked. The guy sitting next to us checked his laptop and informed us that the same flight had been 6 hours late the day before, which did not make us feel better. The gate agents did give out some sandwiches after awhile (although they didn't have any options for our vegetarian friend), but no meal vouchers. We finally left Lima around 3:30am, instead of the originally scheduled 11:20pm. As an aside, the floor in the Lima airport is tiled with stone and very cold.
- When we arrived in Miami, we discovered we were rebooked on the 3:30pm flight to San Francisco. (Our original flight was 8:30am, but we were already 4 hours late, so we calculated it would only be a couple of extra hours of waiting; not too bad.) However, half of our group was booked on the later 7:00pm flight. After doing some research, they got themselves rebooked on the 1:45pm connecting through LAX. At this point we all expected to arrive back in San Francisco around 6 or 6:30pm, and D and I had managed to secure $10 meal vouchers for lunch, so we were moderately un-cranky. (As another aside, I am now much, much too familiar with the Manchu Wok in Miami's Concourse D, having also spent 3 hours there last year waiting for a delayed AA flight to Buenos Aires, since it closes the latest of all the restaurants in that terminal.)
- We boarded our flight at 3pm as scheduled, and I fell asleep while waiting on the runway. An hour later I woke up and we were still on the runway. Apparently we had been delayed an hour and 40 minutes because a runway at SFO was closed "due to weather". Conveniently, a thunderstorm rolled in as we were waiting on the runway, and at the time that we were cleared to takeoff, the thunder and lightening were in full force, and it was pouring cats and dogs. We waited another 25 minutes for the storm to clear, and finally took off 2.5 hours late.
- When we finally arrived in SFO, I checked the LAX route that the other group had taken. They had been delayed out of Miami (30 minutes) and delayed out of LAX (30 minutes) but had eventually landed at 6:20pm. I am not clear at all about why it was okay for them to land at 6:20pm but not okay for us to land at 6:30pm.

In the end, instead of getting home around noon on Sunday, I got home at 9:30pm, after 32 hours of travel. I think that may have been my longest travel day ever, in terms of absolute hours.

Proportionally, my worst-delayed trip involved getting stuck on a runway in Syracuse for 9 hours while flying from San Francisco to Boston via St. Louis, after having already seen the runway at Logan Airport. That particular flight (on the now-defunct TWA) also involved aborted detours to Hartford and JFK, and should have taken about 6 hours but ended up taking 17 hours in total.

Anyway, it's a really good thing the rest of the trip was gorgeous and delicious and exhilarating and otherwise awesome. Stay tuned...

perfect storm

I just got home about an hour ago after watching the Rockets beat the Warriors in a surprisingly entertaining game. It was even meaningful, at least for the Rockets, since they were fighting to keep the third seed going into the playoffs.

The game was scheduled for 7:30pm, so we left San Mateo around 6:00pm. We got to the Hesperian exit around 6:30pm, so we thought we had plenty of time to stop at Panera for some sandwiches. We were back on our way in about 20 minutes. Then, about three exits before the Coliseum, the traffic became insanely bad. Only then did we realize that the A's were playing their home season opener, also at the Coliseum.

We finally arrived at the BART station (where we normally park) around 7:20pm, having gone 3 miles in 30 minutes, spent ten minutes looking for free parking, and decided to give up and pay for parking. When we got to the paid parking lot, we were turned back by the parking attendants; they were already full. By the time we found parking (in the surrounding semi-sketchy neighborhood) and got to our seats, it was nearly 8:00pm, and almost the end of the first quarter.

The after-game experience was pretty crazy too. The game ended quite early; just after 10pm. Unfortunately this meant that the end of the basketball game coincided with the end of the baseball game. We spent the next 45 minutes slogging through pedestrian traffic over the foot bridge and into the BART station. Luckily, once we got out of the station, things were mostly back to normal. (I was really happy not to have been one of those hordes of people standing on the platform, waiting for the BART.)

BART is useful (sometimes)

I usually don't take BART, mostly because it takes $8 to go roundtrip from Millbrae to the city, which makes it only worth it if no one wants to carpool. Last week I took BART twice; once to a whitewater rafting offsite (the bus picked up in Mountain View at 7:30am and in San Francisco at 8:30am, making my decision of pickup location very easy), and once to the Orpheum to see the Drowsy Chaperone with some friends living in the city.

PROS:
- free and plentiful parking at Millbrae
- $8 is about as cheap as round-trip gas, at least for one person
- the Civic Center stop at 8th and Market is pretty convenient to lots of stuff

CONS:
- takes 45 minutes (as opposed to 30 minutes) from my house to downtown
- last train a little after midnight
- sometimes the cars smell funny

All in all, it's a decent option and I will have to remember to keep it in mind.

As for the events themselves, rafting was fun and all, but I'm tired of Class III. If only someone else would plan a Class IV trip...since I'm too lazy at the moment.

The musical was surprisingly good; I had no idea what it was going to be about, and I found the self-conscious humor and show-within-a-show setup intriguing. The narrator character was well played, as were the male and female leads, but I was less fond of some of the supporting characters, including the titular chaperone. Overall it was fun and upbeat, and not too expensive either, at $55 for a weekday showing.