Sevilla, Spain:

I was clever. I had a plan. All I had to do was wake up at 6:00, take the morning train from Porto to Lisboa, Metro to the bus station, and take the late-morning bus to Sevilla.

Sigh.

My very good excuse is that I was up until 2:00 finishing El Juego de Ender (spoiler: it’s fantastic), so I was nervous about missing my alarm. This meant that I found myself waking up repeatedly in a panic, only to discover that it was still the middle of the night. Then I woke up again and found it was 7:00. My 10:30 bus wouldn’t work, but according to the Internet, source of all truth and knowledge, there was a 12:30 bus. Which, by some bizarre Portugese logic, turned out be a 21:30 bus, so hurrah! I got 9 hours in Lisboa for “free”.

The city is nice. Without a map, I had to rely on my now well-honed instincts to find the city center (look for converging Metro lines; look for water; look for impossibly clustered streets), but that worked fine. All in all it was a very pleasant place to spend a day wandering, eating, writing, and reading, although, predictably, it was a little overrun with tourists. I got back to the bus well ahead of time, and after we left I remembered the hard way why I pay for couchettes on night trains. Two words: Ugh. gh.

We arrived at 04.00. As in, 4 a.m., the guard at the bus station hurried us outside so he could lock the door of the station behind us. As in, 4 a.m., the city busses weren’t running yet, so I had an (admitedly pleasant) 1/2 hour walk to my hostel, navigating by GPS the shortest linear route through all the fun twisty Spanish alleys.

So I’m in Sevilla. The hostel is nice: I used Windows Vista for the first time getting my upcoming accomodations in order (it’s shiny!), then got about an hour’s rest(-ish) on the couch before the very nice staff member woke be because his boss was going to be coming on duty, then had coffee and read on the terrace. I’m still waiting to check in, and my body hasn’t explained to me if I’m going to be sleeping today, or if we’ll just call it a wash and move right on to daytime, but I’m sure I’ll enjoy it either way.