Mary Poppins Huynh

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Geo: 37.3833, -5.9965

Up a bit later than usual, at 9 AM or so, which is still fairly early by Spanish standards. We got ready, packed up, and headed to the ferry terminal, stopping for breakfast on the way. It was a bit of a stormy morning, with strong winds and rains that alternated between a light drizzle to a heavy downpour. On the way there, I half expected to see the wind grab Mary's umbrella and lift her up to the sky, like Mary Poppins. Luckily for us, the heavy rains came just as we sat down for breakfast at a sidewalk cafe that offered overhead shelter from the elements.

Along the way to the ferry, a number of people try and sell you ferry tickets, and it had the feel of a Moroccan hustle. Not that we truly can detect what a Moroccan hustle feels like, given that we've been scammed a couple of times already! We went through passport control and the security check, only to find out that our tickets weren't what we needed to get on the ferry. I went back out to the non-secured area, and discovered that we needed to first check in and exchange them for boarding passes. The police officers simply waved me back in, recognizing me from before. I grabbed Mary and we checked in, and once again walked past the police officers who once again waved us through, probably thinking "How many times are they going to come through here???"

Finally, we were on mainland Spain's soil!!! We made our way over to the Algeciras bus station to pick up tickets we had purchased last night on line, and were off in search of lunch. We ended up back at the station's cafe since we didn't see anything very appealing within a 5-minute walk, and clouds and rain had also rolled in.

At the cafe, I noticed that the right side of my face had gotten kind of numb, and wondered if it was due to sleeping funny, perhaps pinching a nerve in my neck. Or perhaps it was a stroke, and I told Mary to tell the paramedics if something happened to me, but she only laughed at me about it. That's OK as I'll have the last laugh, having sold her to Hamou!

We finally arrived in Seville, after a long day of travel and it was just in time, as my bladder was about to burst. We boarded a bus to La Macarena, the neighbourhood where we would be staying, getting lost after hopping off. I prefer not to say that I ever get lost, and told Mary that I was taking her on an off-the-beaten path tour of Seville, that few other tourists ever get to see. She's so fortunate to be traveling with me!

We checked into the hostel and got settled in. The hostel's manager told us that tomorrow we could change to a private double, at no extra charge. I questioned whether or not we should do this, since the other two people in our current room could potentially be beautiful Spanish women. But after finding out that they were two guys, I no longer cared if we stayed in that room or not 😞

We quickly headed out after chatting with Marcus, a bunkmate living in Boston. Apparently, the hostel is hosting a bit of a New Year's eve party here, but being almost 10 PM, we decided to first go find food and if there were no large outdoor gatherings, make our way back here to ring in the New Year.

We wandered for a while before finding anything better than a convenience store; the only problem was that it was a very fancy-looking restaurant, Robles. There was a long wait to get inside the restaurant, which offered only an expensive set menu this evening, but we sensed that if we didn't eat here, we wouldn't eat tonight. We quickly snagged one of the remaining tables for two outside, and it ended up being a very chilly dinner.

The restaurant set up a number of extra tables outside to accommodate all of the people waiting to eat, and even had a couple of outdoor heaters fired up. Too bad we weren't near any of the heaters, but the square where we dined was probably warmer than any other outdoor spot in Seville tonight, since seemingly every tourist in the city was waiting to eat at Robles! And though it certainly isn't pleasant to be cold, it's definitely better than being cold AND hungry.

We joked that maybe we could go eat in the bathroom if the temperature dropped any further, or get the rest of our meal to go. We had become quite sick of Harira, the traditional Moroccan soup, after having it so many times in Morocco, but we wondered how good a steaming bowl of that would be at this moment. I don't think that we would've eaten it, but dunking our cold hands into it would have been wonderful.

We laughed that both times we have been in Seville, it's been dead because it was either too hot (42 degrees in August), or too cold (10 degrees like tonight), so that everybody was hiding from the weather. But things started to look up shortly into dinner, as some of the locals started to come out. Things started to look even better when some of them were local Spanish women 😊

The conversation turned to the past year, and its highlights and lowlights. It was a good year for Mary, because she could only think of highlights. We noted that it was a funny year for me, with both the highlight and the lowlight being the exact same thing.

Dinner ended taking us almost right up to midnight, so we walked around a bit to scope out the plaza by the cathedral, to see if it would be any busier than Plaza Nueva, where people had started to gather. As we walked, I stepped into a big pile of horse crap, which felt a lot like stepping into a disgusting chocolate cake. This was the second time I stepped into crap this evening, doing so once just outside of the hostel, as we began our search for dinner. And if you count the cuttlefish crap we ate for lunch, this was my third exposure to crap for the day! That's gotta be some kind of record!

We ended up back at Plaza Nueva, which was getting quite packed, and ran into Michael, from the tour out to the Sahara desert. We didn't stay long, walking around the city, which was now bustling with people, crossing the river to Triana, where many outdoor bars and discos are opened up during summer. We finally made our way back to the hostel just before 2 AM. The party was winding down there, and a bunch of us ended up heading to a bar just around the corner, on Alameda de Hercules. It was a bit of an odd place, with a lot of bad 80s music being played. The bar was barely half full but magically at 2:30, the place became packed - they say that Spanish nightlife doesn't get going until at least 2:30, and tonight was true to form.

