Hella Not Halal

I think Spain is still trying to catch up from 500 years of Muslim rule, because I've had 4 different types of pork today and I wasn't even trying.

Also, where's my Lipitor? I know I had it around here somewhere.

1001 Alhambrian Cats

Okay that might be an exaggeration. There were more like 3.

The Alhambra is Granada's biggest sight, and is one of the biggest in Europe. Tickets for it sell out online weeks in advance, but fortunately (and totally unbeknownst to me) hotels, hostels, and other businesses in the area all have a separate pool of tickets they can sell from, so I was still able to see it (huzzah!).

The gist of the palace is this: the Alhambra was a compound of three Islamic palaces built on a hill overlooking Granada when the city was one of the last Moorish strongholds left in Spain. Picture an Islamic palace with all the arches and fountains and courts and such. You're probably picturing the Alhambra. Why? Because it and the Alcazar in Sevilla are the two palaces that pretty much every documentary and film uses as a backdrop when it needs one. When the Spaniards finally forced the Moors out of Europe, they built another Renaissance palace in the compound.

You were picturing something like this, weren't you? Told ya.

I won't go into details too much since my day basically boils down to "Chris went to the pretty palace. Chris saw pretty things in the pretty palace. Chris took pretty photos of the pretty things in the pretty palace. Chris is waaaay behind on photo processing and probably won't get to it until back in the states." It was a hike to get up there though, I'll say that much. And for some reason the path I took dropped me off in the middle of the palace compound...inside the ticketed area. Not sure how that happened. I still needed to show a ticket to get inside any of the palaces, so I spent half an hour to figure out where the ticket pickup was before actually seeing any of them. I saw the grounds and two of the palaces, then killed a half hour drinking coffee and watching some kittens beg for scraps while I waited for my slot to get into the Nasrid palace (the big kahuna palace, which you're only allowed to enter during the timeslot on your ticket).

Alhambrian cat.

While I was inside I realized why everyone hates selfie sticks. There's lots of awesome viewpoints in the palace, which always had a line of folks waiting to take a photo from them. Unless you had a selfie stick. Then it's apparently TOTALLY FINE to reach it front of all the people waiting, block their shots, and pretend you don't see them while you're doing it. Like this jerk.

Class A jerk right here. Made him real big so you can see his jerkiness better. Note how he is holding his
phone DIRECTLY in front of the camera of the guy next to him.

On the way home I stopped by a shop that made wooden mosaics in mudejar-style patterns, and got a backgammon set and a cool wooden tray, which I guarantee I will find some way of fitting into my luggage before it's time to leave. Honest. Totally. Maybe. After that, I just got home, dropped my stuff, and went on a tapas crawl with some folks from the hostel. Honestly, none of the places we ate were all that great (one was SMACK in the middle of a row of tourist traps and decorated in cheesy medieval armor), but it was still a fun time going out with a big group. I have more stories on them for a later post.

Grungy Granada

So day one in Granada got off to a grungy start. Not 'dirty grungy.' More like 'Seattle grungy.'

My hostel seemed to largely be run by punk rockers, hippies, and hipsters, so I was curious what their walking tour would be like. Let me just say, it didn't disappoint. First stop on the tour was a little square that our guide said was 'a really great spot to smoke some hash, as long as the neighbors don't call the cops on you.' It seemed like the square was a building a few hundred years ago that slowly wore down to a couple low walls that had been covered in graffiti. Afterwards, he took us through the Albiyazin, which is the cities old Moorish quarter. Here was equal parts grunge and history, as he walked us through everything from the local graffiti scene, to the history of the wells in the area and why they all had turtles in them, to where all the gypsies and hippies would meet up to drink and smoke hash at night, to how to differentiate between a house that was built by Christians and one that was built by Muslims.

Mmm...pastries.

Halfway up the Albiyazin (it's built on a hill overlooking the city), we stopped at a bakery for a snack and I got some horchata and some Poin...Ponino...Ponioloino...*googles* PIONONO, which are like a cross between a vanilla-flavored tiramisu and a small cinnamon roll, then headed further up the hill to Plaza Sant Nicolas. The plaza is named after a church there that was fire-bombed by anarchists while Franco was in power, but the real draw is the view of the Alhambra, Granada's premier castle, palace, and tourism magnet. We hung out here taking photos for a while, the started back down the hill to the city center, where our tour guide took us through a food market and fed us some ham, cheese, and olive oil  (at this point I'm not sure why these three foods aren't on the Spanish flag, because they're amusingly ubiquitous in this country). I grabbed a bottle of olive oil and some local wine, then we continued on for a quick tapas lunch before heading back to the hostel.

