Welcome to 2015, the year of the goat!

Do you have any idea how excited I was to learn that February 19, 2015 marks the start of the Chinese year of the goat?

(Do you know me in even the slightest bit, and/or do you ever read this blog? If you answered "yes" or even "maybe" to one or both of those questions, you probably have quite the idea how excited I was to learn this.)

First things first. We've seen references to the "year of the goat, also known as year of the sheep, ram."

Now, we mean absolutely no offense to our Chinese friends - it's YOUR culture, it's YOUR year, interpret it however you want.

But for the record - THIS is a goat:

smarter than your average bear

(the goat, not Patrick.. actually, Patrick too)

This? NOT A GOAT:

dumb as a box of nails

(the sheep, not Patrick)

Okay, now that we've cleared that up, we hereby bring you GOATS OF THE WORLD! Enjoy.

cheerleader goat

(Eagle Hill, Alberta, Canada)

regal goat

(Quebec City, Canada)

sweetest goat EVAH in the history of all goats

(Wakefield, Quebec, Canada)

adorable plum-eating goats

(Nemcicky, Czech Republic)

curious goats

(Picos de Europa, Spain)

tree-climbing goats

(Essaouria, Morocco)

shy goats

(Phong Nha, Vietnam)

"whatever, I'm eating" goat

(Sapa, Vietnam)

focused goat

(Luang Prabang, Lao)

headbutting goats

(Pai, Thailand)

goat TV

(Mae Sariang, Thailand)

baby goats

(Pratchum Khiri Khan, Thailand)

first Nepalese goats

(Annapurna Circuit, Nepal)

second Nepalese goats

(Annapurna Circuit, Nepal)

third Nepalese goats

(Annapurna Circuit, Nepal)

fourth Nepalese goats

(Annapurna Circuit, Nepal)

fifth Nepalese goats

(Annapurna Circuit, Nepal)

sixth Nepalese goats

(Annapurna Circuit, Nepal)

seventh Nepalese goats

(Annapurna Circuit, Nepal)

pygmy goats

(Waikoloa, Big Island, Hawaii)

smiley goat
(South Point, Big Island, Hawaii)

Goats were strangely absent from our photos from Portugal, Turkey, Cambodia and Australia. That clearly means that we need to go back to those countries and spread the goat love...

Happy 2015!

Every-day-is-Friday five: songs about places we have been.

We would sing the song for days while in a particular city. Sometimes we sang it for weeks before we visited the city, and sometimes we couldn't get it out of our heads for weeks after leaving the city. (Sometimes this made us want to cry.)

Here are five songs about cities we've visited on this trip, in no particular order... complete with links to YouTube videos so that YOU can get the song stuck in YOUR head for days.

• One Night in Bangkok (Murray Head)
• Barcelona (Builders and the Butchers)
• Istanbul (not Constantinople) (They Might Be Giants)
• Kathmandu (Bob Seger)
• Marrakesh Express (Crosby, Stills and Nash)

And now, as our return to Maryland (and therefore "real life") is more and more imminent, I can't seem to get (Don't Go Back To) Rockville out of my head. Go figure.

What are some of your favorite songs about international cities?

Spain! On $56/person/day! Yikes!!

Spain shall hereby be known as "the country where we spent the most money"...  In all fairness we did fly into the country twice, and Jen celebrated her birthday in Spain too.  But mostly?  It's just an expensive country to visit.

Here's the breakdown with some details...

Initial budget: $100/day, $50/person/day
Actual cost: 18 days at $2020 ($112/day, $56/person/day)

(luckily, wine is cheap)

• Lodging: $598 - 18 nights at hostels or 1-star hotels averaging $16/person/night
• Transportation: $901 - flights Turkey-Barcelona and Morocco-Madrid; car rental for Picos de Europa; trains/buses between major cities and to Gibraltar; nominal dollars spent on public transportation everywhere
• Groceries: $230 
• Meals: $134 - don't let the small plates fool you, tapas are expensive!
• Tours: $69 - most of this was our Gibraltar day trip; otherwise, admissions to various Barcelona and Seville museums/sights
• Alcohol: $32 - darn you, delicious Spanish wine!
• "Misc": $56 - $18 in laundry; $29 for much-needed (used) clothing; $9 for random things like contact lens solution and telephoning a hotel for directions

Other fun Spain facts...

• Cities visited: 7 (Barcelona, Pamplona, Llanes, A Coruña, Seville, Tarifa, Madrid)
• Bottles of wine enjoyed: we aren't saying
• National parks visited: 1 (Picos de Europa)
• UNESCO World Heritage Sites visited: 3 (Barcelona's works of Antoni Gaudí, Seville's cathedral, A Coruña's Tower of Hercules)
• King and Queen sightings: 1 (our only day in Madrid was the anniversary of the 2004 bombing)

To Vietnam, where there are lots more zeros on the money!

