Day 5: A FULL day in Sevilla (June 16)

We had grand plans of doing Nike Training in the morning, maybe even at a local gym we saw a few blocks away, but we found out that it didn't' open til 10 am on the weekends and we wanted to get to the Plaza de Espana before it got too blisteringly hot.  We got a later start then I wanted as I realized I should have thought about tickets to Sevilla's main attractions and reserved entrance times.  I decided at the last minute to book a tour to get into the Cathedral so we wouldn't have to wait in a long line later in the day.

Breakfast at the hotel was served on the rooftop deck for free, but after looking at it, we immediately left to find our own in town.  We had our usual by now, toast, OJ, and tea, and for some reason we are finding that very filling.  We walked over to the Plaza de Espana, a beautiful building built for the Ibero-American Exhibition of 1929.  We saw some flamenco dancers and more gorgeous tile that Rachel refused to be photographed in front of, no matter how fun I made it look!

We sat in the adjacent, shady Parque Maria Luisa and planned out the rest of our walk through town, which took us first past the Torre del oro (a military watchtower that we didn't go in)

and across the bridge to the "wrong side" of the Guadalquivir River of river into the Triana neighborhood. 

We wandered the market and bought some fresh cherries, nectarines, and plums to snack on (still full from our toast and tea).

Triana is famous for ceramics and we toured the interesting museum to learn more about the process of making the art and the history of it in this area of Spain.  On our way back across the bridge we walked back through the market and couldn't resist these little pastries near the exit. 
I have been so proud of the amount of Spanish Rachel and I have been speaking...doing all of our transactions and interactions with locals in Spanish (even sticking with it if they try to switch to English for us), and even keeping many of our conversations between us in Spanish for long periods of time.  So, it was with great confidence that I walked up to the woman selling pastries and asked "Qual es el mujer?" - which is wrong on many levels!  Still have some practicing to do!

Columbus' tomb

By this point we had to hurry back through town to make our 3 pm tour of the Cathedral, the third largest in the world after St. Peter's and St. Paul's.  tour guide half in English half in Spanish - fun to try to see how much we could pick up.  The tour was interesting but we so enjoy Rick Steve's take on a place that after our tour guide left us we retoured the inside with our book.  Lots of talk of Christopher Columbus who DNA tests recently proved is actually buried here.

Back when the site was a mosque and the tower a minaret, the call to prayer person had to go to the top five times a day to ring the bells, so rather than climb stairs five times a day, they built it with interior ramps and he rode up and down on a donkey.  Walking up 34 ramps was tiring but much more preferable than flights of stairs would have been.


For some reason the Royal Alcazar online ticket sales rejected my card on several attempts this morning so I thought we should go there next to buy tickets for the next morning ahead of time.  Being late in the day, there was a still a line but not too terribly long.  Once in line though we couldn't buy tickets in advance so had to go through right then.  It was another beautiful example of Moorish architecture, this one still in use by Spain's royal family.
 Our tour ended with a lovely sit in the Gardens, until we realized we needed to get to an exit quickly to make the hour-long Flamenco show we had booked this morning.  That was an interesting foursome to watch for an hour.

The show was very close to a wonderful restaurant were we sat and had tapas, our second meal of the day.  Though it was just 8:00 pm this time the restaurant was pretty full and we had to sit at the bar, which turned out great for watching food prep.  We ordered manchego cheese, a stuffed squash blossom, a zucchini wrapped vegetable dish, and a Thai rice - four tapas for the two of us.  We can't figure out if we are ordering too much or too little. We were very full but the plates are small so it doesn't seem like you are eating much and it was all still under 20 euros.

We walked back to the hotel and moved out our two beds out of the way to make two very narrow channels, each just wide enough for a push up, in which to do the Nike Training strength program.  Check!  Afterwards, we headed back out to the honeycomb structure under which we had watched the World Cup game the night before. We had discovered that you could walk across the top of it and wanted to check that out.  Though we didn't leave our hotel til 10:30 pm,  the night was busy with people eating dinner and playgrounds full of kids running around.  It was quite a lively night scene and had an enjoyable walk back to our hotel by midnight (forgoing the delicious desserts we passed along the way, still full from dinner and virtuous from our workout).