The Alhambra from Plaza Sant Nicolas.

We got back around 4, so I just hung around for a couple hours before heading to dinner. Got a recommendation from the front desk and wandered over, but got there while they were still opening up so I wandered around the block for a few minutes, came back, and found them PACKED. Apparently it's a good place! Ate my fill of tapas, then skidaddled, as they proceeded to get more and more packed as the night went on. Pretty sure I accidentally hip-checked a small child in the back of the head in the process of getting out the door. Oops.

But at least I had snails.

Voy a Granada!

The day I left Sevilla was fairly uneventful. I woke up, grabbed breakfast on the roof one last time (where Gemma was sitting grumbling about missing her bus to Malaga), packed, and walked back to the bus station. I caught my bus, caught up on blog posts on the drive, and got to the station without much fuss. Once there, I grabbed coffee and a sopressata sandwich, then grabbed a cab to the hostel (2 miles over cobblestones with a rollie doesn't sounds like my idea of fun). The cabbie spoke as much English as I did Spanish, so it took a bit of pantomime to figure out that he was telling me my hostel's street was too narrow for a car, so he would drop me off a block away. All this happened by the way while 'Shake It Off' was blasting on the radio, which a nice dash of 'what the hell is happening here' to the whole situation.

Anyhoo, he got me there, and it was a short walk around the corner to...wait. My cat sense is tingling. Why do I feel like I'm being watched? 

Oh, because I'm literally surrounded by cats right now.
That's cool.

Apparently there's an abandoned house near the hostel that's turned into a cat colony, so there are literally always cats meandering about. I d'awwed and took a photo, then meandered on before I got fleas. Got to the hostel which has a pretty cool layout, as the main hallways are all open to an atrium/shaft that goes all the way up to the roof.

View of the atrium from the second floor.

By the time I checked in it was around 4, so I just figured I'd hang out at the hostel and go grab dinner someplace nearby. Then the front desk put up a sign that said "PAELLA NIGHT 5 EURO" and that plan became 'Nope, staying here all day then." I set up shop on the patio with a book, talked to some folks, and watched as a four-foot across pan slowly turned into dinner for 30.

It was a good day.

Bulls, Buses, and Bonapartes

I left my last day in Sevilla intentionally open so I could either do a daytrip to Cadiz or stay in the city, depending on what I had left to see and how lazy I was feeling. I had some left to see still and was feeling too lazy to battle the Spanish train system two days in a row, so I decided to take a slow day in town.

First things first I wanted to see a bit more about bullfighting before leaving the city, so I headed back to the Plaza de Toros to get the tour of the ring and museum. I'd considered going to see a bullfight, but ultimately decided against it. I still wanted to learn more about it though, so I hopped on the 6 euro guided tour. It was in both Spanish and English, so the tour guide kept flipping between the two. It was funny to hear all in the same breath "Spanish spanish spanish spanish the royal box up there is the..." Everytime she'd switch, you'd see people jump and start listening again.She walked us through the ring, down into a gallery with paintings of the history of bullfighting, then through the museum, where she explained how the whole process of the fight works. Basically, it goes like this:

1. A mounted caballero rides around the ring poking and prodding the bull with a spear to get it angry and start tiring it out.
2. Quick picadores dart around the bull and stick it in the back with decorated hooked sticks that further weaken it and tire it out.
3. The matador finally comes out and uses his cape to keep the bull moving and attacking for another ten minutes or so. After that, he has three attempts with his sword to try and kill the bull, and is awarded 0-2 points based on how he does it. If he stabs the bull through the head, it dies instantly and he is awarded 1 point. If he stabs it through the spine (an equally instantly deadly spot, though harder to hit), he is given 2 points. Anywhere else, and the bull takes longer to die and he doesn't get any points. 
4. If it takes more than 3 attempts to kill the bull, the bull wins. Bulls aren't allowed to fight more than once in their life (otherwise they'd know the pattern of the fight and would be more likely to hurt someone) and is allowed to retire to a farm, where it's used to sire more bulls which can be sold for a higher price based on their pedigree.
5. If the matador wins and has done an excellent job, the umpire of the fight can award him one ear, two ears, or two ears and the bull's tail as trophies based on how stylish of a fight he put on. The bull's head is then generally mounted, and the rest of him is given as stew meat to soup kitchens and food banks.

