Our last full day in Sevilla would be a full one, as full as we could make it. We were going to extract every last drop from the place. We knew we’d be spending many hours sitting over the next two days, and we could catch up on sleep then. As events would transpire, we’d be getting even more than we bargained for. The wing-it method has wings. While we were eating breakfast, I saw a particularly fat bird in a tree. I leaned over to get a better look and it fluttered down a few yards in front of us. I was gobsmacked. “It’s a HOOPOE!” Just that one moment, long enough to get a good look at it, not long enough to get a picture. The hoopoe is mostly an African bird, and I didn’t know its range extended into southern Spain. If we had stayed in a hotel or gone to a restaurant for breakfast, we would have missed the moment. We decided to do two locations and see a late flamenco show. Due to the show schedule, we’d splurge and get dinner downtown as well. Since we were leaving town, we could save the few odd bits of food we had left for our trip. We started with the General Archive of the Indies. It’s a museum dedicated to the Spanish exploration of the New World. The TripAdvisor reviews said it was great even if you didn’t know any Spanish, and they were right. It’s absolutely a world-class museum. If only every museum were designed this well! We were riveted. The main exhibit at that time had to do with the discovery of a ship that had been sunk in 1804. The British intercepted a Spanish flotilla that was sending money to Napoleon, and just happened to sink the one carrying the gold and silver. An American salvage operation found this treasure ship, and there followed years of litigation that is still ongoing a decade later. The millions of dollars in coins and ingots were displayed for all to see, as though Spain were saying HA HA. This would have interested us regardless, but my husband is particularly interested in the Napoleonic Era. He explained the different kinds of ships, armaments, and military strategy to me. He also knows quite a lot about numismatics, or the study of coins. We were both astounded when I proved to be able to translate about 80% of all the placards on the exhibits. We loved this museum, and so did the treasure hunters; it turns out the Archive is the source of much of the documentation that helps aquatic archaeologists know where to look for all the awesome loot. We left the museum, chattering a mile a minute. The weather was great and we were really having fun. We walked over to a little indoor mall we had found two days earlier, knowing that the restaurant would be open for business this time. It was a cute punk vegan place. I was able to chat with the proprietress a bit. “Soy vegana por veinte años.” While we were eating, a guitarist came by and sang to us. He was terrific. Probably another sign of over-qualified people hit hard by the tanking of the economy in 2008. This out-of-the-way mall had a lot going on. We overheard a flamenco dance class behind a wall. As we were strolling around, we came upon another restaurant where a group of Spanish people were singing in accompaniment to a flamenco guitarist. They smiled at us. Most of the mall was deserted, shopfronts locked down, so what we witnessed was a private moment among Spaniards. Culture is what happens when people show up and do things with sincerity. The flamenco group wasn’t putting on a public performance. They were entertaining one another in a casual moment of friendship. What does it cost? One guitar and some strings. There is no reason whatsoever why there couldn’t be informal flamenco groups in every city. Or any other genre of music or dance. Whenever people complain that there’s nothing to do in their town, I wonder what they mean. Come up with something. For the afternoon, we wanted to go to the Roman ruins of Italica. It wasn’t mentioned in any of the guidebooks; I’d only seen it while surfing through TripAdvisor. WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH GUIDEBOOK WRITERS?!? This place was UNBELIEVABLE. It’s still being excavated and it’s the size of a small town. There were about a dozen house foundations with complete, full-color mosaic tile floors. There was an entire gladiatorial stadium. It went on and on. We were literally sprinting from one spot to another. Why sprint? The location in TripAdvisor was about five miles off from the true site, and we wound up on a sort of snipe hunt on the bus before we could get there. We only had, get this, FORTY MINUTES at Italica before we had to catch the bus back and watch our flamenco show. Going to the wrong place and losing the majority of the time you had dedicated to something can be a serious bummer. We were learning to be philosophical, though. A full day would barely have been enough to do justice to Italica, for us anyway. There was no way we could have known how extensive the site was from the material we had seen. We saw enough to know we wanted to know more. We could go home, read up on the site, and if we ever came back, more of it would be excavated for us to see. It’s conceivable, given that he has a master’s in engineering and I have a history degree, that we could even talk our way onto a dig crew. What happened on the bus trip to nowhere? We saw more of Spain. We wound up in a neighborhood just as the moms were picking their kids up from school. We saw a stand of rental bicycles, which we considered, but we weren’t sure if we would have to return them to the same spot. On the ride back, we saw a pair of female acrobats busking in an intersection by doing lifts and hula hooping. We saw teams of boats doing crew practice on the river. We saw people running or hanging out by the waterfront. It was another great slice of what life could be like if we lived in Sevilla: It’s a Great Place to Visit AND I Want to Live There.
