Andalucía summary... 2 months late!

I have really hit new levels of blog-related procrastination: nearly two months without an update. They have been pretty intense months, in all fairness! The end of November/beginning of December saw me and 20 of my Santander Erasmus companions venture to the other side of the country on a 9 day road trip, making the most of a week that contained two national holidays. We spent one night in Toledo, two in Granada, two in Cádiz, two in Sevilla and one in Córdoba and had an awesome time in each place.

Whilst there we visited some awesome sights, including: the old fortified city and cathedrals of Toledo; the Alhambra (a beautiful Moorish palace) and the Sierra Nevada in Granada; Flamenco dancing, the Cathedral, the Plaza de España and the Alcazar palace in Sevilla; and the Cathedral in Córdoba that is rather cheekily built inside a massive ex-mosque. There is, of course, a link to my photo album of said places in the sidebar.

We also passed by Gibraltar on the way to Tarifa, which is a town located on the "Costa del Windsurf". Suffice to say that upon trying to enter Gibraltar it transpired that, like a complete plonker, I had left my passport all the way back in Santander and was thus denied access to my own country. How I enjoyed sitting in the frontier McDonald's mindlessly stirring a McFlurry for 2 hours whilst my French mates ran around like schoolkids having the time of their life in "my country".

The people in Andalucía are a lot more accessible if you need help or feel like chatting to a stranger in comparison to Cantabria. However, the downside of this is that when you do talk to them, they have this daft accent that omits the majority of the appearances of the letter S, a sound which Spanish is not exactly shy of. The end result is that they sound like they are speaking with a dummy in or have some juvenile speech impediment. I assure you that this ceased to be amusing rather quickly.

Toledo is actually not in the region of Andalucía and is situated right in the centre of Spain. We used it as a stopping point on the first day to avoid a full 12 hours driving. It had beautiful old buildings, but was how dead the nightlife was for a Saturday night beggars belief. Granada was not particularly attractive as a town but appeared to have a lot going on. Unfortunately we were there on Sunday and Monday nights and therefore didn't really get to sample the nightlife. Cádiz was really quite pleasant in terms of architecture and general city ambience. The nightlife on the Tuesday night before the Wednesday national holiday was good, but it seemed like quite a small town and would probably get boring pretty quickly. Sevilla was far and away the best place we visited: awesome architecture, brilliant nightlife and so many fantastic sights in one area. The flamenco there can only be described accurately as mesmerising and addictive. If you ever get the chance to see it, do, as you will not be disappointed. Córdoba was scenic but pretty small and we weren't there long enough to judge it accurately in all fairness.