Plaza del Toros. (pardon the scowl; staring into the sun while trying to grin is difficult :) )

All around, a pretty bloody process, though the tour guide made what I thought was a good point. To get to full fighting weight, it takes a bull 5-6 years wandering in the grasslands, as opposed to the year or so it takes a beef bull to get to slaughter weight on a farm (the older it is, the tougher and more gristly the meat is). So while his end is a bit more bloody, he lives a much longer life than his hamburger-bound cousins.

Bovine business complete, I went to the bus station at Plaza de Armas to make sure I'd be able to find it the next day. Pretty simple to get to, so I got my ticket from Granada to Cordoba from one of the ticket kiosks there and wandered back. On the way to the station I'd passed a market that reminded me of Mercado San Miguel in Madrid (think like a food court on steroids) near the river, so on the way back I stopped there to get some pastries for lunch. I didn't have any other plans until a walking tour that night, so I grabbed some coffee at a cafe near the hostel and read and people-watched for an hour or two.

That night I hopped on the other walking tour the hostel offered and got Mehdy as a tour guide again. He said he had seen me walking into Plaza de Toros, but that I was too far away to say hello. We met up in Plaza Nueva, and he ran us through the Moorish and Jewish history of the city. He took us to the (now closed) catheral's entrance and ran us through it's history of construction, partial destruction, reconstruction, and additions, as well as the Giralda, it's minaret-turned-belltower-turned-weather vane. He explained that the cathedral had expanded so much that it had swallowed a smaller nearby church. Apparently thrifty tourists seeking to avoid the 9 euro entry fee to the cathedral sneak in, thinking they've found a back endtrance, only to find that despite being a part of the cathedral's building, it's an entirely separate entity. 

He then took us to the Alcazar palace and explained that despite it's Muslim and Moorish decor, and despite there previously being over 15 Moorish palaces in its vicinity in the past, there's only a very small amount of actual Moorish construction in the compound. Almost all of it was built by Muslim workers in the area for Christian kings who just happened to like the look. He then ran us through Santa Cruz, the former Jewish quarter, as well as the history of the city's Jewish population, the plague, and the Inquisition, which took a strong hold in Sevilla. He also explained how the neighborhood's name is layered in irony. 'Santa Cruz' just means 'Holy Cross' in Spanish, so the Jewish quarter is named after the cross. Apparently this name came from the Church of Santa Cruz, which was built in the neighborhood after the Inquisition drove many of the Jews out. When Napoleon put his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne during his conquest of Europe however, his palace was built across from the church. Joseph didn't like how the church and surrounding buildings impinged on his view, so he had them demolished and rebuilt outside the neighborhood. So Santa Cruz is a Jewish quarter, named after the Church of the Holy Cross, which isn't even *in* the neighborhood.

Tour finished, Mehdy walked us back to the main part of town, and I found out that he used to be a software engineer and has a Master's in Artificial Intelligence. He said that when the market tanked a few years ago, most programming jobs barely paid a living wage so he started doing this instead. He's working on a business venture in Morocco with a former research adviser to use machine learning to better organize the administration operations of the government there, though it's currently entirely unpaid unless they sell the idea. It was weird for me to hear, since in the States, a master's in CS is basically a guarantee of a well-paying job. Goes to show that prospects aren't the same everywhere, I suppose. He seemed upbeat about it though; when we parted ways, he shook my hand and said, "When next we meet in Sevilla, may we meet as billionaires!"

After that, I grabbed dinner at a place he recommended called Azotea, an upscale tapas place with a bit of a hipstery fusiony vibe. Everything was pretty traditional, though had a bit of an Asain twist on it. I got Spanish almond soup topped with fish roe, and seared cod with in a squid ink and garlic sauce, served on top of Japanese soba noodles. Thoroughly full, I wandered home, checked everything was ready for the trip to Granada, then went to sleep.