One thing we saw while we were waiting for the bus disturbed us. We weren’t completely sure what to make of it. There was a borracho on the median strip shouting at a guy at our bus stop. He was clearly insulting him. At one point he started yanking on his crotch. I couldn’t understand what he was saying due to the traffic noise and my limited vocabulary of verbal abuse. Did these guys know one another? Or did this have something to do with the fact that the target of the obnoxious shouting happened to be black? This man took the barrage of invective with good humor, awkwardly smiling, like, “What the heck? That guy’s crazy.” He went to catch a bus, and the buffoon picked a rose off the landscaping in the median and tried to offer it to the black gentleman through the bus window. The whole thing went on for at least five minutes. We still couldn’t figure out if they knew each other, although I don’t think so. I don’t even know what I would have done if this happened at home, in my own language, and I had a better grasp of what was going on. All we could really do in Spain was watch silently and stand by in case things escalated. Shouting across the street can be waited out; anything physical would have been a different scenario. In all our time in Spain, this was an extreme, isolated incident. The black guy’s patient, embarrassed reaction seemed more typical of a Spaniard than the weird behavior of the white jerk. When we got to the edge of the historic district, we had to walk. Not just walk, but hustle. On foot was our only option. My husband took over navigating from his phone, and I scurried after him as quickly as I could. We covered about a mile and a half in under half an hour. We managed to get to the hotel with our flamenco show with five minutes to spare, enough time not just to claim our seats but even to freshen up in the restroom. Flamenco is the cultural product of the Expulsion. People who were not of the Catholic majority went to live in exile in the mountains of Andalucía, and the melding of gypsy, Moorish, and Jewish cultures produced this phenomenal blend of music, dance, fashion, and attitude. It comes in four parts: guitar, voice, dance, and audience response, which has a codified repertoire of callbacks, clapping, and snapping. Listening to recorded flamenco music or watching a video in no way does justice to the galvanizing nature of a live performance. You can see the sweat flying out of the dancers’ hair. Watching this show was the shortest hour of our lives. I think we forgot our names. So often, shows put on for tourists become hackneyed, saccharine, and exploitive. This felt like we were graciously allowed to observe something the troupe would have done for fun even without an audience. We were going to eat dinner before the show, but our mishap with the bus had disrupted that plan. We decided to simply go back to the Lebanese place where we had eaten on our first night. It was still warm out. We sat at a sidewalk table and watched the world go by. The mesmerizing foot traffic of Sevilla had one last surprise in store for us. For the first and only time, we happened to see a young man cruise by on a motorized unicycle with no seat. It takes a lot to render an engineer speechless, but that did it. We took a cab back to camp and had to have someone open the gate for us. We spent a little time organizing our stuff before bed, knowing we’d have to get an early start the next day. We had ended on a high note, having the best day in the best city. O Spain, O Sevilla. The wing-it method suddenly started working again, just as I’d given up on it. We woke up to a relatively sunny day, a stack of clean clothes, a bag of groceries, a clear mental map of Sevilla, and well-defined backup plans. Our goal was to get tickets to the Real Alcázar after eating lunch. We figured we’d have to stand in line for a long time but that we had a good shot at getting a time slot sometime in the next couple of days. After we got the tickets, we could walk a few paces to the Archive of the Indies and check out the exhibit. Our expectations were nice and low. We took the bus downtown and went straight to Starbucks. I checked TripAdvisor to see what restaurants were near the palace. It just so happened that the first place I looked at had vegan tapas! We walked there to have lunch. The place was packed to the gills, but we managed to get seats. Minutes later, a drenching downpour started outside. We had window seats and watched as all the locals ran by, trying to stay out of the rain in their regular street clothes. We were wearing rain jackets and rain pants, a uniform absolutely guaranteed to mark one as a tourist, yet so practical it should be more widespread. Or does my thinking this also mark me as middle-aged? A fabulous meal has the power to change lives. Only the day before, we had been trudging through these same streets, under the same precipitation, hangry and miserable. Now everything gleamed with beauty and possibility. It was more than just a lunch: it was a power-up. We had tempura sushi. HOW did we not know this is a thing? It was even better than the day I invented tater tot pot pie. The rain had stopped by the time we finished our fine meal. We walked toward the palace, truly feeling like we were on a fabulous vacation. There was a long line out the gates. In the sunshine, we could stand and enjoy the atmosphere. The Real Alcázar shares a square with the Cathedral. Other than all the modern people in their contemporary clothes, this little patch of Spain is redolent of history. It could have been a time when people cared more about making their surroundings beautiful. Unfortunately, ours is a time when many people follow their lowest drives. The first impulse of the barely literate is graffiti, and before that comes litter. To our surprise, we waited only ten minutes and were able to enter the palace grounds. Well, then! First we beat the rain and got a table for