The opportunity to change climate from London's 4-seasons-in-a-day to Spanish sunny siesta came along with my friend Martin (from We follow the sun). After inviting him to join me in exploring London's possibilities, Martin brought the carefree attitude and imaginativeness of a true traveler. Inspired by his stories, and by being "stuck" in London, we have decided to honor the end of my internship with one final trip, following the sun. For destination we chose Valladolid, a small modern city in Northern Spain, where Martin had spent few eventful party days as a member of BEST (Board of European Students of Technology). For date - the final weekend before my last day at the Institute of Linguists, Monday Sept 15th. Following advices of my former roommate (who was flying to Italy every other week to visit his girlfriend) and Martin's own experience, we booked a Ryanair flight two weeks in advance.
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| The Basement |
So with our plane tickets booked (75£ round trip for the three of us, those were the days..), travel guide prepared, my first and only 2 days leave off work, we were almost all set. One last thing missing was accommodation. That's where Martin's couch surfing experience came in. He had explained to us how he hosted people back in his home city in Poprad, Slovakia and how in return he was hosted by by friendly couch surfers in Spain, Poland, Estonia - all in the course of one month.
It goes without saying, that we were very much intrigued by all this. Traveling the world, meeting locals and travelers, all for free. How is that possible? Well - he said - you should become couch surfers too, and find out yourselves! He helped to set up our profiles at http://www.couchsurfing.org, wrote our first reference (reading the references written about possible surfers/hosts helps you to know them better) and helped with our first couch search. We searched for hosts in the Valladolid,Castile y Leon, Spain area (nowadays it comes up with 235 people ;) and then, following Martin's instructions wrote a few couch requests and waited for the answers. Martin was approached by a first-time local host by the name of Jesus Alberto (name Jesus is very common in Spain), while our request was positively answered by a Czech Erasmus student Tomáš. Our first couch surfing experience (first of many) could begin.
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| From 2008-09-11,12 Valladolid |
So, on the eve of Thursday the 11th of Sept we were filled with a range of emotions. Nervous, anxious, we packed our cabin-sized bags, made a pizza, watched a movie and slept for a few hours until we have hit the dark streets of morning North East London at 3.30 AM, around the time of the Islamic morning prayer Fajr (فجر), trying to catch the bus to Stansted Airport. This proved to be a little tricky, because Martin, as usual, has decided to find an ATM right before the bus was to arrive. When it arrived, he was nowhere to be found. We have boarded the luggage very slowly and used our Eastern European charms to persuade the driver to wait just a little longer for our friend. The driver's patience was just about to burst when we saw Martin, with his BEST laptop case running towards the bus in huge leaps. The driver had closed the door just before Martin reached for the bus, but fortunately took our pleads, and let him on board.
We arrived to Stansted half an hour later, on a bright sunny morning, before six. Our flight was to depart two hours later, so we slept for a bit and I had managed to capture the panorama picture you can see above. Sleepy we have boarded a plane. Once I got on board, I was wide awake again. It was my first time on a plane (three months earlier I had taken the bus to London - 18hrs!). In just over an hour we could see brown picturesquely shaped fields near Valladolid.
Our first CS experience was just around the corner.
(To be continued)
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1 comment:
Always on time! :) It was great week in Spain
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