Sevilla

Unheard of, two posts in quick succession! However, I have been on two trips so far and haven’t said a word about them on my blog. This omission must be fixed, hence this post. A couple weekends ago I went on a day trip to Sevilla with one of the girls in the program. We left early, early Saturday morning and took a bus to the main Estación de Autobuses. I used a text message and my passport as a ticket (strange, but it worked) and we took the two and a half hour trip to Sevilla dozing or chatting as we saw fit. Once we got to Sevilla we were kind of at a loss since we didn’t have a map. Reminded me a little bit of “A Room with a View” since we were wandering without our Baedaker (spelling?) breathing deeply of the Sevilla air…or at least we were wandering. Anyhow, by a stroke of luck, we happened upon one of the places that my traveling companion really wanted to see. She being Jewish, she was interested in seeing the Barrio de Santa Cruz which I guess is the old Jewish section of the city. We wandered through the barrio for a while without knowing where we were headed, followed a tourist group for a while, split up with them and again somehow found ourselves right where we wanted to be: the Cathedral. We paid the two euro entrance fee and wandered around looking at all the nooks with bishop’s bodies and other neat things. My favorite was this enormous monstrance of silver. I’m the fuzzy girl in black at the bottom of the picture. My camera was (still is) out of batteries, so these pictures are all courtesy of my TC (traveling companion, from here out known as TC) who took pictures of things that I wanted as well as what she wanted. Nice of her. We also walked all the way up to the top of the tower to see the view. It was a hike, but well worth it once we got to the top and saw the view of the city. After the Cathedral, we went in search of TC’s other top destination in Sevilla: Starbucks. Yes. Apparently, Sevilla is the proud owner of the closest Starbucks to Granada. Fortunately, Granada does not as yet have their own. It’s fine with me since the coffee here is better anyhow and the prices not as ridiculous. After paying five euro for our drinks, we headed on to see the University. The University of Sevilla used to be a tobacco storage place. It’s very old and very large and quite impressive overall. We ate our bocadillos for lunch in the courtyard there with only the pigeons for company. After eating, we found a very cool tree which I promptly climbed into. The bulk of the rest of the afternoon we spent in the humongous park of Maria Louisa. We rented a bicycle carriage thingy and rode around for half an hour with TC driving and me trying to moderate her usage of the bell. She got a little out of hand with it, in my humble opinion. It was a fun time. After the park we went across the street to the Plaza de España which was gorgeous. There was a guy and a girl playing Flamenco guitar and singing, the sun was shining and the whole plaza was just beautiful. I thoroughly enjoyed that plaza and would go back again if I could. It had a section for all the major provinces in Spain. We found Granada and sat there for a bit enjoying the sun before moving on in search of ice cream which we found and ate in the park outside of Barrio Santa Cruz. The only problem with eating ice cream in a park in Spain on a beautiful sunny day is that since it’s a beautiful sunny day in a park in Spain, the couples are out being, well, very couply. It is difficult to enjoy conversation and ice cream when hearing/seeing rather too much PDA to be comfortable. This inordinate amount of public affection is common in Granada as well, but that weekend in Sevilla was rather more than what I’d seen before. Although not as bad as in Madrid…but that’s a different story. Anyhow, after we’d eaten our ice cream and wandered some more through the Santa Cruz, I found a lizard on one of the cool old trees and caught it. I love lizards; I wish we had more in Michigan. There are only three kinds of lizards in Michigan and all of them live far away and all of them are rare. Sigh. After that, we went back over across the street to people watch until it got cold and dark at which point we found an internet café where we stayed until it was time to catch our bus at 8:00. While people watching, I had the very disconcerting experience of being flicked off by a little girl. Now, by little I mean, had her hair in pig tails and was wearing a puffy pink jacket. She looked to be about seven. I don’t know what her deal was. I was just watching her and her family go by (not staring, just people watching) and I guess she didn’t like it because when they were about to turn the corner, she turned around, did a little dance and flicked me off while sticking out her tongue. I was a little taken aback, but found it funny. How many people can say they were flicked off by a seven year old girl in Sevilla? I imagine not very many, so I am one of the privileged (?) few. Anyhow, that was Sevilla and since this has turned out rather long, I’ll leave Madrid for another post.