Sevilla

So now I am settled into my cute little studio apartment in a very pleasant neighborhood.  The apartment has the strangest layout I have ever seen in one regard.  It is one long room with the bed on the right, then a desk, sofa and dining room.  The kitchen is opposite (to the left) of the dining room, and opposite the bed is ... the shower with a glass door.  Not a lot of privacy.  Oh well, it has everything I need.

On Sunday I finally went for a walk in the daylight but the streets were empty.  Everything is closed on Sundays here except bars and tourist shops.  I meandered across town ending at the futbol stadium and bought a ticket for tonight's game against Malaga.  Then I walked back home - a walk of about forty five minutes.  The game was at 9 so I decided to take a bus.  You may not know that football fans all wear scarves in their team colors.  I went to the bus stop that I thought was right and a man was there wearing his scarf.  I was pretty sure then, but I asked him anyway if this was the bus to the stadium.  He looked at me like I was an idiot and just pointed to his scarf.  Of course.

My seat was on the center line but pretty high up.  Good view of the game.  I'm not sure why they bother having refs on the field.  Every fan in my section was able to call the game.  They kept correcting the ref when he was wrong and making the calls before he could.  I think they were helping the coaches, too.  I couldn't understand everything but I heard the words puta and cabron a lot.  Fortunately, Sevilla won 2 - 0 so the ref didn't need too much help and the fans went home happy.

Classes started on Monday and they put me in a high intermediate level.  They assume I know all the conjugations and now we are working on the subtleties of usage.  I did learn all of the conjugations, but that is not to say that I know them.  I'm doing a lot of reviewing at home.  It is a very pleasant fifteen minute walk to school from my apartment and school starts at the civilized hour of 9:15.  That, by the way, is very early in Seville.  No one is out then except school children.  Stores don't open until 10 or 11.

The school has a different cultural activity every afternoon.  On Monday I took an orientation walk around the old part of the city.  The highlight of Seville is the Cathedral - the third largest in the world after St. Peters and St. Pauls.  I haven't been able to bring myself to go see another cathedral yet.  Maybe next week.



There is, of course, a Juderia - a Jewish quarter - and the guide told us once again how everyone used to get along.  Then he did mention Seville had the first anti-Jewish riot in Spain where they killed 4,000 and the first auto da fe in the Inquisition where they burned six Jews at the stake.  The tour was all in Spanish, so while I can understand it all, I couldn't take on the guide even if I wanted to.

On Tuesday I took the tour of the Alcazar which was a Moorish fortress turned into a Christian palace.  It was fabulous.  I knew the Alhambra in Granada would be incredible, but I wasn't expecting it at the Alcazar.  Those Moors were great builders.  By the way, in modern Spanish, you say Moslems; Moors is a non-pc term.





The activities on Wednesday and Thursday didn't interest me, so I went for walks on my own.  And I've got a lot of Spanish to study.

Pueblos blancos

I ended up leaving Granada a day early because I wanted to see Ronda and the white villages, and the only day I could arrange a tour was on Saturday.  So after my long day of travel on Wednesday, I had an unnecessarily long one again on Friday.  One of those silly travel problems.  I couldn't buy a train ticket online because you must print it out - you cannot print it at the station - and I had no printer.  I couldn't buy a bus ticket online because they only acceot Spanish credit cards.  So I just went to the bus station at 4 and ... the 4:30 bus was sold out.  I backtracked to the train station and got a ticket for 5:30, but had over an hour wait and the train took a little later than its scheduled three hours.  With the taxi ride to my apartment in Seville, this simple three hour trip took over six hours.  Ah, travel.

It turns out that my apartment is just off the Alameda de Hercules.  An alameda is a tree lined street, but this one is more like a concrete park six blocks long and a block wide.  And by the time I put down my suitcase and went out for a walk at 10 PM, I was just in time for dinner.  All of the restaurants and bars on the Alameda were hopping.  I took this picture a week later when I returned from Cordoba in daylight.

The next morning when I met the driver/guide, it turned out that there were four of us - besides me, a family of three that included fairly large parents and a skinny college girl.  Our vehicle was a teeny tiny European car and since I was alone (and first to be picked up) I got the front seat and the three of them squeezed in the back.  Not the best arrangements for them.

From the guidebooks I understood that white houses hung off the side of the mountain.  Not at all.  The villages are more like Swiss villages nestled at the foot of mountains, but all of the houses are white.  It is beautiful rolling countryside, and then every so often we would come to a pueblo blanco.  The first was Zahara.  But first we stopped at a random castle left over from the war with the Moors.

Zahara from a distance

Zahara up close

Zahara is very small with only a few thousand inhabitants, most of whom are elderly.  The streets are all steep and there are few services - no schools or hospital.  It reminded me of Venice:  absolutely beautiful but impossible to live there.

The guidebooks also said the roads were narrow and winding.  That was another understatement.  Our guide was not a very good guide, but he was an excellent driver, taking us on roads that I could never drive on with simply incredible views.  Hard to tell from the picture, but this is a one lane road with switchback all the way up the mountain, and of course there is two way traffic, but not a lot of it.  There were several bicyclists too.  What a great road for biking and what beautiful views.

