Let me give you a little piece of advice: arriving in southern Spain 4pm in the middle of summer and taking the girl at the tourist’s word that it’s not a long walk to your hotel is not the best idea. A twenty minute walk in 40 degree heat is never going to feel like ‘only 15 minutes’. And those cobble-stoned streets aren’t so charming when you’re your dragging a suitcase along their curves, the total lack of footpath pressing you against the gorgeous buildings as the cars zoom by. Welcome to Seville and the best shower I ever had in my life.
When we finally arrived the receptionist handed us a map and explained (in Spanish! I was stoked.) about breakfast and began circling the million-and-one things to do in Seville. Turned out we were within a kilometre of everything. And oh crap, we only had three days to see it all!
After a quick recharge, the acquisition of 4 euros worth of internet (a day’s worth which they let run for 3-or-so days) and a quick reminder to ourselves that we are not of the let’s-see-how-much-crap – we-can-fit-into-the-least-amount-of-time-just-so-we-can-say-we’ve-seen-it-all school of travelling, we took it upon ourselves to explore the narrow streets surrounding our hotel in the hopes of stumbling into the famed Juderia (old Jewish quarter) and seeing, like, you know, some pretty buildings and shit.
We had though that it was pretty hot in Madrid, but that was nothing compared to the early evening pounding dry heat of Seville, which clings to you like a heavy scratchy blanket made of sheep, possibly live ones. The streets have a maze-like quality which, after the ease of the Madrid metro and the confidence it had inspired was apt to get us more than a little lost. The architecture is a mesh of terraces, flats, arab and jewish buildings which have been whitewashed, gold-trimmed and given wrought iron balconies. Geraniums are more than at home here. Seville is beautiful.
Walking around in the stifling heat that evening we began to understand the concept of siesta, and, post-helado, retired to the safety of our air-conditioned room for a couple of hours to try it on for size. It definitely fit, but after a while our stomachs began to rumble, so we decided it was time to try some of that tapas that the south of Spain is so famous for.
The bars gradually began opening around 8 so we went to the closest one, the name of which escapes me. While I had a pretty good food vocabulary in terms of individual ingredients and basic concepts of food, I had no idea what most of the individual tapas on the blackboard were. So we ordered one thing I knew for sure translated as ‘old cheese’ and two other things I had no idea about – a salad of some kind and something which I thought was a vegetable, but I wasn’t sure which vegetable. We ended up with some romano-like cheese, bread, a crab salad and the most amazing zucchini in blue cheese sauce. I was in heaven. It was the best tapas I had in all of Spain.
Seville started us on a habit that became pretty hard to break – beer, beer and more beer. In a part of the city where you may as well throw away your map, this did become a bit of a hazard from time to time. But it was so hot and the beer kept flowing, so we never let it stop us from having una mas cerveza.
There was a different vibe from Madrid- just as alive and even more laden with tourists but somehow more laid back as well. It wasn’t just overcoming our initial choque cultural that made Seville seem a more intimate, less intimidating city. People welcome you into the bars, if only to make money from you, but somehow it was easy to forgive, especially since the money they parted you from got you so much more. And wandering around on that first night was so interesting, from the tiny high-rent streets of the Juderia to the Plaza filled with people drinking on the street, that we could tell we were gonna love it here.
