SEVILLE, SPAIN

My first exposure to Spain would be my bus ride from Tavira, Portugal to Seville. This part of the countryside is quite barren and desert-like. It’s not ugly, but the western part of Andalusia is not one of the prettier parts of Europe. The bus pulled in on schedule, which was surprising because it arrived about 20-minutes late to my stop. I found myself at a large bus station along the river about 1 km from the old and touristy part of town. I took Rick Steves’ suggestion and walked a few blocks to the uncrowded Tourist Info office nearby where the helpful staff there called a few of the hotels in my book to ask about rates and availability. I’m always very conscious of which part of town I stay in because in some cases it can make or break a visit. Especially with larger cities I often find that trying to save a few dollars on a hotel outside the city center can ruin the visit because you are either going back and forth all the time or find yourself trapped in town because going back to your hotel is such a hassle.

I chose to stay in a 2-star place called the Hostal Picasso just two blocks from the gigantic cathedral that dominates the center of town. In Peru also, it seems that a Hostal means small hotel, rather than a backpacker place with dorm rooms. Most small hotels in Seville call themselves hostals. My choices were a €50 room with an en suite bathroom or a €35 room with the toilet down the hall. I looked at both and was tempted to get the more expensive one because it also had a TV, but the girl at reception told me there were no English language channels anyway so I took the cheaper one and also arranged for a 10% cash discount by showing my Rick Steves book. The hotel has abstract looking paint on the walls, obviously in the spirit of Pablo Picasso and is quite nice. I always ask for and pay for a “single room” which usually contains one full sized bed, or sometimes one or two small beds. This “single” had three small beds (the one with the en suite had two small beds and a sofa). Even the small beds are usually fairly comfortable and this was no exception.

It was already mid-afternoon so I decided I would spend the remaining part of the day just getting to know the city a bit and the next day would be the sightseeing day. I started to walk around through the main shopping part of town and already noticed a big difference between Seville and most other European cities I have visited. Most city centers were redesigned in more modern times after an earthquake or WWII bombing or something, but not this one. I have read that the Moors purposely laid out their cities in a somewhat confusing manor for some reason. The architecture is very nice throughout the old town and is all in the classic Spanish style of high ceilings and cast iron balconies on almost every window that also dominates the French Quarter in New Orleans. The problem is almost every street is large enough for exactly one car to pass and the sidewalks randomly shrink from 3 feet to 1 foot then back again on both sides of the street. This means you have no choice but to spend a good deal of your time stepping on and off the sidewalks while every 10 seconds or so a car wants to go by too. I’ve seen many inadequate sidewalks on this trip, but this was almost comical and it’s that way throughout the city.

Another problem is the streets have very long and complicated names, but they are thin and tangled so when you put that on a map you get short abbreviations for street names where they fit, and sometimes they don’t fit at all. In other words, it feels like being in one of those English hedge mazes even when you have a map in your hand every second. I almost always had a hard time finding my location on the maps and when I would just try to use my best guess I would sometimes look for the next corner on a curving street that was gently curving for 100 meters in the direction I didn’t want to go and no corner would appear until I was going in the complete wrong direction. It’s hard to describe and I’m sure the locals never have problems, but this does get a bit frustrating for the newcomer.

I saw my first Starbucks of this entire trip just on the other side of the cathedral from my hotel and I thought a large cup of joe would be nice just then. I went in to read the all-Spanish menu and quickly noticed that most of the customers in line and at the tables were either American or British, yet the 3 beautiful Spanish girls working there seemed to speak no English at all. You would think at a place like that that they would try to hire English speakers or at least the employees would pick up the few key phrases in English to help complete the transaction, but once again it seemed like the Spaniards just don’t get it, or care. My turn came at the counter and I even impressed myself when I ordered my large filtered coffee in Spanish with a passable accent. The girl then asked my Nombre as she held a marker up to the paper cup to write my name on it. Instead of saying Roger in a Spanish accent (which sounds like ROY-er) I decided to just say Roger in my normal American accent. She looked flustered for a second, then wrote ROYER on my cup. How the hell do you get a Y out of RAW-jer? I decided from that point on if I go to a Spanish Starbucks my name will be Paco.

That evening I decided to try my first official Spanish tapas. I went to the scenic and traditional neighborhood that is just across the river and stopped at a recommended place from my book that sure enough, was packed with locals and no other tourists. The guy at the counter did actually seem to know a few words of English to help me fill in the gaps where my Spanish let me down and I ordered a few things. Tapas, as you may know, really just means small, appetizer portions of food when used in the dining sense. Most tapas seems to consist of small sandwiches with pork, cheese, or seafood on them, but usually no condiments on the white bread. I had a few different things and began to understand why they say the Spaniards eat to live and not the other way around (like France, for example). It was okay, but really nothing special at all. I was eating exactly what all the locals were eating and the place was crowded and recommended so I didn’t really feel like this was a disappointing aboration. The service is fun as they sling €1 beers at you whenever your small glass is empty and they keep track of your bill by writing your running total in greasepaint on the wooden counter top. It’s an enjoyable and social way to eat, but the food isn’t really the highlight.

The next day I wanted to have some laundry done while I was sightseeing so I tried to retrace my steps from the previous day to find the nearby Lavanderia to drop off my laundry bag. It’s no exaggeration when I say it took almost an hour and about 3 miles of circling the general neighborhood before I finally re-found the place in a quiet corner of a dark street. I asked a few people, but they didn’t seem to know where the Lavanderia was either. I finally found it and dropped off my bag containing just about all my clothes since I hadn’t been able to wash them myself for almost a week at that point.