After lunch in another pueblo blanco, we went to Ronda, a city built on two sides of a giant gorge.  Needless to say, the Romans got there first and built a bridge.  In the 1600, the Spanish built a bridge across a lower part, but beginning in 1751, they built the New Bridge which crosses at the high point and joins the two sides of the city.  Pretty incredible.

Our guide drove us down a ridiculously steep and twisty gravel road to see the view up.  Then we took a walking tour of the city ending on top of the bridge for the view down.  This is the view from the bottom of the twisty road and those people are walking to a starting point to climb.  The building on the left side is a hotel.

For me, the incredible thing about Ronda is that they built the city on both sides of the ravine with a New Bridge over two hundred years ago.  In our free time, I took a tour of one of the highlights of Ronda, the first bullring.  I'll never go to a bull fight, but the history was pretty interesting.

After a two hour drive back to Seville, I settled into my apartment and will start school tomorrow.

Granada

This was a loooong travel day.  I left DC at 10 at night and arrived in London at 10 in the morning with just over an hour to make my connection to Madrid.  Although the passport control line was very long, they have a special one for people with connections of an hour or less.  What a concept.  I made it to the departure terminal before they even had posted the gate assignment.  Piece of cake.  I had bought a separate ticket to Granada from Madrid with a three hour layover in case there was a problem.  I thought the price of the ticket was pretty cheap, only about $50.  But when I went to print out my boarding pass, they charged me $35 for my luggage.  Not such a deal.  I have a flight from Madrid to Fez next week on Ryanair that cost $24 for me and $35 for my suitcase.  It is a bizarre world.  Anyway, I got to Granada and into my apartment by 9:30 that night.  It was a loooong day.

The next morning I took a walking tour of the sights of central Granada.  Isabella and Ferdinand treated Granada as their home and met with Columbus here.  Obviously, the most famous site in Granada is the Alhambra, but everything else is Isabella, Ferdinand, and those incredible Christians who defeated the Moors finally in 1492 in Granada, the final holdout.  It was a big year for Ferdinand and Isabella; they helped Columbus discover the Caribbean, they ended the two century war with the Moors, and they expelled the Jews.  Go, Christians.

Ok, I'll just say this just once, now.  Every guide in Spain proudly shows off the Juderia, the Jewish quarter, of his city.  Every guide in Spain tells proudly how three religions lived side by side in peace.  I heard this the first time several years ago in Toledo, the "City of Three Religions."  It is a crock.  The Christians fought the Moors for two centuries over the entire southern half of the country before finally getting rid of them.  During that same time period, they persecuted the Jews.  The Crusaders brought the Holy War to Toledo in 1210 (yep, three religions living together in peace).  In 1391 an anti-Jewish mob killed 4,000 Jews in Seville.  A wave of violence spread across the country.  Over 2,000 Jews were murdered in Cordoba.  The first auto da fe (burning at the stake as a test of faith) took place in Seville in 1481.

I am going to enjoy my time in Andalusia (southern Spain), but the only historical sites to visit are leftovers from the Moors or massive and expensive monuments to all those santos and santas and those glorious Catholic rulers.  I'll try to keep my attitude in check and stick to my Spanish lessons.

Back to Granada.  I visited the Alhambra on my first afternoon and it is incredible.  The style is ornate yet peaceful.  I read about stalactite ceilings before I came and didn't know what they were.  They drop down to create a 3-D composition.  It is all amazing.  The rulers took it over for a few centuries and then let it go into disrepair.  (I'm not going to comment on how those Christians couldn't even maintain someone else's perfection.  Not going to do it.)  But it got restored and it is incredible.











I just can't do this justice with pictures.

Granada was a nice enough city to walk around in with narrow lanes and interesting architecture, but once I had seen the Alhambra, I was ready to move on.

Babies

The theme of this year's trip is not warm weather but babies.  First I went to Virginia and stayed with Rachel, Joe, and Baby Bobby.  Needless to say, Baby Bobby (Baby is his first name) is very cute.

 

I call this one a "selfie" not because Baby Bobby took it himself but because Baby Bobby feeds himself his own bottle with his two chubby little fists.  I just hold him.

The next week Beth went back to work and I played nanny for Baby Norah for a week, sending Beth pictures every half hour.  They do look quite similar but I think Beth would have noticed if I repeated a picture.  I won't post them all.  Needless to say, Norah (somehow Baby is not her first name - no alliteration) is very cute.

I made a family dinner one night, so Steve got a chance to double fist the two babies.

Not to leave anyone out, the day before I left, I spent a day with Haley and at one point gave her a bath.

Needless to say, Haley is very cute.















I also attended her holiday concert where she was clearly the star of the show.  She's the one in the striped shirt in the middle making sure everyone else is paying attention.

And that was the first two weeks of my winter trip.  Oh, the week I watched Norah, I took three steps out of the house to take this picture of my car.  Otherwise, I never left the house for a week.

I love my children and grandchildren, but wish they lived someplace warmer.  I may have to visit them at other times of the year.  Now finally, off to Spain.