Seville trip, June 14

[jinian]

Tour day! We woke up early and got ourselves out to the pickup location in good time, though we were a little surprised to see a minibus looking for us instead of a bus bus. It was hard to fit our legs into the interseat area, but Mom thought we would be heading to a larger bus for the trip. Nope. We experimented with a variety of leg-accomodation schemes in our little bus over the course of the day.

First stop: González Byass winery, or "bodega", which apparently means here a place in which wine is aged (rather than the convenience store). These guys make the "Tío Pepe" wine sold everywhere in Spain, including the airports, and they're the last Spanish-controlled winery in Andalusia. Well, "last" implies incorrectly that there wasn't an intervening period of partial foreign control, but it is the one such winery currently active. The guide to this bit spoke nearly perfect British English and was considerate of our wish to hear the material; sadly he didn't translate the questions of the others in our party or his answers, just the std.tourspiel.

We found out a whole lot about sherry aging. The guide described "solera" as the quality of oldness to the sherry, produced by their yearly mixing of older wines, 50 years or more in some cases, with newer wines. (It's also the name of the system.) Basically, whenever they take sherry from the cask for bottling, they replace it by siphoning more from the next cask up, which is slightly younger wine. The casks are stacked 4 high, and the bottom ones in the bodega we saw had been started in the 1960s. Solera was invented in Jerez many years ago and provides the distinctive old/young flavor mix of sherry and its consistency of flavor from year to year.

They have a bodega designed by Gustave Eiffel and one known for its sherry-drinking mice, but my favorite was the one where they aged the sweet wines, with a deep musty sweet smell and row on row of large black barrels, with a high ceiling supported by pillars and small windows near the tops of the walls letting in enough light to make the cobwebs shine.



Minimal landscaping made good use of xeric plants, fragrant flowers like jasmine, and of course grapevines:



Despite taking not only my regular migraine preventative but diphenhydramine, I did drink a bit at the sherry tasting (and felt awfully sleepy for a couple of hours after). First we had a Tío Pepe wine, very dry and pleasant but not as interesting as the next. The next was medium sweet, which we later found out meant it was tailored for the English; embarrassingly unsophisticated or not, this was my favorite. Sweet but not overly so, and really interesting (she says vaguely) mix of flavors. The third was a sweet wine, turned to a dark topaz color by aging, that tasted decidedly of raisins. It wasn't bad alone, but the serving suggestion to pair it with a sticky toffee pudding like to made me gag. It really didn't go with any of the potato chips, crisp bread sticks, or cheese provided either. The guide later suggested drinking it unaccompanied after coming in from the cold.

The tour left Tío Pepe's shop a little late, so we had to rush to see the equestrian show. The horses were beautiful, glossy and muscular, and, even though it made me sad to see them as tightly reined as they were, I was very impressed with the show. The promotional claim that the horses dance is really warranted -- they did some individual prancing, goose-stepping, and turning, and some large square-dance types of figures with frequent close approaches to the other horses. Some of the horses would rear, jump, and kick on cue! Very dramatic. The one that pranced in place for ten minutes may have been the most impressive in its way. We learned after the show that the riders were all students, paying a fair amount of money to train here. I wonder what their job prospects are like outside this show.

There was a dirt zamboni brought out at half-time of the horse show: a tractor with two little tillers and a scraper behind them. Horses just defecate wherever they happen to be, and this cleared that up along with the hoofprints. We all clapped when he was done, but he didn't wave. Our illicit photo of him shows only a blur in the dim light, much like the pictures we attempted of the horses.

I knitted a little on my Seville-swifts anklet during intermission, too, which led an older lady next to me to show me her method, which wasn't exactly the Continental that I'd been aware of previously. She was fast with it, but I like my way. In trying to do what she'd showed me, I think I managed a chimeric style that didn't help at all. Oh well. (I returned to my method when the horse show was over.)

