Seville trip, June 16

[jinian]

Hop-on-hop-off bus tour (the green one as opposed to the competing red one) was kind of a bust; 15 euros for an hour-long recorded tour that didn't do a good job of telling you which building it was talking about, and only a couple of stops available. It didn't help that some of the headphone ports didn't work at all. Mostly I looked around and listened to Mom's commentary on the recording. Again, the driving tour provided little opportunity for photos, but we got a nice one of the Plaza de España, the huge pavilion representing Spain in the 1929 Expo.



And, because we'd slept in, there wasn't enough time before siesta to go visit Triana, our other goal for the day. In our minds there had been a bus stop there, but that turned out not to be one of the three stops available. We returned instead to one of the plazas hidden in Santa Cruz, where Mom had liked a leather purse Friday. The purse shop was closed with no hours posted, but she did find a dish she liked in a nearby store.

And then, in the courtyard, on one of the cool tiled benches...



Mom accidentally reformatted her camera's new memory card. It didn't have everything, but it did have all our photos of the Alcázares and the Cathedral. Very sad. She tried hard not to let it bother her. (Actually I worried that she wasn't telling me about the MTOD any more because it bothered me.) Poor choice by the camera UI people: to see the amount of space you have left, you have to go to the format-card screen, and if you hit OK it deletes without confirming. I'm hoping for data recovery, though it doesn't seem too likely. [But it happened! By the ruling of hattifattener, all the pics were recovered except the few that were overwritten by later shots on the same card. YAY.]

So I tried for distraction! We came back to the shopping center near the hotel to get lunch and interweb time at VIPS, which is, invaluably, open during the siesta. It has a large menu and a cafeteria loudness, a convenience-store area with Kinder eggs and stroopwaffels and a few other things, and two terminals for a very reasonable couple of euros per hour. I finally checked my grades (2.8 in o-chem is better than I thought!) and got the addresses I needed to send postcards.

Lunch:
Mom: Sweet-and-sour chicken thing with white rice, steamed broccoli, and a few mysterious charred black lumps. The lumps tasted fine but were still unidentifiable, so she didn't eat any more of them. "Not bad" was the verdict, and there was NO MTOD.
Me: Ensalada Toscana of moist chicken bits, bacon bits, gorgonzola cheese, croutons, and mixed greens. They put tomatoes in, though they weren't on the menu, but I avoided them all right. The vinaigrette was nicely acidic and not too heavy. It felt like real meal food for the first time since I've been here. I like all the rich and fried food, but I miss fresher flavors.

Next we took the #5 bus, which I noticed that morning goes to Pta Triana, which turned out to be where we wanted to go. What we didn't know is that it's traditional in Spain for stores to close entirely for Saturday afternoons. The turned out to be a pretty traditional part of Seville. Triana is the working-class area, where the tobacco factories (think Carmen) and ceramics manufacturing (Saints Justa and Rufina) were, so we were hoping to find atmosphere and buy tiles. Neither really worked out.

But! I was a hero on our walk back! A little girl had lost her hold on the leash of her black cocker-spaniel puppy, and the puppy was running in giddy circles around her on the sidewalk. I didn't notice what was going on until Mom looked, but when I looked over too the girl's mother was coming out of a door on the same side of the street and starting to chase the puppy, who was running in wider circles that were going to intersect the street very soon. Not a good idea -- a car was coming. So I hurried across the street to get the puppy to run away from me, and managed to catch it by a leg. I gave the puppy a talking-to, and the little girl got one too, but everyone wound up unharmed. The best part? The mom called me a "caballera". Hail the heroic cowgirl.

The bridge we crossed to get back was a fairly famous one, the Barqueta bridge.



Nearby was the very pretty Plaza de Armas, formerly a train station and now a shopping center.



In the guidebook I found a bit about the main shopping district -- this was our last day in Sevilla, nobody was going to be open Sunday that wasn't Saturday, and I did not want to leave without some of the famous azulejos to bring back. So we threaded our way along with the usual number of errors and soon found where everyone in the city was: shopping! We found a great tile store and got some very pretty stuff. (I got many different geometric tiles rather than any that matched, since it's more source material for stuff I might do later. Mom got a tile set that I cleverly managed to describe as "from the grapes to the wine" in Spanish, since it showed the harvest and processing of wine grapes. Minor language triumph!) We got a candied orange, too [which I still need to try with Wim]. Also available were candied figs, sweet potatoes, and squash.

Mom had wanted to see the Alameda de Hercules since we'd arrived, so I prevailed upon her to follow through. We managed to walk there, though it was a little far, and we found... mostly a place under construction. There were two tall pillars with statues of Hercules atop them, a courtyard of packed earth with lovely tall trees, and a whole lot of stacked paving materials in a net enclosure. Sheesh, not a good day.

We went to a hotel restaurant that was just opening, the Sacrista Santa Ana, where we had the weirdest meal ever. The food was bread (MTOD) followed by a number of meaty stews that the waitstaff somehow thought we wanted to eat in order rather than simultaneously, so they would bring one, we would eat of it, and then they would take it away and bring another along with fresh plates and silverware. So weird! Did we confuse them by having Mom order everything? But the appetizer was brought out last (and wrong, but we managed to straighten that out), so something beyond us was strange. Dessert, however, was weirdly fabulous:
Mom: Chocolate soup, which was cold and I think dairy-based, served with a thin leaf of chocolate stuck into a scoop of puddinglike ice cream in the center.
Me: Citrus soup, warm except for the mandarin sorbet in the middle. Like melted sorbet of a different kind of orange, with cut-up pieces of oranges and grapefruit in it, and raspberries and red currants served on the side. Both of these were so good.

We took a taxi back to the hotel, and that was our last day in Seville. Tomorrow: a trip wrapup post. Maybe after that I'll catch up on booklogging. :)

Comments

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

By the ruling of hattifattener, all the pics were recovered

Yay!

Also, wow, the desserts sounded amazing, and my caballera puppy wrangler girl!

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Beautiful pictures again. it sucks that you lost several of them because of a bad interface. I am usually not up for trying new foods, but your dessert soup actually sounds really good.