My Travel Adventures

On the last day of my long weekend in Spain, I explored Toledo. Since basically every tourist site in the country opens at ten o’clock in the morning, I spent my first hour outside walking the road along the southern edge of the city. While this route does not have too many sights – except, perhaps, for the Old Arab Baths – it offers some pretty views of Toledo that most tourists miss. Since the Alcazar is closed on Mondays, I only visited the gardens at its base and then backtracked to the Museo de Santa Cruz. The museum, which is free of entry, has an impressive collection of art by El Greco, who spent half his life in Toledo and whose tomb can be viewed through a little window in the floor of the Monastery of Saint Dominic of Silos. The upper floor is mostly dedicated to azulejos and temporary exhibitions.

On my second free morning in Madrid, before my friends were up and running, I made a quick tour of the Royal Palace. Since I was not sure when during this extended weekend trip I would visit the palace (if I did visit it at all), I did not buy my tickets online, and they were all sold out by the time I had chosen a date and time. Still, I had read online that I could buy tickets in person if I turned up to the palace and waited in a long queue: I was advised to turn up half an hour before the actual opening time.

I had a free morning in Madrid as my friends wanted to go to the Prado, which I visited last year. Instead of joining them, I made a quick trip to Aranjuez, a town just south Madrid known for its royal palace and gardens – and for inspiring the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joa quín Rodrigo. My journey to the small touristic town was relatively simple: after reaching Villaverde Bajo-Cruce by metro, I boarded bus 423, which had arrived just late enough for me to eat my second chocolate croissant of the day. I had eaten my first upon buying a bag of three at a bakery in Madrid and ate the third once I made it to Aranjuez. Fortunately I still had cash on me, as the bus driver told me his card reader was not working.

I thought I was strangely well rested when I woke up before my alarm, but after a few minutes of lying in bed with my eyes closed, it occurred to me that I forgot to set it. As soon as I saw the time, I darted out of bed. I crammed all my belongings in my backpack and ran out to find a café where I could buy a small pastry to go. Armed with an apple and a slice of banana bread, I then made my way to the Silla de Felipe II, a lookout over the Escorial about thirty to forty minutes from the city centre. That, at any rate, was the time it took me in my frantic state. El Escorial looked small but majestic from the lookout, dwarfed by the mountain on whose slopes the city stands, and snow still capped the even taller mountains on the distant right.  

As soon as I arrived in Madrid on Thursday afternoon, I made a rookie mistake. I turned up at the airport bus station some five minutes after the bus for Alcalá de Henares was scheduled to depart and, after hanging around a little hoping that it was merely late, I went back into the airport to buy a sandwich. The next bus was supposed to arrive forty minutes after the first, but as I waited and waited, and as the forty minutes turned into an hour, it slowly dawned on me that pretty much every bus leaving the airport in that direction was departing with a delay of at least a quarter of an hour. In other words, the bus I thought I had missed left while I was buying an overpriced airport meal.  

On my last morning in Cyprus, I made a quick walking tour of Limassol. The city has a relatively new cathedral dedicated to Agia Napa as well as a very blocky medieval castle, but its most appealing attraction is its long, palm-lined waterfront. Even quite early in the morning, people were walking and jogging beneath the palm trees, and elderly men sat on the pier with fishing lines drooping into the water. Since the waterfront forms a gentle convex curve, one can view the new high-rise buildings of Limassol and the hills behind the city by walking out on one of the jetties.

I began the day at the Tombs of the Kings in Paphos. The site’s name is a bit of a misnomer: no kings are thought to be buried in the necropolis, but the tombs were originally thought too fancy not to have been built – or rather dug out – for royalty. While some are simply niches dug into rocks, several catacombs branch off from proper Greek-style courtyards with columns that would have resembled the living quarters of the buried.