Ehhhspain: Feb 4-5 Seville

With Barcelona thoroughly unfinished, we headed off to the airport to get to our ClickAir flight (which was maybe cheaper than RyanAir, offers direct Vienna to Barcelona flights, and has preassigned seating, though seats have not so much legroom. Hm!) We flew into Malaga, a town that reminds me of Orange County during rush hour (both times we encountered Malaga, it was during rush hour), visited a huge supermarket for food, and got on a train to Seville.

We arrived pretty late (around 11pm), and were greeted at the bus stop into town by a trumpet + drum band, playing slightly out of tune but intensely spanish music. The bus into town came, we got up, and it left. Without us. In Seville, we learned, the busses will only stop for you if you wave and yell and jump in front of them. So we got to our hotel somewhat later. It was somewhat quaint, somewhat far from the center of town, and had somewhat less hot water available than required for one person to shower in the morning.

Seville gave a first impression that was not quite as neat as Barcelona's. Our area of town was pretty dead at night, which is a little weird for Spain (at least compared to Barcelona). We woke the next morning to get to our (maybe) guided tour with Concepcion Delgado, who by all accounts is the best walking tour guide ever. I'd agree, except we didn't get to take a guided tour with her because noone else showed up for it. She spent a half hour with us, advising us on how best to spend our short time in Seville, gave us her phone number should we need anything, and tried to book us for a flamenco concert, but it was already sold out.

Our breakfast was a pastry and "hot chocolate" at this hot chocolate place. We had been looking for hot chocolate, and every café we went to, they'd say "No hot chocolate, only ColaCao". (ColaCao is a powdered hot chocolate that tastes like, well, exactly what you'd expect from hot chocolate). Then we found out why. Spanish hot chocolate is a cup of chocolate. Bars. Melted. It would be a cool dessert at a restaurant, served in an expresso cup with a tiny spoon, but when faced with a big steaming cup of thick, viscous, dark chocolate, one doesn't quite know what to do. Eventually I just took a big breath and started drinking, because if you just sipped it, you'd be there all day. Weird.

So we went to Seville's cathedral, whose builders' creed, "let those who come after us take us for madmen" came through loud and clear. It's really very big. But it doesn't produce the feeling of awe that the Sagrada Familia or Eglesia del Santa Maria produce; it's almost too big; you can't really see all of it at once, so you break it into boxes of relatively normal cathedral size. We took the entire audiotour - every painting, statue, side-chapel, everything. We figured that just once, we should do the entire audioguide of some cathedral. It was both cool and exhausting. Columbus is buried there, in a huge bronze coffin on the shoulders of four giant statues representing the kingdoms of Spain. At the end of the exhausting audio tour, you get to walk up 45 stories to the top of the Giralda tower they incorporated into the Cathedral from the old mosque that was there. The views were really neat, and at the top are huge bells, which we decided wouldn't possibly go off when there were tourists up there, and then, of course, the bells went off, which we discovered were really very loud and headache inducing.

Off to lunch and to the Alcazaba, a beautiful Arabic palace that unfortunately blends way too much in with the memories of Granada's Alhambra to really remember it distinctly, except to say that it was very beautiful. Theres a nice photo tour(not ours) over here: http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/spain/seville/alcazar/alcazarindex.html

We stayed till closing time, met one of the cats of the palace, who gets petted by probably thousands of people a day, and I think lives in cat heaven currently (for those cats that enjoy getting pet, at least), lost our guide book, ran back in and discovered that somehow security is so on top of things that they had our guide book right there, took a too-long Siesta [at ~1 hour you get *way* more tired than you were when you started], headed off to the bus station to get tomorrow's schedule, walked back past some huge building, and Carmen's cigarette factory(now the Seville University), and went to the tapas section of town, where we bar hopped until we got to the place that served us 4 plates consisting entirely of mayonnaise ("Tropical Cocktail": Mayonnaise stew with lettuce and shrimp in it. Yum), at which point we were no longer desirous of more tapas.

That night concluded with getting lost looking for the Flamenco bar, getting stopped by a Spaniard on a bike: "" "..." "Ingles? Alleman?" "Si" "Are you looking for la Carbonera?" "Yes (Thank God! He will show us where to go!)" "Do you know where it is?" "No, we're lost" "Oh. Me too. Maybe I'll see you there. Bye."

We got there eventually, spent an hour or so nursing a beer and getting smoked at, and left; there was no flamenco that would happen, it seemed. Thus ended Seville.

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