Okay, so Seville: BIG fan. HUGE fan. It’s absolutely beautiful here, all palm trees and fountains and these lovely buildings and sprawling gardens. I went walking around the other night and got lost in some maze of streets lined with shops and cafes and every so often a street would open up onto some kind of plaza with yet another stupidly beautiful…something, everything looks like some kind of church-ish thing but I haven’t actually tried to learn much, I’ve just been absorbing it all.
There are a million horse-drawn carriages here though unlike the ones that go by my window at home these are all the same carriage, very dignified and handsome, and the horses all seem about 85% the size of a regular/American horse. They move at a brisk trot, unlike the ones I’m used to plodding along, and I am glad not to see any of the ridiculous frippery we have at home, horses wearing giant sprays of feathers like we’re welcoming the queen.
I’m making everyone nervous here because I don’t know the rules for correct behavior. I’m leading with lo siento and then just going into English. At a restaurant, I just walk right up to the waitress, whatever she’s in the middle of, and ask if I can sit and sometimes I even just give her my order right there, like she doesn’t have anything else to do, but there’s this kind of primal panic of orchestrating the fewest interactions possible, plus I need this lady to confirm that I can be there, that I can sit there—all I need is for her to disappear and some man to show up yelling at me because for SURE back home there are places you can’t sit if you’re not ordering food or that are reserved for someone else and while we do all our yelling in English, I can’t quite bring myself to assume they would do the same here.
In my defense, even when I haven’t been a weirdo, various café/restaurant people have generally been not super nice. I ordered a café and the lady just started shouting at me, “Café con leche? Café Americano? Café con leche? Café Americano?”
“Con leche,” I cried, and she did not speak to me again. A dinner one evening, the waitress sat me at a table and then left me there, presumably to contemplate my sins, for an extended period of time. She kept walking back and forth, right in front of me, so maybe there was some kind of something I was supposed to do? She came back eventually and I ordered the three vegetarian items on the menu (well, if you count the artichokes which I ordered without anchovies) and outside of the artichokes nothing contained actual vegetables so I guess it’s scurvy AGAIN.
I booked two tours in Seville, took one and immediately on getting home cancelled the other. I was glad of the tour I did but that one was only an hour and a half bus ride each way, and as we stopped in three places we left at 9 am and didn’t get back until almost 8 pm. The second tour was to the Alhambra, which is more like three hours away, and when I booked they said we would leave at 6 am then I got a message saying the time had changed to 4:50 am and while I got a lot of knitting done on that first tour I had maxed out my interest in bus rides with strangers. I’ll come back for the Alhambra another time and will not try to make that a day trip from Seville.
But the tour I did take was marvelous—we went into Andalusia and visited two of the white villages, Zahara and Grazalema, and then stopped in the town of Ronda. The white villages were very beautiful and crowded as apparently All Saints’ Day is a big deal here (o right, Catholics!) and thus it was a three-day weekend so lots of people were out and about, some, as our tour guide explained, in the countryside to “practice hiking” and others just to drink a lot of beer/wine and ignore their children.
The countryside is beautiful. Leaving Seville it’s all flat plains but then as we got into the province (?) of Cadiz (?) it was gorgeous rolling hills and so many growing things—bitter oranges, pomegranates, almonds, and grove after grove of olive trees.
The road between Zahara and Grazalema made me want to come back on a motorcycle, wow, and twice coming round a hairpin turn we almost ran into wild pigs. They are presumably a source of the legs I saw everywhere, propped up in a special rack, kind of like a wine holder but bigger because it’s for a leg and usually there was still a foot attached and this is no country for vegetarians.
In Grazalema, I braved a bar—I was so hungry! It was very crowded but I managed to squeeze into a corner near the obligatory leg—this one looked old and rather wounded. The bartenders were in a big rush and had no patience for anything so after searching through the menu (Spanish with English underneath, which is the main and only reason I had chosen this place) I tried to convey that I wanted the bruschetta without anchovies, which I signaled by putting my finger over the word “anchovies” and saying “no? no?” The bruschetta came with anchovies, of course, and they were super gross to look at, fat red slices of fish laid out on top of what appeared to be Saltine crackers with some kind of watery ketchup. I hid the plate away behind some stuff on the bar and was too cowardly to bring it back out as I left—I did not want to get yelled at—so they may still be there today. Sorry, Grazalema! But the fried cheese with honey on top was delicious.
