Advertisement
Published: September 17th 2005
Edit Blog Post
Wednesday & Thursday Sept. 1, 2005
Getting used to eating dinner at 9pm and then going out with friends may be one of the hardest things about living in Europe; we all met at 11pm in front of the school and went to a huge hotel we had seen on the walking tour we took of the city. Some girls we ran into during the tour were here studying from the states as well. They said there was going to be a huge outdoor showing of the movie Garden State on one of the big streets at 10:30pm. Garden State dubbed in Spanish; that has to be interesting. Climbing five or six flights of stairs at the Doña Maria hotel we found the legendary rooftop bar and café we had heard about from the director of our school. A tile inlayed swimming pool had been set into the hand painted tile of the rooftop and reflected a spectacular view: red rooftops spreading out over the view with the world’s largest Gothic cathedral towering so close and high overhead that you could genuinely have thrown a stone at its magnificent square minaret-turned-church steeple.
Today was class registration, but since we didn’t get
back until 3am the night before (we walked all the girls home) we were more than ready for our siesta in the afternoon. In our cultural adaptation class they gave us a few more pointers, some surprising: the TV is always on in most Spanish homes, it’s considered part of the family even at the dinner table, smiling and greeting people on the streets means they must know you and will confuse strangers immensely as they try to remember who you are, children (boys and girls) and older men will very often relieve themselves in public places, pushing people out of your way at restaurants, bars, and on the street is not considered rude at all, TV commercials for things like shampoo, even during children’s show times, will include complete nudity and the news will be much more graphic than anything you see in the U.S. Overall I think the only one I was totally happy about is that Spain works on Latin American time, 5-15 minutes late for everything; that I can get into.
N.B. Tip for ordering tapas, the French fries in Spain are terrible; some culinary sins even homemade guacamole can’t cover. Tip 2: if your host
The muses
These are the famous poet Becquer´s muses. family makes homemade French fries they will be made with olive oil and will be the best fries you have ever had.
Saturday, Sept. 3, 2005
Today we got up early and went to the bus station where we bought tickets to go to Matalascañas, one of the five near beaches. We barely made it aboard the bus, and some of the group that had been a few minutes behind us were unable to get a seat and had to wait for the next bus. At the beach there was a piece of some kind of huge stone watchtower in the water that appeared to be from the 10-12th century or older if the small rock masonry was any kind of indicator. The beach wasn’t overly crowded, unlike beaches like Cadiz this time of year. Our group had a great time just relaxing, enjoying the semi cool ocean (like a swimming pool, not freezing like most beaches I’ve been to). The major difference here in Spain was definitely that the rule seems to be that every woman wears a bikini, no matter what kind of figure you might have or age factor. It is true that European culture
Plaza de España up close
One of the towers of the Plaza de España tends to look on men and women’s top-lessness as being equivalent and one no more scandalous than another. Contrary to popular belief, at the beach, only a few of the older women (40+) tended to go topless, and the younger children went completely naked (which was something of a surprise). Once you can overlook that, it’s pretty much just like any other beach I’ve visited. Getting back that night, we went in search of the elusive Carbonería that I had read about in Lonely Planet. We found it at about midnight. A very “low on tourists” place, it is completely hidden on a back street off an almost invisible plaza called Las Mercenerias. The place has only one small door inside of a giant door like you see on castle and forts; moreover there is no sign or even indication that its there, minus the two people hanging out outside of it. Someone knows how to keep a place from getting too crowded, too bad for them it got such rave reviews from Lonely Planet as being the only flamenco place with no cover charge. A good visit, but definitely warrants a retake.
Thursday, September 8, 2005
Tonight after
Swim in the Guadalquivir
Locales taking a swim; yeah, I´ll be right behind you. classes was “Noche de Hombres”. All the guys met at school at 6:30 at headed for the river together. We rented these funky paddle-boats at a little floating café/dock. The river running through Seville is called the Guadalquivir, Arabic for “great river” or something like that; consequently, I found it humorous that the boat rental was called “Pedalquivir”. Packing four fully grown college guys onto each little boat almost negated their buoyancy, which would have seemed a lethal proposition considering the number of dead fish I had seen floating in the water already were it not for the huge number of people playing a form of basketball with kayaks in a floating court, constantly rolling over and spewing the water out of their mouths. More than that, some kids were swimming around in it between jumping off the ancient stone docks, and others still were racing crew boats up and down as the sunset lengthened their shadows. In spite of the evidence, and in spite of all my excursions at SWEBCO, I refused to touch the water. We had fun racing around on the river, trying to ram each other’s boats, and ramping the huge wake from the multi-story party
My profs
You can see there are gringos on the right; they´re not profs though, they´re the directors and ministry leaders. yachts that frequently run up and down the river hosting rich or ripped-off tourists. By the end of the ride, I thought my legs were going to fall off. The pedals were so close that it used muscles in my legs I didn’t know existed because I don’t think I’ve ever used them (they were so high up on my butt that I might just as well have used my back to pedal).
Afterwards, we went to David’s apartment (obviously, yet not completely, nobody has houses downtown in this huge of a city). David is the guys’ director-type character who leads the Service Internship program that puts students in a bookstores or old-folks homes, or hospitals to get some practical experience using the language and serve the community at the same time. There we ordered pizza, hung out and talked for several hours about everything, mostly grilling Mark Triller (the director from Trinity visiting for the first two weeks) about the mystery known as “women” or “persons of the female persuasion” (for the politically correct). Twice married, once widowed by a car accident, and with five daughters, he has quite a lot of experience for not even being 40 yet.
Guadalquivir
The dock to the Pedalquivir hosts a bit of family swimming as well as kayak lessons Then of course there were the more traditional male topics: food, sports, travel, cars, we even beat on stones with sticks a bit and grunted (kidding). There’s nothing like an all guys’ conversation. It was a good time. Then about four of us went to the Heladeria Artesana with some of the girls. This ice cream place is like 400 feet from our apartment and boasts some of the best ice cream creations in town and cheap prices, which says quite a bit considering all the ice cream around here. It was Paige’s 20th birthday, so we embarrassed her by singing to her in front of the hundred or so people enjoying the long row of sidewalk cafés, and we bought her a big African Sunday (I don’t know where the name comes from, but it was really good; I think it came with a discount coupon for some conflict diamonds or something).
Advertisement
Tot: 0.058s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 7; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0269s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb