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Published: February 8th 2009
Seville at dusk
Another one of my learning-to-use-my-camera jobs... We hit the road at mid-day for our 500km drive to Seville. Having never driven in Spain, we were really not sure what we were in for. Armed with Brenda (our GPS) and a large map, we headed out of Madrid, excited about the adventure ahead.
Were we in for a treat! The roads in Spain are unbelievably good. Well signposted, fantastic quality, almost always with 2 lanes for each direction, and both directions separated. And we got to do 120kmh, which is a treat for us Aussies who at best get 110kmh!
On top of the roads being good, the countryside was gorgeous!! Lots of rolling green hills, with picturesque white houses stuck in the middle of them, just begging to be photographed. If Catherine had not been persistently firm, we would have never got to Seville, as I would have stopped the car all the time to get 'just one more photo'.
Drivers in Spain are very reasonable as well. None of this road rage that we see in Australia. There are two lanes: one does the limit, the other goes ridiculously fast. If you're in the 'slow' lane, then you can do whatever speed you
want. If people behind you don't like it, they just overtake you. If you're in the fast lane though, and not driving fast enough, people come up right on your tail till you switch to the slow lane. So everyone ends up staying in the slow lane as much as possible, and only switch to the fast lane to overtake. Simple huh? We somehow haven't caught on to this in Australia, where it's not uncommon to have a truck doing 110kmh sitting 1m behind you flashing its lights, and you've only got the one lane to drive in..
The roads actually made me a bit annoyed as well. I like to think that we live in a modern efficient country, but every time I travel, I'm reminded how backwards our road system is. Oh well. At least we have a nice harbour 😊
So anyway - after several hours of driving, I was merrily bopping along to whatever was on the radio, the girls were asleep, and suddenly there came Seville! The sun had just gone down, but I could still see enough to realise that it wasn't a quaint little town like I'd first surmised. Seville (like
most towns) had long outgrown its historic centre, and is a large bustling city of its right! So I joined the local traffic and wound my way through impossibly narrow roads to get to our hotel. Whereupon I insisted that Catherine get out of the car and direct me through the also impossibly narrow carpark where I was supposed to park my car! No wonder all the cars in Europe are tiny - there is no way you could get a Commodore through most of these streets!
Seville is the capital of Andalucia , the part of Spain that we had specifically come to see, and as such is the home of tapas (lots of little 'tastes') which you have at a bar generally! It is very lovely - cute narrow cobbled streets with little tapas bars on the corner of every street! We were staying in the old quarter so decided to do the walking tour on the first morning to see all the sights and get an idea of the town - we had 5 days here so plenty of time to find a local café, work out what was where and hopefully eat some good
tapas!
I had decided that my new hobby is photography - so what should have been a 1.5 hour walking tour ended up being 4 hours of me taking endless photos and my poor wife trying to entertain an incredibly bored and cold Sahara who was not sure whether it was day or night! Still at least we saw everything there was to see in Seville!
We also did spend time trying to find a pair of shoes for Sahara, who had managed to lose one of her sneakers while we were madly running from between terminals at Heathrow to catch our plane to Madrid. So between the stopping to take every picture between our hotel and the centre of town we were also going into every shop that looked like it had children's shoes in them! We got very scared by the prices and decided that unless we found something reasonable (being less than $60 - she was going barefoot! Thankfully we found some boots at a reasonable price which she promptly lost (but that is another story for another day!)
The working hours are kinda interesting; people start work very late here - we would
The bull ring
This is the outside of the arena where they do bullfighting. I was really keen to see one until I found out they actually kill the bull, at which point I couldn't really justify seeing it - too cruel to animals! get out of our hotel at 9 to find everything shut, with most of the signs of life starting at around 10. And then everything closes between 2 and 5 so that meant retreating to our hotel every afternoon for naps - which is a form of heaven for Catherine but drives me stir crazy!! Things are then open again from 5pm till late, with most people starting dinner at 9pm. So our evenings consisted of us putting Sahara to sleep in the hotel, then dressing her up in blankets and putting her fast asleep into her pram and braving the cold to go forage for food! What was funny was turning up at bars with a pram and sleeping baby in tow - not sure that this is the way that the Spaniards tend to do it! Sahara slept through the whole ordeal - smoke, loud noise and the cold - perfect travelling child!!
(Ok… so she was not perfect - the first three or four nights we spent waking up at 2am to 'play' which was ok while the tennis was on as we got to see a lot of the finals live while Sahara got used
The Seville Cathedral
We never got to see the inside, but the outside is v impressive! to the whole day is night thing!! But after a couple of days all was well and we had a sleeping baby again)
Just a note on the weather - we had read that the south of spain is very mild in Winter - 15 degrees most days, no snow, it is on the Mediterranean right?? Well unfortunately Europe is in the middle of a very cold snap - even the UK is getting heaps of snow - so we have been freezing here (well 6 degrees anyway!) Can't win them all but made us wish I we'd brought really heavy winter coats! We also would alternate between really beautiful sunny blue-sky days, and rainy cloudy days, as you'll see in our pics.
In fact, the weather did get us a good one. We noticed that if we visited the famous Seville cathedral on a Sunday, entrance was free - whereas on other days, it cost something like 8 Euros each. So being the cheapskates that we were, we decided to wait till Sunday (our last day of 5 in Seville). Was a great idea, until we woke up on Sunday and had the worst rain I've seen
in a long time. Oh, did I mention we didn't have an umbrella or raincoat? So - we were still determined to see the cathedral, and since we had our car, decided we'd drive as close to the cathedral as possible, and then RUN to the cathedral. We had a piece of plastic that we decided could cover us during our run, and Sahara was protected in her pram.
So we battled the rain and narrow streets and got to a convenient car park. For some reason, our trip coincided with some large protest, so there were zillions of people walking the streets, and it took forever to get to our park! But we got there, ran to the cathedral, looking quite the irresponsible parents with our piece of plastic held over our heads. We were a few minutes early, so we found ourselves a convenient alcove and hung around like drenched rats, waiting for the cathedral to open.
Half an hour later, we knew something was wrong. The cathedral was still closed! There was a line of tourists queuing out the entrance, getting drenched (ha - they weren't as smart as us). Eventually we figured out that
More buildings in Seville
Note the orange trees - they are all over Seville! Not good to eat though - but good for marmalade! the cathedral was not going to open for another 3 hours, as they were preparing for a service that evening!! Aargh! There was no way we were going to sit around for 3 hours in this miserable weather, so we decided to give up on the cathedral altogether, and headed back home.
It's almost not worth mentioning that when we got back to the hotel the rain stopped.
On the flip side, we got great weather when we went to see the Alcazar, which is the old palace built by the Emir. It was absolutely stunning and we really enjoyed every minute of it, even more so because we didn't get to see the stupid cathedral.
That's all for Seville. We took far too many pics, but enjoy the few we've put on here. Stay tuned for some of our day trips out of Seville…
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Carol Simister
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Thank you for my trip around Seville. I have thoroughly enjoyed the tour. I take my hat off to you both travelling with a child so small. Look forward to having you all home!