Sevilla
Sevilla, the home of Flamenco, is crowded with everything flagrantly Spanish: bullfights, discos, botellón, and enormous cathedrals. The “SnL+A” (Sean and Lauren, plus Andrew) tricycle pulled up to Sevilla in time to enjoy a few warm days of touring before a cold front blew in on All-Hallows-Eve and closed the curtains on our artificially enhanced summer. Lauren got to know Sevilla really well back in 2006 when she studied there for a month. Leading up to our arrival she wouldn’t stop talking about how much I was going to love it. Her excitement turned out to be justified and Sevilla quickly became my favorite Spanish city of the handful we’ve visited.
I could sum up a lot of what made me love Sevilla in two words: tiles and courtyards. Everywhere we went there was an exquisite building covered head to toe with colorfully painted tiles and around every corner we found a hidden courtyard filled with trees and stone benches. I’m a real sucker for artsy façades and shaded plazas. The endless pedestrian zones and overly designed city parks didn’t hurt either.
The once round wheels of the SnL+A-cycle gradually started to function more like squares as our time in Spain dragged on. Although that metaphor could work on a multitude of levels, here I mean that we didn’t move too fast. Luckily life in Sevilla seemed to flow at nearly the same easy current and we managed to get a lot done nonetheless – as the following parenthesis plagued run-on sentence will depict.
In the days leading up to Halloween we sampled plenty of “Agua de Sevilla” – a tasty (turns out girly) mix of liquors and ingredients so random they might have been chosen blindly out of a hat, watched as Sevillanos mixed wine and fruit juice and called it “Tinto y Verano,” cheered on the Florida Gators from the Texas Lone Star Saloon (that obviously attracted us like a magnet,) developed mystery rashes all over our bodies possibly due to a mixture of hostel beds and obscure Agua de Sevilla pathogens, spent 30 minutes (6:00-6:30AM-Spanish clubs get a late start) navigating through tiny streets back to our hostel from a bar district called Alfalfa that turned out to be literally 100 yards around a previously unexplored corner the next day, unknowingly saw the tomb of Christopher Columbus, explored an Arabic palace, spilled sangria on the oldest bar in Sevilla (est. 1675,) and enjoyed a two hour flamenco extravaganza.
The night of the flamenco show Andrew had one of his classic Spanish conversations with the waiter who came around taking the included 1st drink orders. It went exactly like this:
Andrew, “Scotch y Soda, porfavor.”
Waiter, “8 Euros.”
Andrew, “Cerveza.”
And then there was Halloween. Spain is completely devoid of any halfway decent costume stores, so we hit up the nearest H&M in search of some inspiration. Lauren saw a sparkly dress and decided on “Rock star,” I grabbed some suspenders and a hat and became “Gangster,” and Andrew found some neon green and neon orange wristbands to depict “Workout Man.” If you’ve seen the photos from the night, you might be asking yourself “what happened to Workout Man?” Workout Man was cast aside at the last minute after an ill received dress-rehearsal involving laughter to the point of tears on Lauren and I’s part.
The evening went off without a hitch (unless you count getting denied from the Halloween party club after waiting in the cold for almost an hour or being the only idiots in Sevilla not dressed as zombies) and we had a blast. Not a day goes by, however, that I don’t think back to Workout Man and the night of neon wristbands that could have been.
Be sure and check out Andrew’s blog for more.
Tags: Travel
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