It was really pretty before I started eating it. Then the black sauce
started smearing everyhere and it looked like a nightmarish finger painting.

Hey look, it's people!

Every post so far has ended with ‘and then I hung out on the roof,’ so figured I’d say why and who all I was with.

La Banda has a pretty rockin’ rooftop deck, with a view of the cathedral, a couple lounge chairs and couches, a bar, and an enormous dining table that can seat 15-20. Every day started out with everyone in the hostel crowding up to the roof for breakfast, and every day ended with everyone hanging out and getting cheap drinks from the bar while chatting and swapping stories about their day or previous travels. It was a pretty awesome way to end every day, and a lot more pleasant and sociable than a lot of my time in Japan.

The hostel seemed to have a spectrum of employees, ranging from the semi-mythical Owners (four guys who I never met while I was there), to semi-permanent staff who were there for longer stretches of time, to short term folks, who worked largely for room and board there for a month or two while pursuing some other endeavor in the city (like Gemma, a girl from Belfast who was there studying Spanish). It was great because you never felt you were dealing with an impersonal front desk or concierge, but the first morning it took me a while to figure out why the two girls who’d been drinking beer with us discussing their studies the night before kept offering to cook everyone eggs.

Anyhoo, in no particular order here’s some of the folks I met there:

• The aforementioned Gemma from Belfast. Her last day at the hostel was also mine, and she kept getting farewells from everyone there. The walking tour guide Mehdi walked in her last night, hugged her, and said she was in no way allowed to leave. He was apparently partially right at least, as she slept through her bus to the airport and had to book a rideshare to get there.
• Juan, who got me all checked in and such. Super nice dude who seemed like he would be sticking around for a while. Said that one of the main reasons he took the job was because he liked all the questions they asked.
• Ben and Mark, two PhD students in economics in Michigan. They apparently worked in some field that analyzed the role genetics had in risk tolerance, and what the implications of that were (I also added them on Facebook so guys if you’re reading this apologies if I’ve butchered the description of your research :D )
• Sean, a 36 year-old Brooklynite who looks at most in his mid-twenties. Described himself and his entire family as ‘Irish as all hell.’ He has a tattoo his family's crest on his arm, is quite ginger, and is a fierce soccer fan. He left for Lisbon on a bus the day before me and was very much dreading the fact that it was going to be an 8 hour bus ride.
• Shyam, who I went exploring landmarks with. He just left an associate position at a dental firm in Orange County and was taking this trip as a break before starting his own practice. Super nice dude, and we were able to actually get photos of ourselves at the big landmarks.
• Tom (Thom?), who was in Sevilla from the Netherlands for an animal and pest control conference where he was showing that he had literally built a better mouse trap.
• One of my roommates, Jinny, was from Korea. She asked where I was from and I told her Mississippi, and she nearly hit her head on the bedframe she jumped so hard. She said when she was in school she did a study abroad at MC. I asked why Mississippi, and she just laughed and said she didn’t have much of a choice.
• Wei Wei, a girl from China who was in Sevilla to take a couple weeks of flamenco classes. She brought some sweets on Wednesday and we all tried to guess what they were.
• (And here the names get fuzzy) An Australian fella who was so Australian it hurt. My first interaction with was him walking up to me shirtless and barefoot to offer me a beer. I asked ‘what’ and he said he was the bartender, then went back to sitting in a ring of more shirtless Australians.
• Several Seattlites actually! Met four others while I was there, two from Wedgwood, two from Sammamish. Far enough away from my usual haunts that I probably won’t see them again, but you never know!

Jerez de la Frontera

I saved at least one day in Sevilla for a trip to Jerez de la Frontera, a small town outside Cadiz with the claim to fame of being the home of sherry, the strange dessert/not a dessert wine that Spanish and non-Spanish people approach entirely differently. While folks in the US and UK (which apparently drinks gobs of the stuff) think of sherry as a super sweet dessert wine, most Spaniards drink dry versions with afternoon snacks or appetizers. Anyway, the trip to the port cellars in Porto was one of my favorite parts from my post-college eurotrip, so I figured I’d go and learn more about it.

