(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).
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| 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,
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