Because we didn’t have Portugal as part of this trip. I wanted…no, I needed to have a traditional Portuguese egg tart while I was in Spain. I grew up eating the egg custard tart at dim sum and I’ve had the egg tarts in Macau which are slightly different which are the ones I prefer. I wanted to know how the original ones tasted.
We walked past a shop here in Seville which I bookmarked to grab before we took the train back to Madrid.
These were good but I prefer the Chinese take on them better. They were just a bit too sweet for my taste however the flaky crust was very good. Maybe I overhyped it in my head. If I come across another shop, I’ll have to try it again. Or I just go to Lisbon ¯\(ツ)/¯
We caught the train at noon to head back up to Madrid. Our friends are staying another 2 days in Seville and then flying out to Rome to meet with another set of friends who are living in Italy for a month and doing remote work.
After being here for a week, I’ve kind of gotten my fill of old crowded Spanish cities. I usually intersperse nature type stuff in between cities just to mix things up otherwise you get burned out on sight seeing, tons of people, and trying to cram in as much as possible to take advantage of the short time available to travel. I’m really looking forward to this next phase of the trip. Unfortunately, Joanna doesn’t have enough vacation to stay an additional week with me so she has to go home.
We are meeting up with our friends Luke and Halea who have been traveling since July and will end their travel around the middle of December. Luke and I have been friends since my junior year of high school so about 2003 (whoah 20 years). He actually took Japanese class with Joanna so we’ve all known each other around the same amount of time. We didn’t start being close friends until he was doing conservation research for his PHD in Wyoming studying the Wyoming Toad, which is now listed as extinct in the wild.
I never get tired of bragging about how cool of a guy he is and that I’m lucky enough to be friends with him. He’s a National Geographic explorer and has a bio on their website: Link. He visited me several times while I was going through chemo, forced me to get out of the house to take Speedy on walks, and even cooked me a lobster dinner. Later when Joanna and I got married, I asked him to be my best man. He killed it for his best man speech, check it out if you’re interested.
Over the last few years he’s been working with the Smithsonian museum in DC. We’ve been trying to sync up the last 3 years for a trip to Panama where they have a research facility but it just hasn’t worked out. However we have been able to do some kind of camping or cabin trip at least once a year for the last 5 years.
Halea just finished her residency and Luke wrapped up a contract with work so they’re taking advantage of the timing to do a 5-6 month trip around the world. So far they’ve been to Japan, Indonesia, Norway, Croatia, Hungary, UK, and now Spain. They’ve also got Tunisia, South Africa, Australia and others next.
Hiking and hiking in Norway
Seeing a play at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London
After Joanna and I arrived back to Madrid and got settled at the hotel we connected with them and went to check out a really big park in the city where it seemed like a quarter of Madrid was visiting as well. I feel like I appreciate Madrid more now that we’re back from Seville considering how hot it was there. I’m sad that Joanna can’t join us, however I appreciate that my wife is cool and is letting me hang out with my friends for a week while she goes back to work 🙂
