Sunday, May 28, 2006
Report from Seville
Seville, where Asela, my Cuban friend, and I arrive by plane on Monday, May 22, has complications. The day before we leave Valencia, I notice that Lonely Planet (I have photocopies of its pages covering each of my destinations folded in half-size manila envelopes) says that hotel prices in Seville are double those in other parts of Spain. Therefore our 74€ double room (78€ on weekends, reserved through the Bookings site) turns out to be centrally located in what is a backpackers' hostel that includes some rooms with private baths--but almost no furniture other than the beds, just a rudimentary bedside table. Luckily our room has three beds, so the extra one becomes a catch-all. Also luckily, we get free continental breakfast (to which I add a tangerine from the supermarket) and the room for storing backpacks has a computer with Internet connection in it, which guests are free to use. I find myself doing email before breakfast because that's the only time the computer is free.
Another complication is the fact that my envelope with the Lonely Planet pages disappears the first day; I remember taking it out of my bag in the restaurant to check the list of veggie restaurants from the Happy Cow site, but when we return to the restaurant the next day, no one knows anything about my envelope. Luckily the hotel hands out an annotated map and there's a tourist magazine in the computer room. And yet a further complication is that Seville is building a metro and therefore its main avenue and a couple of its most important plazas are all torn up.
Despite the above, we early on locate (in the old part of town, where the street layout is like Toledo's) a restaurant offering the unlikely combination of Cuban and vegetarian food, both quite good, and I find myself photographing charming patios behind lacy wrought-iron doors. And in our wanderings we run into a museum too new to be mentioned by Lonely Planet, the Museo del Baile Flamenco (Museum of Flamenco Dance), which we discover the next day offers incredibly wide-screen videos of dancers demonstrating the various types of flamenco, exhibits of costumes, too much to read, and the chance to watch a class, which has me heel-and-toeing on the other side of the glass, attempting to imitate the teacher. There I pick up a little free publication with cultural listings and learn of a flamenco performance to take place later in the week in a bank's cultural center near our hotel, to which we go that afternoon to buy (front-row) tickets.
The performance, of the Compañía Blanca del Rey, is thrilling and inspiring because Blanca del Rey, who dances alone, is pushing 60, announces her retirement at the end, but is enormously vigorous and intense. Her second dance is with the bata de cola, the gown with a train, which whizzes around as she turns, stomps, and kicks, and her third and last dance is with an enormous fringed silk shawl (black with gold embroidery and fringe, her gown black), which at the outset appears to be attached to her gown but turns out not to be and which she swooshes and twirls, at times like a toreadora, with incredible facility. A man young enough to be her son is the company's other dancer (I have read a book on flamenco that says the most authentic performances are of a dancer dancing alone), who impresses with his turns as well as his tapateado, there are two guitarrists, who at one point do marvelous solos, and three male singers whose hands clapping are another instrument. The theater is small, and sitting in the first row we are only a few feet from the performers, and quite exhilerated from their performance.
Speaking of silk shawls, I have decided to buy one to hang on the wall, but having also decided that my limit is 100€ (and I actually pay 35€ more), what I end up with is a lot more modest than Blanca del Rey's, a triangle rather than a square and half of what would be a smaller square, black with multicolored embroidery (done by hand) in colors that include the salmon color of the paint on the wall.
The two big tourist attractions in Seville are the Cathedral and the Alcázar. We get our first glimpse of the Cathedral before hours when we get there before it opens to tourists to discover a door open for those going to mass. So I can sit and gaze at the enormous hunk of sculpted solid gold, scenes from the Old and New Testaments, that is the main altarpiece while pretending to be Catholic, and I can hear the booming of the organ. I have a parochial interest in this Cathedral because it claims to be the world's largest Gothic cathedral, and for many years I lived in Upper Manhattan around the corner from another cathedral that makes that claim, the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine (Episcopal). Seville in any event wins out for impressiveness for having been constructed 500 years earlier, which gives it incredibly elaborate sacristies with gem-encrusted gold altar accessories and chapels with 15th-century sculptures. (We come back when it's open for tourists so as to have better light and to see the sacristies.) It also wins out for the Giralda, a high square tower built as part of the mosque that was destroyed to build the Cathedral, which was spared and adorned at the top with a belfry. It is easy to climb because there are 35 ramps instead of stairs, this so the caliph could ride up on his horse to call the faithful to prayer. The view of course is fabulous.
The Alcázar is a grouping of palaces based on a Muslim fortification built in the 9th century, expanded after the Christian Reconquest in the 13th century, with changes continuing into the 16th century. It is full of horseshoe arches and elaborately carved stucco, includes a room with a long rectangular pool flanked by sunken gardens, surrounded by arches. The gardens are extensive, with many fountains. Unlike the Cathedral, there is of course no way to enter before tourist hours, and although we get in line before it opens, the crowds are quite oppressive and get in the way of the view. Most of my pictures are of the upper half of the room to avoid the tourists; I find that waiting for a group to leave means only that another group will enter. (I am beginning to suffer from tourist fatigue, not being tired but being tired of being a tourist.)
We do an enormous amount of walking--south from the Cathedral to the Plaza de España, an enormous semicircular three-story structure of brick, tile, and marble constructed for the 1929 Iberian-American Espo, another day cross the Guadalquivir River on the Triana Bridge to wander in the neighborhood of that name, visiting ceramics shops, I shooting photos of church towers and flower-filled wrought-iron balconies, discovering that in the market the space above the stalls is covered with tiles in elaborate designs. By the Torre de Oro (Gold Tower), a defensive tower built by the river during the 13th century (a Muslim period), we board a boat for a one-hour cruise, not a resounding success because there are about a hundred kiddies on board, you can only hear the commentary if you stand directly in front of a speaker, and what you can see is mostly bridges. Walking by the river turns out to be more rewarding.
