Zaragoza

Sara and I spent the last day of our trip together in Zaragoza. When we arrived on the bus the first place we went was the tourist information centre.

Best tourist information centre ever. Each city we go in to, we've stopped at the tourist desk and asked our standard question "If we only had x number of days in the city, what would be the top places you would reccomend seeing?" Most often the response is simply to hand us a map (which helpfully often pointed out all the McDonalds in the tourist areas) and a attractions book and send us on our way to read on our own. Somewhat unhelpful as we've generally already done this on our own, and just want to know what their top picks are.

The woman at this centre though--fantastic. Took out a map, circled the 3 "must-sees" and then gave us a couple others that were interesting "if we had time". And then, gave us directions to our hotel....all in under 5 minutes.

The first place went to see was Aljarferia, after her "of course you will go to Aljaferia" comment, to which we responded "of course!" even though neither of us had ever heard of it.



AlJaferia is described as a 'muslim palace'. It's interesting for it's architecture and numerous arches with really detailed carving.....at least that's what I found it interesting for.



What I will probably remember even better than the arches though, would be our ultimately unsuccessful attempts to get ourselves some oranges off these trees. Yum.....royal oranges.

The plan, admittedly, was fairly elaborate. It involved a slip-and-fall on the very slippery cement (as demonstrated by Sara here)...

after which my screams for help would distract the orange guard (we assume this was his job--I mean, what else could he be guarding?) and when he came over to help, thus averting a lawsuit, it gave me the opportunity to hop the fence and grab the oranges.

Sadly, though, as we were working out the final details of our plan, another employee came to start cleaning up the oranges off the ground near the trees, and put another element into the mix that we just couldn't figure out a way around. So....no oranges for us. Luckily, I had a clementine in my bag that we could console ourselves with, as we imagined how the royal oranges would have tasted...

Then we also consoled ourselves with a little game of "Where's Waldo", or in this case "Where's Jennie?"


We spent the rest of the day exploring Zeragoza. The cathedral had some great colourful tiles on the roof.


And climbed the tower at another, not-as-helpful (although we didn't give them much of a chance), tourist centre for a night-time view of the city.



Sara and I both left early the next morning to take the train back--Sara to France and me back to Barcelona where I had one more day before my flight left. The train station was new, very massive and impressive, and also very very cold (much like many of the cathedrals we had seen on this trip). They'd even gone so far as to put propane heat lamps throughout it, which each had a circle of travellers huddled around it.