Jacques and Rollande: February 20

Today we wanted to see how the bus system worked. Yesterday we had bought a card with 10 euros on it. Our destination was Costco which is at the other end of the city. It turns out that each trip using this card is only going to cost us 40 cents. If you pay cash it is 1.50 or 1.70, i’m not sure. The bus dropped us off in front of the store but of course before going in, there was a cache to go find so off we went to find it.

We were surprised by how few people were in the store. On a storm day Moncton has more customers than Seville has on a normal day. A lot of the products were the same as home including the cafeteria which had the exact same things on the menu as well as the same prices. Some things were different like all the packages of jambôn and cheeses. We went around a few times so Jacques could salivate as he looked at all the hams and dry sausages. We were not going to buy anything, but we came home with coffee, iberico ham, cheese and 2 bottles of wine to try. We will not need to buy these products for a couple of weeks.

We came back to the apartment to bring our purchases before going on the hunt for more caches around the cathedral and the Giralda. One of the caches took us to a hidden square where the buildings were made in such a way that the square was round. It was pretty neat to walk around. We took pictures but they don’t show how awesome the place was. We also went to 2 different tourist information booths, but they mostly want to sell you tours. At the first booth when we told her that we were here for 6 weeks she took out a sheet from a drawer that listed all the places to visit besides the obvious ones and their prices. Some are free and others very reasonably priced albeit, I imagine they are also not quite as exciting as the cathedral and plaza de España.

Since we have already visited the inside of the cathedral on our first trip to Seville we will probably skip it but we will have to think about booking tickets to Real Alcazar soon before it gets too busy.

We have booked a tour for Sunday with a company that mostly caters to students. We only realized it was geared for students when we tried to book it and they asked what semester we were studying, but when we wrote to them, they said that they accepted anybody. It is the only company that we have found that goes to Setenil de las Bodegas as well as Ronda. They basically just furnish the transportation, and you do your own touring. That is fine with us because it was impossible to find a bus or train that could take us there without having to do a lot of transfers and neither one of us wants to drive.

For now, we have plans for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Friday is our food tour, Saturday a geocaching event and Sunday, Ronda and Setenil. Monday we will want to rest mostly because Sunday’s tour is 12 hours without counting the long walk from our apartment to the rendez vous point and back.