"The Mushrooms"

Wednesday I woke up, grabbed breakfast, and walked to the train station, passing ‘the Mushrooms’ (a super-modern complex of roofs and buildings) along the way. Caught my train and about an hour later I hopped off and tried to get oriented which, despite spending the whole day there, was something I managed to not do. I’d been planning on using a map from the guidebook to find my way to the tourism office and get a real map there, but Rick Steve failed me for once, as there was no tourism office within a two-block radius of where he said it was. I just resigned myself to using the guidebooks map, which only got me hopelessly lost 2 or 3 times.

Despite his utter betrayal of failing to provide me with an adequate map, I took Mr. Steve’s recommendation for a sherry tour and wound my way up to Sandeman’s bodega, which is one of the bigger brands of port and sherry in the States (though not that big in Spain itself). When I got there, the guy at the front desk said he wasn’t sure if there would be enough people for the next tour, so I could either come back for the next one, or just grab a seat with some sherry and wait and see if other folks showed up. I opted for the latter (it wasn’t a long wait) and he ran me through 4 different types of sherry while I noshed on some really durn tasty olives (came to find out later they were stuffed with anchovies, which I would never have guessed). Right on cue, some other folks walked in for the tour, so we were off!

A fino, two amontillados, and a sweet cream sherry. 

The tour was cool, even if it was a little disneyfied. The tour guide wore the cape and hat that Sandeman’s Zorro-like mascot wears, which I thought was a little cheesy until she explained that it’s a combination of costumes from Porto and Jerez, where Sandeman’s two businesses are. The black capes were borrowed from the traditional uniform of university students in Porto (who I saw singing and dancing for their beer money one night on the river), and the flat hat was borrowed from the horseback riders of Jerez. She walked us around the grounds for a bit (apparently you can rent them for big events, much like Chateau Ste. Michelle back in Seattle, which I thought was funny), then ran us through the process of sherry making and how it was different from other types of wine (basically boiling down to adding some brandy during the fermentation and allowing a cap of yeast to grow on top of the wine, which gives explains the extra-yeasty taste).

Sherry casks or 'butts.' Fun fact! Thanks to the name of this type of barrel,
a 'buttload' of wine is a legit measurement. It comes out to about 500 liters.

At the end was another sherry tasting, which gave me a chance to talk to the Dutch couple who constituted the aforementioned ‘other folks’ on the tour. They’d flown into Madrid and rented a car, and were driving around Andalucia for a couple of days before heading up to Barcelona. They were the third people in a row to guess my career based solely on my appearance and me saying I’m from Seattle. Not sure if that says more about me or the city… At any rate, it reminded me that Europeans and Americans have vastly different expectations of their kids, as they were absolutely boggled that I was 25 and had been out on my own for over 3 years. They said their oldest was 24 and was just starting to think about where he wanted to go. They also engaged in a bit of grumbling about their younger kids (all in their early 20s), who allegedly show no signs of moving out in the near future and still rely on their parents’ for rides around town.

Sherry tasting finished, I grabbed a nice bottle to take home as a souvenir and figured I’d check out another bodega before heading back, but alas it wasn’t meant to be. While I’m normally a fan of the laidback Mediterranean lifestyle and workdays, Jerez took it to a new extreme. All the bodegas that Rick Steve mentioned did hourly tours, but they were only open from 11 to 3, so my window was a little tiny. I picked one and started walking to it, and proceeded to get utterly turned around. The map was really more a suggestion of what I might find than an accurate reflection of reality, and I wandered back and forth in the same neighborhood for over an hour before eventually finding the place. They were quite closed by that point, so I just decided to chalk it up for a loss and grab a late lunch near the cathedral. I read in the sun for a while, then wandered back to catch a train back to Sevilla.

Scrimps.

On the way back I stopped at a restaurant near my hostel and grabbed some garlic shrimp, which were essentially unbreaded shrimp dropped into a rocket hot bowl of oil, peppers, and garlic and fried at my table. It was quite tasty, though I was squeezed in a back corner by two ENORMOUS groups of french people, so the waiter had to basically hop over chairs to get to me.

After that, you guessed it: hanging out with folks on the roof.

Tuesday in Sevilla: Alcazar and Cathedral

Woke up Tuesday and decided to go check out the three major sights in the city: the old Jewish Quarter, the Alcazar, and the cathedral. Turns out a new hostel friend, Shyam, had similar ideas for his day, so we joined forces.

