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Published: August 5th 2012
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Day 1: Madrid to Cordoba to Seville
I was excited to meet our guide, Izzy, who I had previously met on the busabout loops in Lauterbrunen and I knew she was heaps of fun. At our first restaurant stop she explained how we were going to be able to order....you HAD to get your elbows on the bar, otherwise you wouldn't get served. She explained some basic Spanish and we were off on our own. I managed a crossaint and tea successfully but when I tried to order a donut, I mistakenly got an orange juice, which was incidently extremly delcious, but not what I had intended. Whoops, Spanish fail, one.
Back on the bus for some more Spanish background info...Chuppa chupps in Spanish means "suckie, suckie". Salvador Dahli designed the wrapping on them (cool hey?!). Izzy also shared her bad jokes with us.... Just to swt the standards for the rest of the week.
What do you call a camel with no humps? Humphry
What do you call a camel hiding in the dessert? Camelflaged
This was improved only slightly by her excellent pickup lines:
Um besso: which means give me a kiss.
I can't write
some of the others,
a) I forgot what it was in Spanish
b) it was below the belt (in more ways than one) so I cannot write it here... (think chuppa chupp)
Although there was a very hot guy at our first service stop, Izzy had not yet informed us of her excellent pick up lines, so Anna and I remain single. Haha
Our first stop was Cordoba, a beautiful town surrounded by a river which we had to cross via a gigantic but beautiful old bridge, it was the first time I felt like I had reached an 'old' city of Spain. We stopped for a tapas lunch and our first Tinto de Verano (red wine with lift) which was decidedly delicious, checked out the local mosque and then some how managed to get lost in the tiny alleyways and dead end streets. This was not hard given the map that Izzy had given us looked like a chicken had walked across paper with inky feet. Proportions were very out of wack. Eventually we found our way down to the river, realised we were quite late and then had to hot foot it back to the meeting
point. It turns out we had eaten lunch on Spanish time and forgotten we only had 2 hours to explore the city. As I recall Anna and I sang random songs on the way back to encourage us to walk faster, we got some seriously strange looks from the locals but thoroughly enjoyed having a good giggle.
Our last stop for day one was Seville which began with a great walking tour of the city. The old Parliment building was very impressive and like all things, a little local info can change your whole perspective. The amazing statues and artwork on the outer edges of the buildings was amazing but if you looked closely you could see extremely obvious changes in design of the creatures on the wall from 1600 to 1800 to 1900. The 1600's featured weird mixes of children and animals with mixed up bodies and strange faces, whereas the more recent works were more normal figures. Something we all missed on first glance. Seville is also home to the world's smallest tram, which as you might imagine, hardly goes anywhere at all! There is a bix mix of styles in architecture particulary from the 1920's where
they joined all the styles at the same time. This is really evident in some of the buildings in Seville.
The main church in town used to be a muslim place of worship with giant bells however during an earth quake the bells fell off so the building was damaged and when they rebuilt it for the Catholic church it was made into a bell tower. The original gates of the Muslim structure however, still remain and the writing on the gates is very intricate. Our guide led us through an alcove which was a secret entrance gate for the king. All of the streetsnare built close together for optimal coolness in temperature, some are so small it is impossible to get a car through. We also saw the famous house from Don Huan and took the typical tourist photos.
On the bottom corners of the houses there are big round blocks, our guide said it was so that the carriges would not do damage to the structure of the walls when they turned the corner in a street and clipped the edge of the building. I thought this tiny piece of history which was still standing was really interesting. The walls are made of brick in three colours, yellow for the clay dirt, found only in Seville (and a tiny part of Asia), terracotta for the blood and passion of the Spainards and white for coolness. The Spanish fans you see in tourist shops, and in Seville we saw a shop almost entirely of just fans, are not only practical but are used by both men and women. No gender issues here guys! And they have special slightly smaller 'man fans' which don't have any lace or decoration.
In the evening we had roof top drinks on our hostel's very awesome terrace followed by a delicious dinner at a local restaurant and more sangria and tino de verano at another bar while we watched the soccer. All in all a great way to start our tour of Southern Spain. :-)
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