Last weekend was by far the most interesting couple of days that I have spent in Europe so far. I planned a very last minute trip to Seville with three of my friends that live in my apartment building. All of our friends already had plans to go away for the weekend. A lot of them were going to Interlaken and Prague with student study abroad groups called Bus 2 Alps and Florence For Fun but we wanted to do something different.
My friend Christina is studying abroad in Seville so I decided to go visit her for the weekend. Our other friend Drew is studying in Barcelona and he was going to Seville for the weekend also so my friends and I thought that it would be fun to go somewhere where we knew some students. That way they could show us around, take us to all the important sites to see and we could go out with them at night.
Tuesday afternoon we booked train tickets to Rome, plane tickets from Rome to Seville, a hostel for two nights, return plane tickets to Bologna and train tickets back from there. As the weekend approached our excitement for our trip was growing. I was looking forward to seeing my friend Christina and I had also never been to Spain before so I couldn’t wait to see another country in Europe after being in Italy for a month.
Unfortunately, our trip did not go exactly as planned. In fact, just about everything that you can possibly think of that could go wrong went wrong.
It started when we got on the train to Rome. My friend Danielle had booked our train tickets. She had gone to Rome the weekend before to visit friends and she booked the train tickets on the same website that she used before. I have found that many times when you get on the train in Italy they do not come around to check your tickets, which is what happened to Danielle the weekend before on her way to Rome. However, on our way to Rome a week later they did come around to check them and we found out that what Danielle had been purchasing were not eight euro train tickets but actually seat reservations. Seat reservations are only accepted if you have a Eurorail pass, which costs about 225 euro, and are not sold on the train. Because we didn’t have these passes my friends and I were forced to pay 95 euro each on the train in addition to the 8 that we had already paid.
Naturally, the incident on the train put everybody in a little bit of a bad mood, but we wanted to have a good trip so we went to get some lunch at a well known hostel in Rome called The Yellow and continued on to the airport trying to get excited again for our trip.
Ioriginally thought that we would have some time to walk around Rome and see a couple of sites but we decided that it would be safer to go straight to the airport and make sure we got there on time.
Danielle and I had packed both of our clothes into her small rolling carry-on suitcase and also each had a big purse. When we got to the airport we weighed the suitcase and it was two kilograms over the weight limit but the man very nicely let us through anyway, which was probably the only good thing that happened in the airport. When we went through security my sunscreen was confiscated because it was too big for a carry-on.
Then as we proceeded to hand in our boarding passes to go to the plane we were told that we could not have a carry on and a purse so Danielle had to shove all of her belongings in her purse into everybody else’s bags. I have never been on a plane before where they did not allow you to have a carry-on as well as a purse so that was a new experience for me.
There is also a small metal cart that you need to fit your bag into to make sure that it is the right size for a carry-on. At first Danielle could not get it to fit and we thought it was going to be too big but my other friend Michael that was traveling with us was able to shove it into the crate after multiple attempts and luckily made it fit.
We arrived in Seville and after taking two different buses finally arrived at our hostel. The room was very nice even though it was not in the main building of the hostel. We had to walk down the street to get to our building but we did have our own room and a bathroom we shared with 4 other people.
My first meal in Spain is one that I will probably never forget. On the menu it said Quesadilla and apple salad. But what I really ended up getting was a 10-euro apple with a glob of goat cheese on top. I absolutely hate goat cheese so obviously this was not my favorite meal.
The rest of the night was a lot of fun. We met up with my friends Christina and Drew by the river where all of the study abroad students hang out and then went to a really cool outdoor club. It was all lit up with trees and outdoor seating spread out around a dance floor and bar.
Danielle and I decided to go back to the hostel earlier than my other two friends but we didn’t realize until we had already taken a cab back that the two keys we had been given were still with Michael and Chris. We had to go to the main part of the hostel at about 3 in the morning and show them a copy of Danielle’s passport so that we could get a new key.
Saturday we walked around and saw all of the sites with Christina and Drew. We went to a beautiful Cathedral and climbed to the top of the cathedral’s tower, which was 40 flights high. After taking lots of pictures and buying some souvenirs we returned to our hostel and rested before going out for the night. Our hostel offered a pub-crawl with 14 other hostels and my friends and I decided to do that Saturday night instead of going out with Christina and Drew again. Danielle had been locking our passports and valuables in the front section of her suitcase and when we got to the first bar she realized that the key to the lock, which she had been keeping in her purse pocket, was gone. I told her to just have a good night and we could look for it when we got home.
We went to two different bars and then an outdoor bar/club. We met a group of guys traveling from Australia and talked with them until the pub-crawl moved to the next club. At this point Danielle and I decided to go home. It was almost 3 am and although people in Spain stay out until very early in the morning, we had a taxi coming to pick us up at 6:45 the next morning to take us to the airport. We told Michael and Chris to make sure that they were back in time to pack up and make the taxi and headed back to the hostel.
When Danielle and I got back we searched everywhere for her missing key but could not find it anywhere. We thought about cutting open the suitcase because we needed to get our passports out to fly home. Instead of cutting it I was able to break one of the zippers off of the bag so that you could still zip and unzip it but the lock was no longer keeping it closed. About 3 minutes after I broke the zipper off Danielle found the key under a pile of clothes.
We went to sleep and I set an alarm but when we woke up the next morning Michael and Chris were still not back. We called them over and over again while packing up our stuff but Micheal’s phone had not been working and Chris’s was going straight to voicemail. Just as Danielle and I were about to have panic attacks, the boys showed up at the last second and got their stuff packed up.
We made it to the airport and then the train station with no problems. But when we got to the train station we needed to purchase new tickets because all we had were seat reservations. None of our credit cards were working in the ticket machines and we thought we were not going to be able to get tickets in time for the train we wanted but luckily we were able to buy them from one of the windows right before the train left.
When we got on the train we found out that we had purchased standing tickets so we ended up sitting on the floor in between the train cars for the 30-minute ride.
Finally we made it back to Florence and I think it’s safe to say that although the city was beautiful and it was fun seeing my friends, none of us will be returning to Seville any time soon. This weekend was filled with many lessons. I will definitely be more prepared for my next trip and I will be more prepared for whatever cultural differences I encounter.
Location: Florence
