The most relaxing weekend

Friday, September 9, 2005
Friday night after a hectic run trying to make our arrangements for Portugal, I ate dinner with some girls from the program that I didn’t know very well. I had been enjoying a slightly more relaxing afternoon, until Jared called to say that the website for the travel agency that was taking the bus out to Portugal had been broken and we had no reservations. He and four others had rented a car, but there were still several girls that wanted to go and they were more or less counting on me to rent a car. Of course they had waited until right before the travel agency closed to call and tell me this, so I had to run halfway across Seville to get there in time. Basically the only way we could get a car rental was if someone in it was 21, which I would later find out is a total lie that they tell tourists, and our car full of 20 year-olds could make the arrangements but only someone with 21 years could pick it up. So we did, but of course didn’t have to pay anything. Fast forward several hours. We spent the evening at La Carboneria, finally getting to see the flamenco singer dance (we always got there closer to midnight when she had more or less finished).

Saturday, September 10, 2005
At about 2:00am we all headed home, and got up at 8am to catch the bus to the island; unfortunately, no one 21 had changed their mind and decided to come, and we never thought to try and get it anyway, not knowing that the regulation was a total sham. Finally we gave up, and we went to take a tour of the cathedral, which is something spectacular. If I heard correctly, it is the largest gothic cathedral in the world. Rounding out our circle we wound up back at the bus stop, and, feeling as though I had let down the girls I was going to split the car with, it occurred to me that there might be some no-shows on the bus. We stopped and hung out with the huge crowd that had gathered; Jared and Zach came with the rental car they were going to use to follow the bus, with some pretty funny stories about trying to navigate Seville’s traffic. Anyway, to make things short, they wanted to let us fill empty spots until they realized that they had to have faxed in insurance waivers the night before, and told us to stop by the office for a discount on any future trips.
Suddenly it occurred to me that I was trying way too hard to make everything work out, and I thought that a day off by myself might be just the thing I needed. And it was in so many ways, I couldn’t even begin to describe them all. I went back to the house and slept, read, wrote, ultimately heading outside to visit the Real Alcazar Palace with its huge gardens. In search of a distinctly Sevillana vista to paint with my recently purchased painting supplies, my reaction to the gardens and palace can be described as nothing less than floored. They just kept going, and going, endless rooms covered painted tiles, tapestries, geometric domes, fountains, fountains, and more fountains, giving way to labyrinthine gardens of every style and size imaginable and eventually to an actual hedge labyrinth. Being so overwhelmed, I never tried to sit down and sketch a thing, but I did take a lot of pictures.
After an early dinner at home, I went with my host parents to the last “Semana de Evangelio” in the park where the kids were going to be singing. Other nights this week they had flamenco by evangelical artists, showed movies in the park and other things. This night I didn’t expect much out of, but wanted to get to know all of my friend Isaias’ (son of the parents I live with and only 4 months younger than me) friends. As it turned out the kids choreographed moves and spectacular singing put to shame pretty much any kids ‘choir’ I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen so much ‘spirit’ in kids before; they were totally into it. Even considering that the culture here is less plagued by the apathy that defines ‘coolness’ in the U.S., I thought they had a ton of flat-out excitement.
As expected, I met many more people my age, and had the stressful opportunity to again try and understand what the heck they were talking about because college age humans have horrible pronunciation and talk a thousand miles an hour, in half constructed sentences when they’re together, which in my experience takes full attention and lot of “huh?’s” to understand when it’s in your native tongue. Totally unexpected, however, was the invitation afterwards to hang out with all the people my age at the Torre del Oro (kind of like Seville’s version of an Eiffel Tower). Packing with a bunch of crazy guys into a little car we drove over together, stuffing in one more guy on the way who was going to walk there. Thus began the most incredible night I’ve had so far, which went well with the most relaxing and refueling day I’ve had in months.
Arriving at the tower, we found about ten kids already there, and the guitar jamming had already begun. As we added our part (Andre’s little pocket flute that he whips out from nowhere randomly), more people showed up. Soon we had two guitars, a penny whistle, and what I can only roughly translate as a “Flamenco box drum”. This last instrument basically resembles a wooden rectangular speaker box that the user sits upon and uses to produce such a variety of sounds that I would nearly put it up against a full trap set in versatility, with ten times the mobility. Pretty soon we were drawing a crowd from the passing party goers of older persuasions (most could have been our parents) who had come down to the riverside to take one of the expensive party/dinner yachts out on the river for the night. Someone took up a gathering of 2 euros from anybody that wanted dinner and about a dozen of the group (which had grown to about 24) headed for Open Cor (the “everything” store around here). We sang and played every kind of music imaginable, and I was pleasantly delighted to find that some of the Spanish songs my buddy Marco Castro had given me at JBU the year before were just the ones everybody sang here. Of course there were the parochial classics in English like Eric Clapton and Collective Soul, and lots of classic English hymns with creative new beats and, of course, in Spanish.
When the food arrived around 1am, things picked up, and I met even more people. Unlike all the flamenco bars and clubs, here people were actually having interesting conversations. And the food was great, sandwiches, snacks, and drinks, way more than I could eat, all for way less than a small tapa and a coke at a bar. At one point I spent a while talking with one of the oldest guys there with his wife; he was from Argentina. After we met, he almost immediately asked about my faith and we had a great conversation about my heart for Muslims and the way the church, even in Seville seems to just ignore their existence, in spite of the fact that they are far more fervent about finding God than the general population, and looking for Him in mistaken places. After a few more lung-stretching classics, we closed up with some sort of a funny “closing time” type song that must be as popular as “the Happy Birthday” song in English the way everyone sang it. Just then, the girls I was going to go to Portugal with finally showed up, so I walked them home. I crashed into bed about 3am, not even exhausted from my incredibly relaxing day.

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