A strange collection of a feature of Andalusia we had noted on our drive to Gibraltar: Larger-than-life black bull cutouts, usually seen forming dramatic silhouettes on seemingly random hillsides, were here in an ensemble of eight or ten in the middle of a traffic roundabout.



Lunch at the Bar Santa Maria in Puerto de Santa Maria:
Mom: Mushroom omelette, Coca-cola. Eggs okay, mushrooms mystery taste of doom.
Me: Garlic shrimps, Kas limón. When they say garlic shrimps, that's what they mean, garlic and shrimps. There was also some oil, and the garlic was browned crisp and salty, so it was good, but it was yet another meal of just meat. The shrimp were found to lack the MTOD, but Mom wouldn't eat more than half of one. The Kas limón was a great lemon soda, dry and tart and fresh. I'm in citrus-lover's paradise here; none of the lemon or lime drinks has been too sweet or not acidic enough.

Boat trip to Cádiz! No narration in any language, sadly, but we did have boisterous middle-aged women shouting cheerful complaints when the swells hit, which was fun. The bay of Cádiz is immense, so we encountered a lot of ocean character on our half-hour trip across it.

Our embarcation point, Puerto de Santa Maria:



Our welcome to Cádiz by a triumphant torch-waving tentacle:



We went on a quick driving tour of Cádiz, which sadly allowed for very little photography. I got glimpses of the lovely Parque Genovés de Colón, which I think is what this photo is of:



The cathedral, built during the 17th and 18th centuries, has always been Christian, never Muslim, despite its great golden dome. The guide said that there were only 3 formerly Muslim cathedrals in all of Spain, but I wasn't fast enough to write down where they were. The Mezquita in Córdoba must be one.

We saw a couple of "Growhouse" establishments, one of which was named after Amsterdam. A quick web search seems to indicate that Spain has lax laws on drug use in general, tending to fine rather than give jail time and often not prosecute at all.

"Y claro la playa." Beaches are a big deal in Cádiz. Hordes of Spanish tourists come for a week or two in the summer, but don't stay longer because of the "terrible wind." Our guide opined that it's good that playas son iguales para no rompe la estetica (all beaches are the same, but that's good because it doesn't break the aesthetic), which made me laugh. Algeciras, which we'd passed through the previous day, is considered the border between the Atlantic & Mediterranean beaches; despite being part of one long strip, the Atlantic beaches have more extreme weather beause they're less sheltered overall.

A photo leaving Cádiz:



After an uneventful drive back to Seville, we went to TGI Friday's for dinner. My three reasons: (1) I thought it would be funny to see how it was different, (2) I wanted a better chance at passing-grade food, and (3) frankly I was not up for going anywhere I didn't already know the location and approximate nature of. They had menus in English, as well they might, though they were somewhat abbreviated compared to the stateside ones and a bit different. Mom demanded that we carry off one of the paper placemats with words in Spanish for our American food. I'd hoped she would like it -- and as it turned out, she had two big pieces of grilled chicken and a slice of pineapple that didn't have the MTOD! So she actually ate enough food, which was such a relief.
Mom: Jack Daniel's BBQ chicken, pineapple, cheese potatoes (MTOD); cookie pie (MTOD) and ice cream with hot fudge sauce.
Me: Buffalo chicken tacos with the tomatoes picked off, french fries; formerly refrozen cheesecake and formerly frozen strawberries (MTOD in some part of this dessert combination).

Bonus silly photo:

Comments

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

Ungulates r00l! (Horsies, bullz).

The food thing is just bizarre, what strange combos. I still vote for some kind of weird olive oil that gets used in desserts too?

What is the story of the tentacle?

[jinian.livejournal.com]

The MTOD has to be some kind of fat, I agree, but then it wasn't in the garlic shrimp, which were swimming in oil. It was so weird, and I haven't talked enough about how unhappy I was that I'd gotten Mom to agree to eat and then THIS happened. (At least she was happy not to have lost ground on her fuckin' diet when we got back, ugh.)

I know of no story for the tentacle.

[hattifattener]

Sherry-drinking mice!