Adios Seville

Seville was a great place for us to land after Barcelona. While Barcelona is super-cool, it is almost too cosmopolitan to really get a feel for traditional Spanish culture.  Seville is the opposite. We saw very little “modern” and much more of the conservative side of Spain. Chatting during our last night on our terrace in the Barrio Santa Cruz neighborhood of Seville, we gathered up our learnings from our two week stay…

1) ROMANCE! Seville is BY FAR the most romantic city we have visited on our trip to date! With horse drawn carriages waiting on every street corner, huge plazas lit up at night by ornate street lanterns and narrow walking streets twisting and turning around historic buildings, old town Seville almost feels like a Hollywood stage. Yve said it best … “I feel like I am on the set for The Truman Show 2.”

2) SEVILLIANS HAVE MASTERED THE ART OF OUTDOOR ROOMS. While temperatures in the summer time can get well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, people of Seville have figured out how to engineer buildings and outdoor spaces to keep cool rather than resorting to air conditioning. Buildings all have inner courtyards lushly planted to keep them cool and allow cross breezes. Public parks have grandiose fountains and plenty of trees for shade. Rooftops have awnings and more plants…there are gardens everywhere!

 

3) A CURE FOR HOMESICKNESS. As we enter the holiday season, each of us feels pangs of homesickness…but we found a partial cure….walk into Starbucks Enter Starbucks in any city and you instantly feel like you are on the south end of Mercer Island! Christmas music, your favorite flavor latte and comfy leather chairs are all there for your enjoyment. The only clue that you are in Spain is the sandwich consisting of Iberian ham on a baguette…yum! Friends who work at Starbucks Corporate, can we get that on the menu back in Washington? 😉

4) LOCALS KNOW BEST. We have never been to Seville, so other than what we had read in our guide books, we were kinda clueless. We spent the first few days floundering with what to do, wandering around but not really discovering the best the city has to offer. And then we met Julian! Julian showed us more in one day than we had discovered on our own in almost a week. We had such a good time seeing sights with him and his family that we repeated the same activities over again the next day 😉

5) WE TAKE CONNECTIVITY FOR GRANTED…NOT ANYMORE! We arrived at our apartment in Seville and quickly learned that we had a cellular internet connection…yikes! This means no surfing the web, no Instagram, no blogging! How would we survive?! ….Hence why we hung out at Starbucks 😉 Trying to do online high school when you can’t get online isn’t easy! We quickly figured out “plan b” once we had our fill of lattes (your Internet connection at Starbucks only lasts 45 minutes unless you get another coffee.) Plan B was getting a cheap room at a pension with unlimited high speed and using it as our office 😉