Spanish buses are horrible. In fact, all European buses are terrible. The best bus I’ve taken resembles a school bus here, apparently, its just one small step ahead of the public bus. There’s almost nothing Europe can learn from Malaysia, except just one thing: the long-distance coaches.
Anyway, I was in a bus from Madrid to Toledo which I didn’t enjoy because I was sweating and feeling so stuffy. There wasn’t any ventilation, and the air-conditioning (yeah, it was hot in the bus even though 20 degrees outside) not turned on either.
But it wasn’t a long trip and we got to Toledo in just 45 minutes. Lovely view as I walked up the slope to the old town, which really occupies a strategic position, on a hilltop peninsula carved out by the flow of the river around it, which wraps around the old town on three steep sides.
Edinburgh has a competitor: Toledo. I don’t know which stupid travel guide I read the following from: "an often overlooked gem by visitors to Madrid”. Toledo is anything but overlooked. It seemed like the only people in the Old Town were tourists, and there were tons of them. It doesn’t matter if its a great town, but really, its now an empty, hollow shell – 100% tourist trap. Expensive restaurants with English menus stand side-by-side with the ubiquitous medieval-castle-themed shops selling armour and swords. Does this bring to mind Edinburgh and the Nonsense of the Tartan Souveniours? Toledo has lots of shops hawking shields, knifes, swords, armours, “traditional handcrafted lace” and anything that a local wouldn’t be caught dead buying.
The town is somewhat attractive, I guess. It is the closest thing to an old town in the United Kingdom. The buildings resemble somewhat the architecture of those in the UK, and the weather was pretty cloudy and gloomy the entire day too, just like the UK (okay, bad example, I know). But at the same time it was distinctively Spanish, definitely more towards Spain than England/Scotland. Lots of old cathedrals and synagogues (although I really don’t find them very special, but apparently there’s something about Jewish heritage in Spain that the Tourism Board thinks will be very interesting to tourists), but really, I’ve had enough of religion-related buildings already. And lots of obvious tourist trap attractions scattered around, like some museum commemorating medieval times or knight armour or whatever.
Yeah, I was pretty disgusted.
Add to that the gloomy weather, and I soon began to feel bad. I realised I was really homesick for the first time in the trip. I would really, really love to have one bowl of laksa instead of terrible Spanish processed food or overpriced cafe food or that same pasta dish that I keep making in the hostels. Sat on a bench in a city park overlooking the emerald-green river and some houses scattered on the hillside. It was a good view, but I wasn’t in the mood for it. I felt like I had seen so many amazing things already on this trip, and Toledo simply failed to excite me. I just sat there for a while, thinking about Singapore, how nice it would be to stop travelling for a while, and I confess I felt rather melancholic.
Then suddenly the mood was gone. I had somehow cheered myself up, without even attempting to do so. And then the sun appeared from behind the clouds for a moment, and everything seemed fine and nice again. Really. It was almost magical. I never thought about wanting to be back in Singapore, and enjoyed the rest of my brief stop in Toledo (there really wasn’t much to see except tourist traps) walking along the road running by the side of the hill, taking in the good view of the riverbank. This was definitely not one of the oft-visited parts of the town, and it was nice to get away from fellow tourists. How strange is it that as a tourist, you want to see less of your fellow travellers as possible. Especially true for people from your country. I bet every Singaporean dreads staying in the same hostel or hotel as another Singaporean group, particularly in a land as foreign in Europe. This isn’t unique to Singapore, by the way, Daniel told me that he doesn’t really like meeting Spanish people outside of Spain as well.
Back in Madrid, I was much happier. Spent a great evening doing nothing but walking down the shopping streets. Usually while travelling, shopping is a big attraction for me, but the length of this trip meant that this excitement of shopping in a foreign land had already died down. Still, I was really enjoying myself just walking down the streets, people-watching, window-shopping, and admiring Spanish architecture once again (I also saw a very hideous building at one point). At some point, I walked into one of those upscale residential districts (didn’t look particularly expensive, but you can tell by the type of shops and the extremely good location) with lovely bars, cafes and bookstores full of character lining the streets.
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