Sevilla!

Sevilla is a pretty cool city.

We went to Sevilla and Cordoba two weeks ago (March 5-7) with the ISA group, and it was a great time. I’ve got to admit, I’ve been a pretty haughty/ proud study-abroader when I tell people that I’m studying in Granada. So far, I haven’t been in any city that I would rather study in. It’s small, great weather (at least theoretically), and really cheap. I was feeling this way when we pulled into Sevilla, and Sevilla almost changed my mind… almost.

Sevilla is a city of about 730,000 people… about 2.5 times as big as Granada. Although you can’t walk from one side of the city to the other, there are tons of stuff to do all of the time, and the river running through the middle puts the “Rio Darros”, in Granada, to shame.
The first night that we were there, we had free time. We ended up walking around the city for a while and found a bar in which to eat that had the craziest bar tender I have ever seen. First of all, he was a dirty son-of-a-gun that flirted like crazy with the girls in our little crew (I wasn’t the only guy in this case thanks to my good friend Jerry). Also, he brought over a little thing of incense because of Semana Santa coming in a few weeks and proceeded to bow to the incense and wail every few minutes. Needless to say, it was an interesting “dinner”. After that, we went to meet my friend, Natalie Fahrner, from Grove City who is studying in Sevilla. We met her in Plaza Nueva and went to go walk along the river when the hardest rain storm I’ve seen in Spain hit us out of the blue. We ended up stopping for churros under an overhang to wait out the storm, which didn’t happen. The rain was “sideways rain”, as Forrest Gump would say, and it did not want to stop… so we made a mad dash for our hotel, which was only a few blocks away. We got absolutely drenched, and since I only brought one pair of pants… I enjoyed some wet pants the next day as well.
On Saturday, we had the usual tour of the major historical sites such as the famous Alcazar (the royal palace) and the cathedral of Sevilla with its huge Alminar (tower) that used to be the tower for the call to prayer in the mosque. In the Alcazar, there was even a wedding going on. Apparently, it's a pretty popular place to get pictures after the wedding... I'm glad I wasn't taking the pictures because it was a miserable day. We got to climb up the Alminar, and it had 35 ramps and not stairs! Does anyone know why? Well, the Muslims were smart and realized that it would get really old to walk up and down 34 (it used to have 34 flights before the Christians built a new top to it) flights of stairs five times a day. Therefore, they built ramps so the call-to-prayer-guy could ride his horse up! Pretty clever, huh? Also, we went into the Cathedral, which is the third largest Cathedral in the world... after St. Peter's in Vatican City and the one in London. Some bones of Christopher Columbus are there as well.
That night, we met up again with Natalie and her friends from ISA Sevilla, and they showed us around town without the rain. We walked along the river for a while, and I got a chance to take some cool river shots. Enjoy!
Ok… that’s enough of this trip (we also went to Cordoba, but I didn’t take pictures because I was tired of carrying my camera around in the rain). I’ll try to get Barcelona up now.