Gleefully
submitted our prized L’Alhambra tickets and walked both of our legs off, each
for four hours. Know how Stumpy
feels. L’Alhambra is a wonder, the tour
in Spanish (English ones were all full) was not as enlightening as one could
have been if I actually understood more than a dozen words but learned much
using the eyes if not the ears. There is
a deliberate attempt to limit the impact of tourism on the old buildings by
restricting the numbers. A good balance
I think, but we were fortunate to get a ticket.
Twice-gullible
tourists persuaded by leaflet-handing girl to go to lunch at Tapas café, then
walked in wrong door to have our leaflet gladly received by an opposing café
and sat down to a similar but different menu.
Realised error after a little while and having ordered. Food not very nice, left there feeling both
guilty and cheated.
Visited the
San Juan de Dios Basilica (very shiny).
Site of tomb of St John of God and relics etc. Shiny, very shiny. All that glittered was indeed gold. Baroque/rococo masterpiece with all that is
great and overdone about baroque, to my limited understanding. Enormous detail and quality, hundreds of
precious things. Did I say that it was
shiny?
Found a nice
place at last for dinner and ate too much.
Best part of the meal was a free tapas plate (best because it was free,
perhaps?) which had a very tasty goulash or similar.
Does it ever happen
to you that something very good comes out of something bad? Will try not to bore the reader here, but
this story doesn’t bore me so I will tell in briefly. Skip to the next paragraph if you start to snore. There’s been some fun with buying things
here, especially online. What I realised
now after I advised my bank that I was going overseas was that I needed to
advise them that not only was I going overseas and I’d like my cards to work
(which they do – sort of) but that I’d like to also do online purchases. This means disabling a security feature of
the banking where they will text you to confirm the validity of the transaction
– a good feature but one that fails if overseas and unable to receive texts
because I didn’t want to run the gauntlet of enabling overseas roaming. Anyway, the boring story … I found I couldn’t
make some payments for online purchases of train tickets, and also the Granada
card which is what one should buy if wanting to go to L’Alhambra (ask me
later). In using a different card to buy
a train ticket from Madrid to Hendaye, I did this successfully only to receive
an urgent email from the booking company Petrabax that the bank had declined my
previously successful transaction. This
was the bad thing … here’s the big fat silver lining in the cloud disguised as
a blacker cloud: once finalised, the
purchase emailed me an e-ticket for the journey, but I then realised that I
never received e-tickets for the four journeys I’d previously booked a month
back. Either they never came or went to
junk, now unrecoverable after a month.
Bored yet? I wasn’t, realising
that I now had what was likely only a useless booking confirmation and no
tickets. Easy … we contact Petrabax …
hard, they give a US number that looks like a 1800 number or something. So … do I find a pay phone and sit on it for
an hour waiting for someone in the US to tell me that they sent the tickets and
I shouldn’t have lost them (when I never got them)? There’s no published email address, no online
chat help, the login portal shows the bookings but no way to print tickets, no
way of contacting them in any way other than the US phone number … and we
travel in 2 days.
But … here’s
the shiniest part of the silver lining in the black cloud … the denied
transaction that was at first successful caused Petrabax to write to me, and so
I had a human on the end of an email piece of string. A few polite words later via middle of the
night emails and Voila! (that’s French for Voila so I’m told) I have e-tickets
in my inbox. Glad that didn’t bore you.
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