Like the pictures from the previous post, I took these photos during the first week of June 2011 in Toledo, Spain. It's a beautiful, walkable city, and it was my first experience of a walled city center closed to cars, the ramifications of which I hadn't fully considered prior to my arrival.
I did everything wrong in Toledo. My sense of direction is awful, and I arrived in Toledo late at night assuming that I could just take a cab to my hostel. Not so--oops! My cab dropped me off at the city wall and I had to try to find my way to the hostel (deep in the heart of the medina) with only a useless map, vague verbal directions from my cabbie, and my own pathetically rusty Spanish skills. Total disaster, especially because it was early in my travels and I hadn't yet figured out how to streamline my backpack to keep it to a manageable weight. I staggered around under my heavy bag asking for directions from people in bars, passersby, and finally a very kind concierge in a hotel in which I was not a guest. !!! The merciful concierge printed me a map and gave me more verbal instructions and I finally, FINALLY, found my destination.
After that night and my subsequent experiences in Morocco, sloppy arrival plans are a mistake I will never make again. When I arrive in a new place now, I make sure I know in advance how to get where I need to go, and whenever possible, I arrive during daylight so that I'm not stumbling around in the dark alone. But those were lessons I had to learn the hard way--as so many of the important ones are. ;) Travel's like anything else: the more of it you do, the better you get. At this point in the trip, there was a lot left to learn!
I did everything wrong in Toledo. My sense of direction is awful, and I arrived in Toledo late at night assuming that I could just take a cab to my hostel. Not so--oops! My cab dropped me off at the city wall and I had to try to find my way to the hostel (deep in the heart of the medina) with only a useless map, vague verbal directions from my cabbie, and my own pathetically rusty Spanish skills. Total disaster, especially because it was early in my travels and I hadn't yet figured out how to streamline my backpack to keep it to a manageable weight. I staggered around under my heavy bag asking for directions from people in bars, passersby, and finally a very kind concierge in a hotel in which I was not a guest. !!! The merciful concierge printed me a map and gave me more verbal instructions and I finally, FINALLY, found my destination.
