Sevilla, Spain

When I walked into the Seville Internet Center, the Rolling Stones´ ¨Satisfaction¨ was playing. I knew my brother-in-law, Tobin, would have felt right at home. The guy who let me into the ¨gated¨ second-story site across from the Cathedral is from Michigan, and he´s lived in Sevilla for 31 years. I told him that I didn´t blame him. ¨But when it gets this hot...¨ he said, shaking his head. ¨I´m from Michigan.¨ I told him that I was from Texas, and that this temperature was normal, which sounds so much better in Spanish than in English. (Same word, different pronunciation.)

We were in Torremolinos yesterday until 12:30 p.m., which gave me plenty of time to walk down the coast to take a photo of a really cool pinwheel sculpture that I saw when we rode into the city. (Blair and Aedan decided to stay close to the hotel.) I think Corpus Christi, which is supposedly the windiest city in the U.S., should have pinwheel sculpture, too. I´ll post pictures later. I took some from every angle.)

Carly Simon is playing now. The gentleman may have left Michigan, but he didn´t leave his music behind. (I´m glad, because I really like Carly Simon. James Taylor, too. I´m still sad they broke up. I´m dating myself!)

On the way back from the pinwheel sculpture, I dashed into Super Sol, a grocery store, to look around. Spanish grocery stores fascinate me. They carry products we don´t have in the States. (Maybe at Central Market, but not the same variety.) I saw a bottle of vino tinto for 1.5 Euros. I was reminded of the year I lived in Spain and you could buy a decent bottle of red wine for 50 pesetas...about 50 cents. I strolled through the store some more, and I came across a litre of vino tinto in a box for .62 Euros or 86 cents. SCORE! I haven´t tried it yet, but if it´s drinkable, I´ll pick up more when we get to Madrid.

From the grocery store, I walked into a Chinese dollar store named Bazar Jin Bao (Ave. Manuel Mena Palma) that had everything under the sun: clothes, tools, art, plasticware, and porno films. Quite the range. I picked up some trinkets for Aedan and spent a whopping 2 Euros.

On the ride to Sevilla, Mariana and I taught our classes. We´ve almost covered all of the material in our classroom with wheels. I´m getting used to kneeling backwards on my seat facing our students, who sit in the front of the bus. So far, car sickness (bus sickness?) has not been a problem. I have a lot of faith in our driver, Ricardo, because I´m not buckled in, and I am a seat belt fanatic. Ricardo is an extremely competent, conservative driver. No hotrodding with him, thank goodness. After our drive to Madrid tomorrow, we´ll bid Ricardo a fond farewell. Emphasis on fond. He´s been great.

¨Sugar, Sugar¨ is playing now. ¨Oh, honey, honey...¨

Our lodging in Sevilla, Hotel Zenit, in the Triana neighborhood near La Iglesia San Jacinto, is lovely. It´s on the Calle Pages del Corro, number 90. Very mudejar (European/Moorish mix). Great location. I found a cute tile magnet with Sevilla´s Triana bridge to bring back to Mr. Triana, Palo Alto´s director of Facilities Management. I think he´ll like it. So many of the names of San Antonio´s citizens are on every street sign, bridge, and building here. La sangre (the blood) of Spain runs deep in our neck of the woods.

After we dropped our stuff in our rooms and freshened up a bit, Gary took us on a walking tour of Sevilla. It was hotter than Hades. Blair said that this part of the trip was to get us acclimated to San Antonio´s weather. We walked by the Torre de Oro (Tower of Gold), a Muslim defense tower, that the Spaniards used to store riches from the New World. After the group broke up, I walked into the Tourist Information Office for a list of all of the tabernas in Sevilla. (Tabernas are where locals hang out and dance Sevillanas, a form of flamenco.) From there, Blair, Steve, Aedan and I strolled around, looking for a McDonald´s to buy an inexpensive (1 Euro/$1.40) ice cream. No luck. I said, ¨Why don´t we walk in the shade?¨ One of the buildings was casting a narrow strip of shade (sombra). Steve said, ¨Ah, shade. What a great invention!¨ I must agree.

Another invention I recommend: an Irish pub. We found one called ¨Trinity¨ that is part of El Hotel de Inglaterra (Hotel of England) that boasts an altar to James Joyce in its window. (I´m still trying to convince a book club that I belong to that we need to read ¨Ulysses,¨ but I haven´t been successful so far.) The comfy seats, ice cold AC, salty peanuts and a Guinness draft were just what the doctor ordered. (Aedan had a big bottle of water. Even though she´s got an Irish moniker, she´s a wee bit young to be drinking Guinness.)

Dinner at the hotel was served at 8 p.m. Mariana and I stayed afterwards to grade all of the blogs. We stopped at 10:30 p.m. to freshen up so that we could go to a taberna, Anselmo, that Mariana had visited two years ago. Lucky for us, it´s on the same street as our hotel. Kim met us in the lobby at 10:45 p.m., and we were off. (Blair and Aedan decided to turn in. Blair said that he was going to have a t-shirt printed for me that reads TRANSNOCHERA IN TRAINING. Mariana is a transnochera...someone who can stay up all night. I´m not. I´m a need-my-sleep-nochera. However, when in Sevilla, the birthplace of flamenco, one must rise to the occasion.

