Segways, a Castle and the Theater

We had booked a tour of the old city done on Segways for 10:00 this morning. We got up, did our morning routine, then walked over to their office. I've always wanted to ride a Segway, but didn't know if, when and where, so I was excited to do it. Dad was as well.

We put on helmets and he gave us a quick lesson on using them. Simply lean forward to go forward, lean back to show down, stop and go backward. Push the handle bars to the left or right to turn. It was slightly weird at first, bit after a few minutes it was really easy to get the hang of it.

We drove around the old city and talked about the various history of the city. We stopped at the theater (live theater), which was originally a church, and remarked that there was a presentation tonight at 6, and that it was free to get in, so he recommended that we go see the inside on the theater.

Prices in the old city are incredibly high. In the traditional upper class neighborhood, houses sell for between 1.5 million - 2 million US dollars. In the middle class area, between 800,000 and 1 million US dollars.

I was really enjoying the Segway. It was a blast.

The tour lasted about 1.5 hours.

We arranged to meet Ashley at noon to head to the castle, so headed back to the hostel. Our Segway tour guide also suggested a great restaurant, so the three of us headed to the restaurant for lunch before walking to the castle, Castillo San Felipe de Barajas.

We hired an English tour guide for the castle. Her ended up being not great at English, and stuttered a lot as he tried to think of the English words, but it was all good.

The castle (more of a fort, really) is built upon a hill, so even though it looks high and mightily, much of its height is because of the hill. It was built to defend against attacks from pirates, the English and the French. It took 150 years to build. It has a while bunch of neat defences built in, like sloped walls to allow cannon balls to glance of, a vast tunnel system, with hidden rooms, and wooden bridges between sections that can be cut down, preventing attackers from being able to access parts of the castle. Quite impressive.

We got back around 4, then around 5:30 walked over to the theater. The show started with a couple of speakers, then a 40 minute weird movie done by some artist. It revolved around some guy who was sleeping work two women, who were cousins. One had epilepsy, and she died, so the guy ended up killing the other woman too. Then he was shot and killed as well for some reason. Keep in mind, everything was in Spanish, so Ashley was trying to quietly translate, I imagine lots was lost in translation.

Then a woman played some songs on a piano. Then another woman sang a couple of songs, including "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", then a panel of people sat on stage and discussed the movie they showed. We left at that point.

We went to an outdoor restaurant in a square for supper, then walked around, had a beer in another square and back to the hostel after 10:00.