Court of the Maidens (I think; got a little
turned around)

First stop was the Alcazar, a royal palace that was initially started by the Moors, then partially destroyed and rebuilt by the Christian reconquerors. That’s a common story in Andalucia, as most of the major sites in the area (Sevilla’s Alcazar and Cathedral, Granada’s Alhambra, Cordoba’s Mezquita) all have stories similar to that. The royal family apparently still officially live there on visits to Sevilla. It's an ENORMOUS palace compound, with gardens that cover a sizable chunk of the city's historic district. The decor and architecture are exactly what you'd picture a north african muslim palace to be, with lots of walls either covered in intricate geometric patterns or colorful
mosaics. Oddly enough, all of these were build for the Christian reconquerors, who just happened to like the style. They hired Moorish craftsmen who had stayed in the area to build it in Moorish style, with a dash of Christian imagery thrown in for good measure.

After that on to the cathedral! (With a short coffee and snack break and dodging some gypsies trying to pull the rosemary scam along the way).

Sevilla's cathedral is one of the largest churches in the world (only losing out to St. Peter's and St. Paul's), and while it's obviously huge on the outside, you don't really get a good grasp of the sense of scale until you get inside and see everyone looking like tiny little ants next to the columns. It’s another case of Christians and Moors repurposing each other’s stuff, as its bell tower is a former minaret and its front gate is decked out in Islamic script and leads to a court of orange trees initially built by the Moors. Shyam and I wandered around a bit in the cathedral, then climbed the belltower’s 34 sets of ramps to see the view from the top.

The orange grove of the cathedral with the Giralda (the bell tower) in the
background. I'm the dot in the bottom left.

After the cathedral we started heading back to the hostel, keeping an eye out for lunch spots. We bumped into Gemma, a girl who works at the hostel, on the way, and she pointed us to a good tapas place down the street. Now both full and tired, we headed back to the hostel where I crashed for a nap.

That night was another night of drinks and hanging out with everyone on the roof. La Banda also cooks a giant meal for everyone every night, so I decided to join for that and get some much-needed vegetation in my system (that night they had a pesto/tomato tart, rice with beets, and a salad, which was more vegetables than I’d seen combined up to that point.)

First full day in Sevilla

I woke up pretty early my first morning in Spain (~7:00) and figured I'd take advantage of the extra time to sort out some train and bus bookings. Apparently there's some sort of issue with the train station in Granada, so the last leg of the trip is by bus. Since the Sevilla bus station is four blocks up the hill from my hostel and I'm taking a bus anyway, I just decided to go the bus route from the beginning. Alsa's (Spain's big bus company) website was having none of my Amercian credit card shenanigans, so I dug up my old PayPal account info and paid that way. Hurray for resourcefulness!

(To worry-wort family reading this: all buses and trains have now been booked for the rest of the trip, so I'm not going to be stranded anywhere, fear not!)

Transit all sorted out, I hopped on one of the two walking tours my hostel offers, this one was basically a history of the city and everything but the two major sites in the city (the cathedral and the royal palace, the Alcazar). Our snap-happy tour guide Mehdi (literally, he kept snapping his fingers when he got excited) walked us through a bit of how the city evolved, from it's roots as a Phoenician settlement called S'ball, to the Roman town named Hispallia, to the Spanish city called Sevilla.

Highlights of the tour:

• The neighborhood my hostel in is called 'El Arenal' which means 'sand.' Apparently when Sevilla was still a walled-in city, it was outside the walls and was essentially just a sand beach between the river and the gate.
• After leaving the Arenal, we walked to the river and got the history of Triana, the town across the river. It used to be it's own village, but was eventually consumed by the city. It was a poorer part of town, so a lot of the cities gypsies congregated there. Thanks to the powers of gentrification, as Sevilla expanded, the gypsies were forced out and resettled in a place called the Three Thousand Homes, or 'Tres Milles' which, according to our tour guide is the most dangerous slum in Europe. He said if you hopped in a taxi and asked to go there, he would just tell you to get out of his cab or at most offer to take you to the the border and wish you luck the rest of the way.
• Speaking of gypsies, Mehdi gave us another interesting fact: Flamenco isn't really Spanish so much as Gitano (the gypsies from this area). Almost all of the flamenco clubs and shows in the city are for tourists, as the only people who legit do flamenco when they go out dancing are the gitano. Spanish folks doing flamenco is like me doing the lindy hop; it's fun and people do it, but it's more to do with history rather than current culture. 
• After that we walked past through the South American pavilions, where Spain attempted to use a giant "We're sorry for exploiting you for centuries" world expo to bring more tourists (and more importantly, tourists' money) to the country. Thanks to delays, the expo happened in the 1930's. You can imagine how much of a success that was.
• We ended up in Plaza Espana, which was Spain's 'pavilion' for the expo. The plaza is ringed with nooks representing all the various provinces of Spain, and has a canal running through it, with three bridges representing the three original regions of modern Spain (Castille, Leon, and Aragona).