We got to the taberna at 11 p.m., but it was locked up tight. We asked at a bar up the street, Las Golondrinas, what time Anselmo opened, and the bartender said, ¨Doce¨ (Twelve). I said, ¨Hijo!¨ (Son! But the translation is more like ¨Brother!¨ in English. It´s really more of a Mexican expression than a Spanish expression, but it fit the occasion.) This transnochera training is not for the faint of heart. We asked for unos tintos to pass the time. By 11:30 p.m., a line was beginning to form. (I told Mariana about a joke I´d heard earlier in the day. A woman was in line (cola), and a gentleman tapped her on the shoulder and asked, ¨Is this the line (cola)?¨And she responded, ¨No. Mas abajo.¨ (Cola also means bottom in Spanish.)

At midnight on the dot, a woman with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, dressed in orange from head to toe, appeared. She had the keys, so it was obvious that she was la dueña, the owner. She shouted, ¨Somos los mejores! Somos los mejores!¨ (We are the best! We are the best!) Sevilla´s soccer team had just won an important match, the Copa del Rey (King´s Cup) that features the country´s top 10 teams, in Madrid. (Their teams are usually trounced by Madrid´s team and/or Barcelona´s team, so it was a big night for them.) Without warning, loud, gunfire-like sounds ricocheted off of the pavement. Mariana gasped, said ¨Oh my God!¨ and ducked behind me. Since I´d spent time in Guatemala, where they launch fireworks (bombas) for every saint´s feast day....and every day is a saint´s feast day...I didn´t blink an eye. Besides, if I can survive tear gas in Oaxaca (read June 14´s entry), I can survive gunfire in Sevilla.) Meanwhile, the woman in orange was holding forth about her team´s victory. I´d really like to know what makes Spaniards´ voices so deep and inviting. My theory is that years of smoking and late nights have given Spaniards the sexiest voices on the planet. Seriously. I´d buy a CD of Spaniards talking. Maybe if I take this Transnochera training seriously, I, too, could have a voice to die for?

I started to feel like we were at Studio 54. The lady in orange, who even had an orange heart-shaped barrette in her pulled-back, jet black hair, started pointing at people to let them in. She mentioned something about reservations. Someone asked her how you got reservations if the place was just now opening. She blew them off and pointed at some others to go in. (Turns out, the chosen ones were the musicians and dancers.) Finally, at about 12:20 p.m., the rest of us were allowed in. There was a mad dash through a narrow door to get a seat. Mariana and I scored two and saved one for Kim, who was hung up in a bottleneck, which made me think of the Pamplona bottleneck Gary talked about. I was happy there weren´t any angry bulls chasing her.

After Kim sat down, Mariana got up to get us drinks at the bar. It was a good thing. After the guitarrists started playing, the lady in orange came over to ask us what we wanted to drink. ¨Tiene que pedir una copa.¨ (You have to order a drink.) I held up my now empty wine glass, and she moved over to the German college students sitting next to me. They ignored her. She wasn´t deterred. She went back to the bar and came back with a pad of paper and a pen. The message was clear: ¨Order or get out. Thirsty customers would like your seat.¨ Even though we had ¨rented¨ our seat for a glass of wine, we were ready to leave. We´d listened to three songs, but not a single person danced. We agreed if there was no dancing on the next song, we would leave. There wasn´t, so we did. Trying to make the best of my transnochera experience, I stayed up grading blogs until after 2...and I´ve paid for it all day today. I´m just not cut out for late nights. Luckily, an infusion of coffee this afternoon saved me from hitting the pavement.

Today, we´ve been running around Sevilla without pause. (It feels good to sit down and write this blog in an air-conditioned oasis.) We got up at 7, ate breakfast at 8, and were on the road by 8:45. The sites we´ve seen include El Torre de Oro, the Alcazar (oldest European palace that was built by the Moors in the seventh century and added onto by the King of Spain, Pedro, in the fifteenth century. Supposedly, this is the place Ferdinand and Isabel received Columbus upon his return from the New World. I thought the Alcazar would pale in comparison to La Alhambra, but I must say that it held its own.), the 1929 World´s Fair area (features buildings from a plethora of countries, including the U.S.), the Plaza de España that tells the story of Spain through tile, the Jewish Quarter, the Plaza de Toros de la Real Maestranza (bullring and bullfighting school...the best in the world), El Museo de Bellas Artes where we saw a beautiful exposition of paintings that feature water (also, local artists gather with their work in a park outside of the museum, which reminded me of Paris´Montmartre artists), and the Cathedral (third largest church in the world behind St. Peter´s in Rome and St. Paul´s in London...it is a Gothic masterpiece).

In the Cathedral, Blair, Aedan, Mother, Casey and I climbed the 35 ramps to the top of La Giralda, a Moorish minaret (tower) that is the symbol of Sevilla. It was built in 1198, and you are able to take in a stunning view of the entire city from the top. (It reminded me of the views from the top of the Empire State Building in New York City and Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. It also reminded me of Richard Serra´s sculptures at the Guggenheim in Bilbao. All that turning (girando) made me dizzy, much like Serra´s sculptures made me dizzy.) When we got back down, we went to see the tomb of Christopher Columbus. What a guy! Who would I have been without him? Certainly not an Spanish-French-Irish-English-German-American citizen of San Antonio, Texas, by way of Liberty, Texas, my hometown.

Tomorrow, we leave for Madrid via Cordoba and Puerto Lapice. I have a feeling that I´ll be returning to Sevilla. I hope it doesn´t take me another 25 years to make it back.