The other thing about Seville that was frustrating, even from my first day there was the whole stores-closing-for-several-hours-in-the-afternoon thing. Where do I begin? I had read about it and heard about it my whole life, but until I actually experienced it I really didn’t understand. I still don’t know how Northern Spain is in this regard, but in the south they take this very seriously. Around 1 p.m. virtually every store and office closes tight, like it was Christmas Day, and they start lunch. The restaurants are almost all closed until noon, and close again at 4 until they reopen again at 8.p.m. Basically they alternate. Every store is open for a few hours in the morning, then they close and the restaurants open for a few hours, then they close while the stores are open again for two or three hours, then the restaurants open up again. My head almost exploded as I witnessed this first hand for the first time. I recently read an article in a London newspaper that said the government is trying to get its citizens on a more normal schedule because this is such an obvious drain on productivity. The article also pointed out that up until the 1930s they were on a normal schedule, so it’s not like this is a centuries-old tradition.

Back to my second day. I found the laundry place finally and by then all the stores were beginning to close. Fortunately, one of the very few things that doesn’t close is the huge cathedral, even though many other tourist attractions do actually close. I went there and paid my €7 and moseyed on in. The place is enormous on the outside and is in fact the largest cathedral in the world, cubic area-wise because it’s ceiling is much higher than Notre Dame and St. Paul’s. Inside it is very odd though, since it has all these different small areas, but no real focal point. There is a statue that supposedly contains Christopher Columbus’s remains in it and I was going to photograph it, but the signs on the way in say NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY, just like any other church or museum that has paintings that get bleached by flashes. Well, that sign didn’t stop anyone else so it was flash, flash, flash and I just added one more.

There is also the obligatory tower that you can climb, but this one was built for people on horseback to go up to the top, so it’s a long winding ramp instead of stairs, and the views are very nice. This cathedral is the number one tourist attraction in the city of Seville so you sort of have to see it when you are there. It really is amazing to see on the outside and I couldn’t help but take many photos of it, but on the inside it’s quite dark and otherwise very much like about 20 other cathedrals I’ve seen. I’m not particularly religious so I am beginning to reconsider if I should pay to go into churches just because they are supposedly famous. I didn’t feel ripped off, I spent about an hour there and I wasn’t really bored, but at the same time these amazing cathedrals tend to look a lot alike after a while. I’ve toured all over Germany and other northern areas and every city seems to be most proud of its cathedral. Oh well. The thing that always does amaze me about those things is they look like they were commissioned by some mad trillionaire while the construction of the gold statues and giant ornaments was probably done by people who earned one loaf of bread per day for their trouble. I guess in those days a church could never be too fancy, regardless of the living standards of the workers.

After the cathedral I went to the bullfighting stadium. They have bullfights from April through October, but this was February so I just went to the attached museum. I’ve never been to a bullfight and I really doubt I will ever go to one. Not only are they expensive, but even though I’m far from an animal activist, I do find the ritual killing of bulls for sport and applause to be a bit morbid. The museum has a 20-minute €4 tour that sounded worthwhile. It was, if only to confirm my negative feelings for the “sport”. The professional guide gave a dry and quick explanation in Spanish and English to a group of about twenty. She first started in Spanish for one section, then English, but very quickly she noticed the Spanish speakers (about half the crowd) were much slower to reassemble at the next object so she started with English from then on. I bet this happens a lot as, for better or for worse, Spanish speakers seem to have a more relaxed way of going about things. I learned that a normal bullfighting evening consists of 3 fighters killing 2 bulls each, and that on the rare occasion that a bull actually kills the fighter, they ceremoniously kill both the bull AND its mother, for fear that the mother might bare another “killer bull”.

The other notable thing in Seville, which is actually just next to the cathedral, is a large Moorish garden or something like that. Rick Steves rates it fairly low on his scale and I am also planning on going to Alhambra in Granada, which is similar, but bigger and better, so I didn’t bother with this one. Passing up famous tourist attractions is a strange thing. You can’t really brag about NOT going to something that you passed right by.

That evening I decided to give tapas another try. I wanted to have a head start with the drinking though since the beer comes along with the food rather than before it at those places. I went to a grocery store during the day and was looking for some local wine. There were quite a few from which to choose, many shelves full in fact. I didn’t have a bottle opener at that point so I decided to try something that most people would find hilarious. A combination of different cheap grapes is called Table Wine and usually find it very drinkable and not harsh at all. The funny thing was the store carried large paper boxes of Table Wine that were one liter each and ranged in price from 59 cents to €1.99. A liter is a third more than a normal bottle, so this was even cheaper than Charles Shaw’s two-buck chuck at Trader Joe’s, by a lot. Long story short, I bought a box for 99 cents and had most of it before I went to dinner and it was good, not great, but good.

My guidebook recommended several good tapas places in my neighborhood so I chose the one that seemed the least touristy and tried it. I started by ordering a beer and a sandwich, but on my next selection I was struggling to figure out what I was ordering (not drunk, just confused since the names of the meats are all different from South America). Luckily, a typically beautiful Swedish girl (although with natural red hair) named Anna was there and she helped me. She is living there and is a local at that place and she and another local guy we were chatting with agreed that it is probably the best tapas place around. Again, it’s a fun and social way to eat and spend part of the evening, but the food itself was nothing more than just okay. I hung out with Anna and the random Spanish guy for a couple hours until the place closed at midnight, then slinked the few blocks back to the Hostal Picasso and turned in.

The next morning I checked out early and walked about 10 minutes to one of the bus stations for my journey to Tarifa on the southern coast. It was about a 3-hour ride on another mostly empty bus that gave me a good glimpse at the general look of Andalusia. The scenery wasn’t too special or great, but when you came across a town the thing that you could not help but notice was that almost every building in town is painted white. That was true of every town on the way and including Tarifa itself. I suppose this is primarily because white reflects the summer heat, just as more than half the cars in Phoenix are white.