Our tour was multilingual, the guide, Catherine, switching seamlessly between French, Spanish, and English. There were two young men from Italy on the tour as well, and as they didn’t seem to speak anything but Italian I hope they had fun? They were late coming back to the bus in Grazalema and Catherine went out in search of them. Everyone was squirming around in their seats trying to spot the “Italian boys” and when they finally showed up this mean American lady pressured the rest of the group into clapping sarcastically as they boarded but I don’t think the Italian boys got it as they gave everyone big smiles and waved as they made their way to their seats in the back. We made a special stop for them back in Seville, Catherine telling us we needed to let the Italian boys off at the football stadium, and then as they left the bus she cried “Ciao, bambinos, ciao!”
Ronda has some really interesting history but perhaps the most famous part of it—after the bullring—is the Puerto Nueva which was started in 1751 and completed thirty-nine years later. It’s a crazy looking bridge connecting two parts of town across a tremendous gorge, over 300 feet deep. I read somewhere that there is a prison chamber in part of the bridge and people got thrown off as punishment but alas that was not part of the official tour.
This town as also has history in textile-making which was all I needed to hear so after I walked down into the gorge to look at the bridge from there I walked back up and went in search of textiles. I was in a shop that was as far as I could get from the main street and salivating over some linens when I discovered a) there were two little birdcages with two little birds in them, chirping away, and b) there was a fat old dog, and c) there was a very nice lady who had more English than I do Spanish but still not much. We both knew the word “handmade,” though, and the piece I picked out was a table runner that was hand-embroidered and had four matching fussy old lady place mats and boy howdy do I love me some table linens!
As the nice lady wrapped these carefully in paper, I knelt to rub the old dog on his head. He seemed kind of meh about that so I didn’t want to bother him, but as I sat back on my heels he got up and laboriously came around so that his butt was right in my face. The lady laughed, called him “el gordito,” and, using her hands, told me he was 11 years old. One thing about being old and fat is that a dog can no longer reach the scratching spot right on the top of his tail so I was very pleased to be able to help the old boy out and scratched his butt until my linens were ready.
On the way back to Seville we went through a cork tree farm and I had no idea how cork was farmed but apparently you can only farm a tree—which involves essentially shearing it of a two-to-three-inch layer of bark—every nine or ten years, so I’m totally good with screw top wine and just want to be on record with that.
I finally figured out why it was so hard to find a place to stay here, which is that there was some MTV festival happening over the weekend. The hotel I’m in is perfectly lovely but it’s about a 45 minute walk from the center of town, so I’ve been taking an electric scooter up and back as it’s a straight shot, with a bike lane. These things can get up to 25 mph though I prefer to proceed at a statelier pace as 25 mph on a little tiny scooter thing seems very ill-advised.
I’ve been just wandering around various part of the city and everything is just so beautiful and one day I happened upon a plaza that will filled with pigeons, including these beautiful white ones, and I think the area is also a site of enormous cultural and historical importance but all the signs are in Spanish so…shrug? I will not admit in writing how many pictures of the pigeons I took but I will just say this: they are very happy to pose.
I stopped for lunch after the pigeons and felt fortunate to find a place where there was a NICE man who wanted to explain the vegetarian options for me in English and I had by far the best meal of the trip—a huge plate of grilled white asparagus and then something that was billed as an egg casserole with truffle oil but turned out to be a fried egg on top of French fries. The (nice) man who brought it said gravely, “I will prepare it for you, madame,” and proceeded to cut my food for me, which I thought was very kind. The whatever-it-was was extremely delicious and since they are the only people who have been nice to me in this country I am going to leave them a nice review, BUT, the most important part of the meal was at the very beginning when they brought me a warm roll and a legitimate BUCKET of butter. What UP, Seville I could totally live here.
Madrid tomorrow, back to NYC on Thursday, I have a feeling this jet lag is going to be EPIC.
