Friday, November 30, 2012

gwintennis shared an Instagram photo with you

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"Beautiful sunrise this morning. "

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The Instagram Team

gwintennis shared an Instagram photo with you

Hi there,

gwintennis just shared an Instagram photo with you:


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"Spectacular Fountain in Parc de la Ciutadella. "

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The Instagram Team

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Huelga

Apparently Nov 14th is strike day in Spain. Kiron and I woke up this morning and did some sightseeing. We saw the gorgeous Plaza Espana and walked through some beautiful gardens. Afterwards, we headed back to our hostel and gathered our stuff to head to the train station. As we were leaving the city, we saw lots of people gathering with signs and fair amount of police presence.

( So I just learned later this evening that huelga means to strike. When I saw the General Huelga signs and flags, I thought it was a parade for general Huelga.  Wrong.  CNN called it the Mega Strike.)

It looked like a protest for something related to the banks.We couldn't understand any more than that.  We were worried about being late for our train. We made the last train by a matter of seconds and wanted to avoid that. Turns out that was the least of our concerns. There was a strike today and no trains or buses. A strike in Spain and Portugal. So we did some brain storming an went to rent a car. We got a rental only problem was when we went to sign for it, it was manual. Ahhhhh! We couldn't drive it.  Perhaps I need to learn again. Thankfully the next rental place had an automatic. Only one left was an Audi A4 station wagon.  We took it and headed for Granada. We had to get here because we fly out of there to Barcelona tomorrow. 

We had a pleasant drive across the Spanish countryside. Managed to get lost trying to find our hotel. We were promised a map of Spain in our car that of course wasn't there. So, we arrived in the Grenada area about 3:30excited to have enough time to sightsee. Well, that didn't work out. The Alhambra was closed because of the strike. We stopped at a hotel for a map about 5 pm and after more driving around finally parked about 6 pm and I sent kiron off on foot to find our Casa Bombo that us somewhere close just not via car. We were worried our car was gonna block the road to buses coming by and would need to be moved. We are in the area that is a UNESCO world heritage site and has limited access.

Thankfully, after 30 min Kiron just returned and we have a place to sleep. We had to trek in to the hostel without our bags. It is worth it all as the views of the Alhambra are gorgeous. It was worth all the hassle. This is the view from our bedroom window. 

Now going to find some dinner and will leave bread crumbs to find our way back.  The adventure continues.   

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