Schengen Woes

As we left our beloved Portugal for Spain, we made two major discoveries.

Rainy hikes near Constantina

The first was that Seville is a great place to go for Easter... if you are not on a budget or if you booked WELL ahead. We did neither and were consequently out of luck. The Easter holy week, Semana Santa, is a huge deal in Seville - it's the biggest celebration in Spain and involves numerous processions  and special events. The hostels that were available were far too expensive, so we put our heads together and decided on a new plan - we would head north and hike in the Andalucian mountains for a few days and come back to Seville when Semana Santa had quieted down. So we grabbed a bus straight out of Seville and north to the Sierra Norte National Park, to the town of Constantina.

We were in Constantina from Thursday til Sunday. It stopped raining briefly after dinner on Friday. We did manage to get a couple good walks in, through the hills with their herds of sheep and goats and through olive groves. It was gorgeous... then it started to rain again.

The sunshine we waited three days to see!

Easter Sunday we caught the bus back to Seville, because in Spain the big hullabulloo all happens on Good Friday rather than Sunday. We had a quiet night at the hostel, indulging in homemade paella and all the sangria we could drink.

On Monday afternoon we went for the hostel`s free walking tour, where courtesy of some new friends, we made shocking discovery number two:

If you are not a European citizen, you are only allowed to be in a certain portion of the EU for 3 months out of any 6. Which, considering we were hoping to spend roughly 5 months in the countries that constitute this zone, is a little frustrating. This is called the Schengen Agreement. Somehow we missed it in our Euro-research!

So the next night we went out for a long dinner, sat down with a map of the EU and a list of Schengen countries, and made a new plan... rather than blow off our plans to meet Dan`s parents in Italy in late September, we just need to exit the zone by late June and not re-enter until our three months are up. This is helped enormously by the fact that Britain, Ireland, Romania and most of the Balkans are not involved.

So despite the wrench in the plan, I am actually now very excited to have the opportunity to explore more of Eastern Europe than we`d originally planned.

S