PS As we pulled into Ronda Catherine announced we would normally need to be on the look out for pick-pockets but, since it was lightly raining, they would probably be at home, so yes, Spain is full of criminals, BUT, they are fair-weather criminals, which is almost somehow worse, hahaha the lazy bastards!
There are a million horse-drawn carriages here though unlike the ones that go by my window at home these are all the same carriage, very dignified and handsome, and the horses all seem about 85% the size of a regular/American horse. They move at a brisk trot, unlike the ones I’m used to plodding along, and I am glad not to see any of the ridiculous frippery we have at home, horses wearing giant sprays of feathers like we’re welcoming the queen.
I’m making everyone nervous here because I don’t know the rules for correct behavior. I’m leading with lo siento and then just going into English. At a restaurant, I just walk right up to the waitress, whatever she’s in the middle of, and ask if I can sit and sometimes I even just give her my order right there, like she doesn’t have anything else to do, but there’s this kind of primal panic of orchestrating the fewest interactions possible, plus I need this lady to confirm that I can be there, that I can sit there—all I need is for her to disappear and some man to show up yelling at me because for SURE back home there are places you can’t sit if you’re not ordering food or that are reserved for someone else and while we do all our yelling in English, I can’t quite bring myself to assume they would do the same here.
In my defense, even when I haven’t been a weirdo, various café/restaurant people have generally been not super nice. I ordered a café and the lady just started shouting at me, “Café con leche? Café Americano? Café con leche? Café Americano?”
“Con leche,” I cried, and she did not speak to me again. A dinner one evening, the waitress sat me at a table and then left me there, presumably to contemplate my sins, for an extended period of time. She kept walking back and forth, right in front of me, so maybe there was some kind of something I was supposed to do? She came back eventually and I ordered the three vegetarian items on the menu (well, if you count the artichokes which I ordered without anchovies) and outside of the artichokes nothing contained actual vegetables so I guess it’s scurvy AGAIN.
I booked two tours in Seville, took one and immediately on getting home cancelled the other. I was glad of the tour I did but that one was only an hour and a half bus ride each way, and as we stopped in three places we left at 9 am and didn’t get back until almost 8 pm. The second tour was to the Alhambra, which is more like three hours away, and when I booked they said we would leave at 6 am then I got a message saying the time had changed to 4:50 am and while I got a lot of knitting done on that first tour I had maxed out my interest in bus rides with strangers. I’ll come back for the Alhambra another time and will not try to make that a day trip from Seville.
But the tour I did take was marvelous—we went into Andalusia and visited two of the white villages, Zahara and Grazalema, and then stopped in the town of Ronda. The white villages were very beautiful and crowded as apparently All Saints’ Day is a big deal here (o right, Catholics!) and thus it was a three-day weekend so lots of people were out and about, some, as our tour guide explained, in the countryside to “practice hiking” and others just to drink a lot of beer/wine and ignore their children.
The countryside is beautiful. Leaving Seville it’s all flat plains but then as we got into the province (?) of Cadiz (?) it was gorgeous rolling hills and so many growing things—bitter oranges, pomegranates, almonds, and grove after grove of olive trees.
The road between Zahara and Grazalema made me want to come back on a motorcycle, wow, and twice coming round a hairpin turn we almost ran into wild pigs. They are presumably a source of the legs I saw everywhere, propped up in a special rack, kind of like a wine holder but bigger because it’s for a leg and usually there was still a foot attached and this is no country for vegetarians.
In Grazalema, I braved a bar—I was so hungry! It was very crowded but I managed to squeeze into a corner near the obligatory leg—this one looked old and rather wounded. The bartenders were in a big rush and had no patience for anything so after searching through the menu (Spanish with English underneath, which is the main and only reason I had chosen this place) I tried to convey that I wanted the bruschetta without anchovies, which I signaled by putting my finger over the word “anchovies” and saying “no? no?” The bruschetta came with anchovies, of course, and they were super gross to look at, fat red slices of fish laid out on top of what appeared to be Saltine crackers with some kind of watery ketchup. I hid the plate away behind some stuff on the bar and was too cowardly to bring it back out as I left—I did not want to get yelled at—so they may still be there today. Sorry, Grazalema! But the fried cheese with honey on top was delicious.