I found the nook for Barcelona!

• While a gorgeous plaza, it's an excellent example of twentieth century Spanish politics, as graft and poor planning resulted in the project running out of funds shortly after it started. The main architect redid the design as a half-circle rather than a full one, with the excuse that it represented how Spain was "opening its arms and reaching to embrace its former colonies," which he couldn't say without snickering. Fear not though! It was eventually finished by one George Lucas, who loved the plaza so much that he put it in Star Wars Episode II. He just did a little CG magic to make it look like it was a full circle.

After the tour, I walked back to the Arenal and had a quick lunch, then crashed for the afternoon (walking halfway across the city with the thermometer in the high 80s takes it out of ya, man. Hung out around the hostel for a couple hours, took a little siesta, then wandered out in search of a tapas restaurant our tour guide recommended, La Colonial. It was well worth the recommendation, as the food was tasty and, frankly, dirt cheap. I got three small plates, two glasses of wine, and a glass of sherry for 11 euros total. 

Full of tasty things, I headed home and hung out with folks on the hostel's roof, 

First night in Sevilla

When I got to Sevilla I was feeling entirely too lazy to walk the mile to the hostel so decided to take a cab, which was my first experience with how wonderfully inexpensive this area is. The cab to the hostel was only like $10, so totally worth it.

I got to the hostel, checked in, and took a quick breather before realizing if I sat still for any longer I'd be asleep before I knew it. Since I didn't want to start off the trip with a totally screwed up sleep schedule, I got up, changed into some clean clothes, and went exploring the riverwalk near our hostel on the Paseo de Cristobal Colon (who departed from Sevilla on his first excursion to the Americas, so there's quite a few things named after him up here). I saw the Plaza de Toros (the big, pretty bullfighting ring I posted a photo of on instagram), wandered around looking for a place for dinner, and just generally got oriented while the sun set over the river.

Once it did (most restaurants don't even open for dinner until at least 8pm), I went looking for grub and found a restaurant near the hostel that looked good. I walked in, ordered, looked around, and saw three different Rick Steve's guides scattered around various customer's tables. I checked when back at the hostel and sure enough he had recommended it, which was funny to find out and a good sign of the food to come. I got a big wheel of warm cheese and honey and jam, along with olives and what I think is some weird form of almond. I also got a strange potato-and-shrimp salad that was tasty, but strange and seemed to be mostly made of mayo.

Warm goat cheese, honey, marmalade, pumpkin seeds, dried cranberries.

After dinner, I went back to the hostel and had a glass of wine on the roof (which seems to be the way every one here ends every evening), then went to bed. Quite happy I made it up as late as I did, since it means my internal clock normalized MUCH faster. The real exploration started the next morning, but my laptop battery is dying so I'll have to cover that later. For now, here's the view from my hostel's roof.

Sunset behind the cathedral, from my hostel

Made it!

Checked into my hostel in Seville and now trying to fight off jet lag for just a few more hours so I can get on a regular schedule. Wish me luck! I'll try and figure out my schedule for the next few days before passing out :)

The trip over was long but largely uneventful, aside from being able to swap my train ticket from Madrid to Seville with one that left two hours earlier (I left way to much buffer time in between landing and my train, so I was quite happy for that!). Found a ticket machine, scan, tap tap tap, and hey look at that, new train at no new cost.

Bags packed, kitties cared for, passport dusted off

I'd say it's time for another trip ^__^

Tomorrow I'm catching a flight to Madrid, then I'll be in Andalucia (southern Spain) for the next two weeks. As per my usual M.O., I'll scribble here to track where I'm going and what I'm doing.

Follow along; my international antics usually result in a few interesting stories :)