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Seville, Spain

Started the day at our local cafe where our ritual is to perch at the cosy bar and enjoy the blackboard special for €3.50. The coffee is really good and the fresh OJ is like eating a dessert. Special cured pig legs hang above us and we enjoy the seemingly simple yet fragrant marriage of chewy toasted roll and black label Jamon with fruity soft olive oil.

We then braved a supermarket for supplies including washing powder which we later found out was a bleach booster as one of our wool tops did not take too kindly to it….. Bummer. After our housework we decided to find the tapas bar that the student told us about so we downloaded a google map wifi, then proceeded to walk several km to other side of town as it satellite mapped us. Cool!

The lay out of old town city centre Seville is lots of lanes punctuated by plaza. Plaza’s can be grand or a modest street corner and anything in between. The photo of the statue of a girl reading was in a little plaza no larger than a street corner but it was really cute. We are still enjoying and being amazed by the architecture of wrought iron little window dressings, large wooden decorative doors, some with unusual handles, and tiles of different ceramic styles adorning bottoms of window boxes, walls, or vase style atop buildings.

The lunch was really really good, and I mean really good! By the time we got there it was around 3:15pm and only 15 mins to kitchen close but we did a whirlwind lucky dip of the menu and you can see the results in the picture nom nom. Quail eggs, chicken with almond cream sauce, calamari, potato with spicy capsicum sauce and aioli, and spinach croquettes with pimento. All for €20 euro including two drinks.

We meandered back, getting brave venturing through random lanes to link up with the ‘shopping walk’ as recommended by Rick Steve – where the locals shop. It was interesting but anything I liked was too expensive, and other items whilst they look great here in context would look odd if I wore their traditional hair comes, shoulder scarfs, flamenco dresses and big flowers for my hair back home. Very stunning though. The lace drapes they have over their heads cost around €70-250 so that is out of the question. Went into a fabric shop where they had such lovely laces, velvets with beads etc. and more that I do not know name of.

Spanish timing is easy to adjust to, but a little tiring. We sleep till 9:30am like the locals, then lunch is around 1-3, then its siesta or quiet time as most of shops shut till 6pm when people start to stroll out in the streets and shop or take kids to play and dogs for walks. They drink in bars or have coffee and cakes – they then eat dinner around 10pm. Shops shut about 8.30pm, but people young to the very old still stroll and walk their dogs or drink till late-late.

People here do not seem to age so well and they certainly are not as healthy as the dutch look. I don’t know if it is the city folk and the limited open spaces or diet? Lots of smokers here and in Amsterdam compared to home.

Back to the day, after the shops and people watching we got some black sausage and choritzo for a bread roll we couldn’t finish at lunch, a couple of sweeties from a cake shop and completed our dinner with an orange before settling down for the evening after a tiring but satisfying 8km or so day.

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