I was one of the first ones to leave the bar at around 3:00, and decided to stroll around for a bit. There's always such a buzz in Spain that makes it so exciting; patrons of the surrounding bars had spilled out onto La Alameda, joining others who had congregated out there with their own drinks. It's always nice to ring in a New Year, and there's no better way to do it than here in Spain!

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Photos

A
View of Plaza Ruiz from our balcony.

E
Mary decided to have a Moroccan-style breakfast, so she had some doughy pancakes and a pastry, along with some mint tea. All of it was definitely better in Morocco, as none of it was very good today.

F
Spanish breakfast just wouldn't be the same without a cafe con leche, so that's what I ordered, along with a Manchego cheese sandwich. I would have preferred one with Serrano ham but strangely, it wasn't available - you expect that such a Spanish staple would be served at every place in the country. The bun was decent - nice and crispy, and the cheese was tasty, with a surprising amount of it inside. The coffee was pretty blah - not as bad as what's been served in Morocco, but definitely not as good as what you'll find on mainland Spain.

G
On board, I wondered if our hydrofoil would leave on time as the sea had become quite rough, and hydrofoils aren't always able to traverse large waves. The journey took a bit longer than the anticipated 45 minutes, but time passed quickly with a bit of planning for tonight and some time on the netbook, while drinking a can of beer - a San Miguel Premium that was purchased last night, with the intent of drinking it later that evening. It was a bit bitter.

H
Mary was pouting on board. I think she's still upset that I sold her to Hamou for 1000 camels.

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Mainland Spain!!!

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Lunch - a grilled beef sandwich, with a pale-looking bun that was underdone, but still tasted good and crusty. It was much better than the three-course menu of the day that we also ordered - patatas a lo pobre (poor man's potatoes), and choco, grilled cuttlefish.
The potatoes were oily, mixed with fried eggs, bell peppers, and onions. The chocos were tough and tasted a bit fishy, reminiscent of Chinese dried cuttlefish snacks, and were pretty gooey inside - we wondered if they weren't cleaned properly. The chocos were also quite greasy, served in a garlicky oil which made the already soggy fries even soggier.

L
Spitting out some of the food, Mary commented that she couldn't remember Spanish food being so bad, but I remember all too well. I accidentally bit the inside of my cheek as we ate, which turned out to be a good thing, since this actually added some flavour to the food. Too bad it didn't help with the temperature, as everything was barely lukewarm.

K
The flan didn't have much flavour, and the highlights of the meal were our fruit juices, and an average cafe con leche that finished everything off. I don't think either of us stopped eating because we were full, but more because we had grown tired of eating such mediocre dishes.

M
View of the plaza from Robles.

S
Only a limited number of wines were available by the glass, but we lucked out and had some very good Rioja Crianza. It was a nice pairing with the first course, a platter of Manchego cheese, cured pork loin, and jamon. I couldn't tell if it was jamon Serrano or Iberico, but given the price of tonight's dinner, I hope it was the more expensive Iberico. I was relieved that I had brushed my teeth after arriving at the hostel, because that helped get rid of the fishy aftertaste from our mediocre lunch. I certainly don't want this expensive meal to end up tasting like cuttlefish crap!

T
Next course - a ball of foie gras and cream cheese, served with toffee apple sauce. This ended up being more like dessert, and the sheer quantity of cream cheese completely overpowered the foie gras. Not sure what they were trying to accomplish with this dish.

U
Fried shrimp - definitely better than the cream cheese ball, crisp and flavourful, but it seemed more like a dish worthy of a Chinese takeout joint, rather than the fine dining establishment that Robles is supposed to be. This was probably the first dish of the evening that hadn't been prepared ahead of time. It was a bit like eating in Morocco, because they had taken away our cutlery and forgot to give us new ones, so we used our hands instead.

V
Braised ox in a pastry shell - not bad, but not very fresh. There was a decent selection of mushrooms served with it, though they were a tad salty. The best dishes of the evening were the first platter of cheese and cured meats, and the Chinese takeout-style shrimps.

W
Dessert, from right to left: a chocolate and toffee shell, with chocolate mousse and nuts inside. Both white and chocolate cake, covered in chocolate. White chocolate mousse. They all tasted about the same, and all were far too sweet.
You might be wondering why I've raised my middle finger to the dessert - if you look closely there is a chocolate on the plate that says "2010". For some reason I thought that it said "2009", so flipping the bird was my way of symbolically saying goodbye to 2009. Mary and I laughed, hoping that I hadn't cursed the New Year by telling it to f*ck off! If 2010 is a bad year for me ... we all can point back to this moment!

zzz
Mary didn't flip off 2010, instead holding it up. What is she trying to say? Her eyes tell the story "I hope ... I stay ... awake ... until 2010 ..."

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It ended being a a pretty disappointing meal considering the price, and especially disappointing after realizing that we could have gone around the corner to this place and gotten a takeout sandwich for a few euros, or walked two blocks to find a selection of inexpensive restaurants, or that if we had walked on a parallel street from the hostel, we could've had a kebab.

Z
These guys ended up celebrating prematurely, as they dropped and shattered their bottle of bubbly.

zza
We rang in the New Year, attempting to eat twelve grapes, one for each chime at midnight, as is the tradition in this part of Spain.

zzb
No such luck, as I had prematurely started eating my grapes, hearing the chime of a nearby clock, thinking it was the one right in front of us. The grapes also had seeds, making them even more impossible to eat in such a short time, without choking on them.

ZA
A sign for Mary that she needs to return to Madrid to find Fernando!

zzc
View of Triana, from across the Guadalquivir River.