I am returning to train travel to get to Granada, my final destination in Spain, on Monday the 29th.
Another complication is the fact that my envelope with the Lonely Planet pages disappears the first day; I remember taking it out of my bag in the restaurant to check the list of veggie restaurants from the Happy Cow site, but when we return to the restaurant the next day, no one knows anything about my envelope. Luckily the hotel hands out an annotated map and there's a tourist magazine in the computer room. And yet a further complication is that Seville is building a metro and therefore its main avenue and a couple of its most important plazas are all torn up.
Despite the above, we early on locate (in the old part of town, where the street layout is like Toledo's) a restaurant offering the unlikely combination of Cuban and vegetarian food, both quite good, and I find myself photographing charming patios behind lacy wrought-iron doors. And in our wanderings we run into a museum too new to be mentioned by Lonely Planet, the Museo del Baile Flamenco (Museum of Flamenco Dance), which we discover the next day offers incredibly wide-screen videos of dancers demonstrating the various types of flamenco, exhibits of costumes, too much to read, and the chance to watch a class, which has me heel-and-toeing on the other side of the glass, attempting to imitate the teacher. There I pick up a little free publication with cultural listings and learn of a flamenco performance to take place later in the week in a bank's cultural center near our hotel, to which we go that afternoon to buy (front-row) tickets.
The performance, of the Compañía Blanca del Rey, is thrilling and inspiring because Blanca del Rey, who dances alone, is pushing 60, announces her retirement at the end, but is enormously vigorous and intense. Her second dance is with the bata de cola, the gown with a train, which whizzes around as she turns, stomps, and kicks, and her third and last dance is with an enormous fringed silk shawl (black with gold embroidery and fringe, her gown black), which at the outset appears to be attached to her gown but turns out not to be and which she swooshes and twirls, at times like a toreadora, with incredible facility. A man young enough to be her son is the company's other dancer (I have read a book on flamenco that says the most authentic performances are of a dancer dancing alone), who impresses with his turns as well as his tapateado, there are two guitarrists, who at one point do marvelous solos, and three male singers whose hands clapping are another instrument. The theater is small, and sitting in the first row we are only a few feet from the performers, and quite exhilerated from their performance.
Speaking of silk shawls, I have decided to buy one to hang on the wall, but having also decided that my limit is 100€ (and I actually pay 35€ more), what I end up with is a lot more modest than Blanca del Rey's, a triangle rather than a square and half of what would be a smaller square, black with multicolored embroidery (done by hand) in colors that include the salmon color of the paint on the wall.
The two big tourist attractions in Seville are the Cathedral and the Alcázar. We get our first glimpse of the Cathedral before hours when we get there before it opens to tourists to discover a door open for those going to mass. So I can sit and gaze at the enormous hunk of sculpted solid gold, scenes from the Old and New Testaments, that is the main altarpiece while pretending to be Catholic, and I can hear the booming of the organ. I have a parochial interest in this Cathedral because it claims to be the world's largest Gothic cathedral, and for many years I lived in Upper Manhattan around the corner from another cathedral that makes that claim, the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine (Episcopal). Seville in any event wins out for impressiveness for having been constructed 500 years earlier, which gives it incredibly elaborate sacristies with gem-encrusted gold altar accessories and chapels with 15th-century sculptures. (We come back when it's open for tourists so as to have better light and to see the sacristies.) It also wins out for the Giralda, a high square tower built as part of the mosque that was destroyed to build the Cathedral, which was spared and adorned at the top with a belfry. It is easy to climb because there are 35 ramps instead of stairs, this so the caliph could ride up on his horse to call the faithful to prayer. The view of course is fabulous.
The Alcázar is a grouping of palaces based on a Muslim fortification built in the 9th century, expanded after the Christian Reconquest in the 13th century, with changes continuing into the 16th century. It is full of horseshoe arches and elaborately carved stucco, includes a room with a long rectangular pool flanked by sunken gardens, surrounded by arches. The gardens are extensive, with many fountains. Unlike the Cathedral, there is of course no way to enter before tourist hours, and although we get in line before it opens, the crowds are quite oppressive and get in the way of the view. Most of my pictures are of the upper half of the room to avoid the tourists; I find that waiting for a group to leave means only that another group will enter. (I am beginning to suffer from tourist fatigue, not being tired but being tired of being a tourist.)
We do an enormous amount of walking--south from the Cathedral to the Plaza de España, an enormous semicircular three-story structure of brick, tile, and marble constructed for the 1929 Iberian-American Espo, another day cross the Guadalquivir River on the Triana Bridge to wander in the neighborhood of that name, visiting ceramics shops, I shooting photos of church towers and flower-filled wrought-iron balconies, discovering that in the market the space above the stalls is covered with tiles in elaborate designs. By the Torre de Oro (Gold Tower), a defensive tower built by the river during the 13th century (a Muslim period), we board a boat for a one-hour cruise, not a resounding success because there are about a hundred kiddies on board, you can only hear the commentary if you stand directly in front of a speaker, and what you can see is mostly bridges. Walking by the river turns out to be more rewarding.
I am returning to train travel to get to Granada, my final destination in Spain, on Monday the 29th.
# posted by Louise Lander @ 10:05 PM 