Our tour was multilingual, the guide, Catherine, switching seamlessly between French, Spanish, and English. There were two young men from Italy on the tour as well, and as they didn’t seem to speak anything but Italian I hope they had fun? They were late coming back to the bus in Grazalema and Catherine went out in search of them. Everyone was squirming around in their seats trying to spot the “Italian boys” and when they finally showed up this mean American lady pressured the rest of the group into clapping sarcastically as they boarded but I don’t think the Italian boys got it as they gave everyone big smiles and waved as they made their way to their seats in the back. We made a special stop for them back in Seville, Catherine telling us we needed to let the Italian boys off at the football stadium, and then as they left the bus she cried “Ciao, bambinos, ciao!”
Ronda has some really interesting history but perhaps the most famous part of it—after the bullring—is the Puerto Nueva which was started in 1751 and completed thirty-nine years later. It’s a crazy looking bridge connecting two parts of town across a tremendous gorge, over 300 feet deep. I read somewhere that there is a prison chamber in part of the bridge and people got thrown off as punishment but alas that was not part of the official tour.
This town as also has history in textile-making which was all I needed to hear so after I walked down into the gorge to look at the bridge from there I walked back up and went in search of textiles. I was in a shop that was as far as I could get from the main street and salivating over some linens when I discovered a) there were two little birdcages with two little birds in them, chirping away, and b) there was a fat old dog, and c) there was a very nice lady who had more English than I do Spanish but still not much. We both knew the word “handmade,” though, and the piece I picked out was a table runner that was hand-embroidered and had four matching fussy old lady place mats and boy howdy do I love me some table linens!
As the nice lady wrapped these carefully in paper, I knelt to rub the old dog on his head. He seemed kind of meh about that so I didn’t want to bother him, but as I sat back on my heels he got up and laboriously came around so that his butt was right in my face. The lady laughed, called him “el gordito,” and, using her hands, told me he was 11 years old. One thing about being old and fat is that a dog can no longer reach the scratching spot right on the top of his tail so I was very pleased to be able to help the old boy out and scratched his butt until my linens were ready.
On the way back to Seville we went through a cork tree farm and I had no idea how cork was farmed but apparently you can only farm a tree—which involves essentially shearing it of a two-to-three-inch layer of bark—every nine or ten years, so I’m totally good with screw top wine and just want to be on record with that.
I finally figured out why it was so hard to find a place to stay here, which is that there was some MTV festival happening over the weekend. The hotel I’m in is perfectly lovely but it’s about a 45 minute walk from the center of town, so I’ve been taking an electric scooter up and back as it’s a straight shot, with a bike lane. These things can get up to 25 mph though I prefer to proceed at a statelier pace as 25 mph on a little tiny scooter thing seems very ill-advised.
I’ve been just wandering around various part of the city and everything is just so beautiful and one day I happened upon a plaza that will filled with pigeons, including these beautiful white ones, and I think the area is also a site of enormous cultural and historical importance but all the signs are in Spanish so…shrug? I will not admit in writing how many pictures of the pigeons I took but I will just say this: they are very happy to pose.
I stopped for lunch after the pigeons and felt fortunate to find a place where there was a NICE man who wanted to explain the vegetarian options for me in English and I had by far the best meal of the trip—a huge plate of grilled white asparagus and then something that was billed as an egg casserole with truffle oil but turned out to be a fried egg on top of French fries. The (nice) man who brought it said gravely, “I will prepare it for you, madame,” and proceeded to cut my food for me, which I thought was very kind. The whatever-it-was was extremely delicious and since they are the only people who have been nice to me in this country I am going to leave them a nice review, BUT, the most important part of the meal was at the very beginning when they brought me a warm roll and a legitimate BUCKET of butter. What UP, Seville I could totally live here.
Madrid tomorrow, back to NYC on Thursday, I have a feeling this jet lag is going to be EPIC.
PS As we pulled into Ronda Catherine announced we would normally need to be on the look out for pick-pockets but, since it was lightly raining, they would probably be at home, so yes, Spain is full of criminals, BUT, they are fair-weather criminals, which is almost somehow worse, hahaha the lazy bastards!
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