Tarifa and Gibraltar: last stops before a whole new world.

When you're THAT close to Gibraltar, you kind of have to go, right?

(That was our reasoning anyway. And then we heard there were Barbary macaques. That sealed the deal.)

We took the bus from Tarifa to La Linea and walked across the border (#3 on foot!). The officers shot a sideways glance at our passports and waved us through, and we crossed the active airplane landing strip to town.

first active airplane landing strip crossing

This bizarre UK oasis has its own currency, a downtown of fancy strip malls, and expats everywhere. 

thirty thousand of them, approximately

it also has churros y cafes

at an Indian restaurant

(of course)

We did the £10 Gibraltar tour which included visits to...

• a Moorish castle, remaining fortifications of which date back to the 1100s - although the original fortifications came even earlier under the reign of Tarik-ibn-Zeyad

fun with downward spirals

• "Gibraltar, a City Under Seige" - a bizarre life sized diorama of sorts, set among original buildings from the 1700s and presenting a day in the life during a siege (apparently it was quite boring)

but to keep things interesting

there were floggings

and low rations of food

• the Great Seige Tunnels, a series of tunnels in the rocks created by gunpowder and manual labor, used for fortification during seiges

the tunnels went on and on and on -

pretty amazing

• the Ape's Den featuring those wacky Barbary macaques

oh hai

• St Michael's Cave, a natural grotto intended for use as a hospital during WWII

now it's an amphitheater...

... Pink Floyd played here once

And that's just what you get for £10. Gibraltar is far bigger than we thought, and there is so much more to it (including naturally occurring, man-made, and historically) than we realized.

and here we thought it was just a rock

For another £8 we could've toured more war tunnels but we opted to just explore the trails for a bit instead...

when you go your way and I'll go mine

And we ascended and descended a lot of stairs.

a LOT of stairs

What a strange, strange place, this tiny little rock that everyone fights over. Now we know.

Back in Tarifa we watched the waves and caught the sunsets and decided it would be a great place to visit in the summer.

surf's up

winter or not, sunsets were still lovely 

next time: kitesurfing lessons

oh, and they have a bullring -

ole!

Definitely glad we stayed in Tarifa instead of Algeciras (which Lonely Planet describes as "an industrial town, a big fishing port and a centre for drug smuggling"). Um... no.

Food notes:

• Halal K2 Doner Kebab & Pizza in Tarifa sounds like an odd choice but it was actually quite good
• and the aforementioned churros at an Indian restaurant whose name I cannot locate (just follow the signs!)
• otherwise sandwiches and lots of salad to counteract all the bread
• and we finally ate the package of instant borscht we've been carrying around since Poland

it was just as salty and beety

as we remembered

Lodging notes: Tarifa's Melting Pot Hostel was fine for a few nights. The kitchen could have been cleaner but the guy who worked there was really nice, we had lots of space, and the price was right.

(this was a nice touch)

And it was a five minute walk to the ferry the next morning...

to Morocco!!

Seville simplicity.

Jen had very fond memories of her visit to Seville almost 20 years ago so we stopped there for a few nights before heading south. (In hindsight, those fond memories involve trying to find good sangria, eating lots of churros, and something about a cathedral. But that's beside the point.)

By Seville we were tired of the Euro so in the interest of "free" we walked through a lot of neighborhoods and admired the architecture.

random buildings

random plazas

random narrow streets

We visited the Plaza de España and browsed the intricately decorated city monuments.

this place is packed in the summer -
hooray for low season travel

we played with the "pop art" camera feature

and the "fish eye" feature

and we went back at night too

We sat across from the Cathedral and people-watched for a while.

(is this rude?)

We visited Mercado de Triana a few times and finally decided on chicken chorizo for our pasta.

lesson: less chorizo, more fruit

We took Clarence to visit the Plaza de Toros. Well, from the outside, anyway.

ole!

(see him there?)

On a whim we visited the Convento de Santa Paula. This did cost €3 each but the money went to the sweet nuns so that was fine.

even thought they didn't offer us homemade pastries as advertised,

they gave us helpful tourist tips on Seville

and the artwork was museum-worthy

Food notes:

• we found the churros...

oh yes, we found them

y chocolate tambien

• we also got a tip on cheap tapas at Taberna Coloniales - actually, no tapas are "cheap" but at least we finally had some seafood in Spain...

fried cod, aged goat cheese, cured ham -

totally worth it

• otherwise lots of hostel cooking

Lodging notes: Just to mix it up a little we chose our hostel using our wine-picking technique (by the price, followed by the name) so Feetup Samay Hostel was the obvious winner. It was clean and roomy and they played Radiohead so we'd call it "fine for two nights".

One could easily fill a week in Seville with sightseeing and delicious foods but we were happy to make it an easy, lazy, inexpensive couple of days.

Only one more Spanish town before Morocco... Crazy, just crazy.