lunch right away. Now our Plan B had moved up to Plan A! We had our bags scanned and passed through a metal detector. The Real Alcázar immediately had our attention, and we stayed over three hours. The only thing American culture has managed to produce on this scale over our brief history is: THE SHOPPING MALL. Instead of the vast palace gardens, we have free parking. Instead of elaborate decorations on every square inch, we have hundreds of thousands of OBJECTS, most of which will be considered laughably obsolete within 7 years. The grandeur of the Real Alcázar came from its design, not its materials. There was something endlessly pleasing about the proportions of the rooms. It aged well as an architectural icon in a way that I doubt La Sagrada Família ever will. Pretty impressive for what was little more than mud, plaster, and paint! We are DIY artisans with a strong background in history and material culture. We saw how most of the decorative elements of the palace could have been mass produced with molds and templates. Then it struck me. It would be totally possible to reproduce most of the bricks, panels, and tiles for the average surburbanite. My husband elaborated that they could be 3D-printed. I added that there were probably high-res images out there of all the features, and you could do it from photographs without even being on the same continent. (If anyone uses this idea, please tap me and let me know!) It was funny to think that we could decorate our back yard with design elements from a splendiferous palace. A wealthy enough person could replicate the entire thing, brick by brick, and if it was done in California, it could even include palm trees at the same spots. Get a few peacocks and boom, done! As we wandered through the vast halls, we talked about what life might have been like for the earlier inhabitants. (There is still a royal family living in a restricted part of the palace). People must have used any excuse possible to get any kind of sinecure or foothold to be closer to the seat of power. “It’s a gossip factory,” I said. Everything revolved around who knew whom. People must have spent all their time finagling and jostling for leverage. There must have been so much envy, jealousy, backbiting, and ceaseless shifting of bizarre love triangles. Courtiers would have had little to do other than to look good and trade secrets. Prestige would have depended so much on maintaining a poker face and somehow managing to say the right thing. So basically, a high school with more jewels. Centuries ago, someone must have had a perfect moment. “Here I am, so fashionable, so popular, in the most important place with the most important people. DANG, I look good. O how awesome it is to be me. Palace life 4EVA.” Then they died. It was a melancholy ruin in some ways. We had trouble believing that we, mere peasants, were allowed to walk on these anointed tiles. There was no furniture, and considering how much wear and tear, graffiti and litter and vandalism we saw, it was easy to imagine that any prior furnishings had either been sold off or come to a rough end. How the mighty have fallen. Hoi polloi had infiltrated the keep, with our Space Age phones, GPS, antibiotics, and all the rest. We used the public restrooms and I had a good laugh about that. I’m peeing in a palace! And this plumbing is better than anything yon vanished nobility ever knew or imagined. Can’t we have both? Can’t we have modern technological progress and live surrounded by staggering beauty?
We wound up the day feeling sated. We had eaten well and drunk enough to quench the endlessly thirsting eye. Better to quit while we were ahead. My sore toe was “bothering” me again (and six weeks later, it would continue to hurt every time it got wet). We took the bus back to camp and made a big dinner on our wonky new stove. Just as we were finishing our meal, an older couple approached us and asked, “English?” In all the travel we have ever done, nobody has ever guessed we were anything other than Americans. Usually this was due to body mass index. We’re leaner these days but everyone can still tell. This time, it was our equipment. The gentleman said he had noticed the REI logo on our tent. This couple was traveling across Spain via bicycle. My husband had noticed their bike trailer and their camping table, which the man admitted he had customized to fit. He turned out to be a mechanical engineer. This profession seems to produce more than its share of dedicated travelers, perhaps due to their can-do troubleshooting perspective as much as their level of disposable income. Note that many of the top polyglots publishing today are engineers by trade as well. We talked with this nice couple for over an hour. They were Swiss and they had a bit of a rebellious streak. Much of Europe has really interesting public use laws allowing people to camp more or less anywhere they wish, even on private property, although it’s considered good form to ask nicely. This man seemed to get a kick out of setting up camp anywhere that was convenient and just keeping a low profile. We told the Swiss couple about the 65-year-old Americans we had met who walked from Egypt to Spain. They looked at each other significantly. They didn’t say anything, but we figured later that they might well have been the same age or older. Everywhere we have gone, we have met older people who are fitter, doing more extreme travel challenges, and exhibiting much stronger language skills. (We met one other couple with a bike trailer, in La Línea. They were young Russians with a toddler in diapers). We went to bed in our little yellow tent, one we now realized was a flag announcing our nation of origin. It had been a perfect day. Wandering the streets as urchins one day, posing as courtiers the next, trading gossip in the modern walled city of our camping. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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