Mediterannean, Here We Come

8 June 2011

Granada to Alicante, España

Thought it was a good idea to get a good night’s sleep, but not a good idea because I woke up–think I set the alarm. Well, unless I turned it off subconsciously, in my drunkenness.. after half a beer.

It’s 10:30am, my stomach has no crappy bread only good for toast in my stomach and my bus to Alicante left half an hour ago.

Get to the strangely familiar old decrepit bus station anyway, which isn’t anything like the developed coast. Some pixels on the arrival/departure board work, and some don’t. You feel like you’re away from it all, but it’s Spain.

I, for once, have a lot of time on my hands. I feel as if there’s travel opportunities coming and going every minute so it feels really strange. Usually, I’m running onto the bus, so my head hasn’t been able to catch up with legs. Let’s consolidate the past few days.. weeks.

Surprisingly pleasant bus journey, five and a half hours, timed perfectly for the sunset over the orange of the mountains and ground below. You think things can’t get any more orange, but they do. They never even go red. Journey is quick as well, because I was typing up all this handwritten journal stuff.

Here in Alicante, on Spain’s Costa Blanca, there’s a smell like Australia, of the burning sugar cane, about. The sweetness doesn’t help with anxiety over with each hour passed, the price of plane tickets to the beautiful Balearic islands goes up. It should be ok if I get someone to speak Spanish for me.

Alicante doesn’t look particularly Spanish, and it doesn’t even look that ‘European’. Don’t ask me what this look is exactly–though we all have some very warped, narrow-minded stereotype in our mind, right?

The hostel doesn’t help matters. I walk into a converted garage that has multi-coloured hand-painted walls, so I give up on getting any sort of bearings.

Good thing I gave up on the bearings. I haven’t eaten all day so I have no hope when I’m placed into a ten-bed dorm with nine other girls, invited out and given free drinks at bars. I can’t rationalise the mind blank I’ve now got, despite being out for hours and hours into the’Spanish evening’, which is longer than any other. I hope this psychological phenomenon isn’t where the name Costa Blanca comes from.

Update August 2011: My god, there are photos, which depict what happened, rather than bring back a memory…