Day 55: Sunday December 4th, 2011
I slept until 12:45, showered and put itch ointment that I purchased in Barcelona on. Sexy, I know.
I had some bread and cheese and salami like meat, then went to Duplex, a restaurant in town, to meet Sylvia (a Spanish girl from Grenada) and Gerald (another guy with dreads, who was awesome and from Barcelona). I ordered a tortilla con salmorejo, which was this cheesy, potato-y, tortilla-y slice of delicious with a fun fruit like sauce.
Then we were off to the Sevilla Cathedral, to meet the rest of the group from last night (Jordan and John). Sevilla Cathedral is the 3rd largest church in Europe (and the largest by volume/area), but the largest Gothic building with the largest altarpiece in the world. It took over a century to build, finishing up in 1506, and is another UNESCO World Heritage site I can boast having seen. Inside it’s absolutely beautiful and massive with gold everywhere, and features Christopher Colombus’ tomb. He’s obviously a big deal in Spain. After exploring (I would’ve wanted to explore more but we were in a group, and I was the only one who had to pay the full rate because I was told it was free to enter by Raquel so I didn’t have my student card), we walked up the Giralda, the belltower. It was quite the trek, but featured jawdropping views of the city and absolutely worth it.
After that we saw another main attraction in Sevilla, the Plaza de Espanya, a building made for the World Fair in 1929. It has 58 different ceramic tiles surrounding the outside representing the 50 different regions and 8 different provinces of Spain. The plaza is surrounded by a mini moat you can boat around in (which seems pointless, because it’s very small), a fountain and really cool lamps, my go-to faves. It was beautiful.
We grabbed a mini sandwich and a beer for two euros at a place that advertised this deal as “Merry Beer to You,” so clearly a no-brainer.
We return to Raquel’s place for a bit, and then go out to another tapas place that featured a half hour wait, called Los Coloniales. It’s apparently a big deal in Sevilla, where all the students and young people congregate. We had almond chicken, calamari rings, and an Iberian ham plate (the famous salty ham of Spain). Everything was great. The ham was nice, but it’s so expensive you hardly get any. Iberian ham is seen as the crown jewel of Spanish cuisine and the finest ham in the world known for its delicate curing process. I don’t know.
I also tried a vinto con verano, which is wine with lemon and soda, apparently a popular Spanish drink that was quite good, even if it didn’t taste like wine at all.
Then we went to a cafe for a few beers, where a Sevillan friend of Raquel’s met us. The entire night I thought he had a speech impediment, but it turns out, the tongue + lispy way to talk is actually how people talk in Sevilla, which I found fascinating. This is a good time to mention that Europe, and Spanish in particular, just has SO MANY dialects. Yes there are a ton of languages, but under the umbrella of Spanish there are hundreds of different dialects you will find in almost every different region in Spain. This is the same for France, Italy, Germany, everywhere. It’s fucking confusing.
NEXT: More food, more palaces