What a maroon.
Have you ever had an experience where you talk about something and then that something keeps coming up in other contexts, places, times… like a premonition of what’s to come or a hitchhiking reference that tags along to other parts of your life? It’s not deja vu but it’s… a cousin to it?
The other day I was, as I do, chatting about Bugs Bunny. So maybe it’s not SO surprising that that wascally wabbit keeps coming up on this trip. Before leaving for Seville, I grabbed a copy of Bugs and Elmer Fudd in the short, “Rabbit of Seville.” It’s not quite up to “What’s Opera, Doc?” but it’s still hilariously good.
Since then I wandered past the famed Sevilla bull fighting ring and flashed onto Bugs as a Matador (“Bully for Bugs” if you’re interested).
And just now I sat down to have lunch and was confronted with this sign.
I knew I should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.
(To be fair, the reason there’s an Avenida Kansas City here is because KC and Sevilla are sister cities… and the famed Sevillian Giralda Bell Tower is even copied in that Missouri town).
Oh, look… there’s carrot cake on the menu!
***
There are times where I fear I’ve fallen into a gamification of tourism. Actually, there’s little doubt that I’ve fallen into it but whether or not I should or should not fear that is another thing. We all have scribbled crib sheets of an area’s “must sees” or “must dos” or “must eats.” There’s a cottage industry of click-bait lists and rankings of all things great and small vying for our attention… both online and in the real world. The best movies of all time. The best hamburgers east of the Mississippi. The top 5 world’s largest tractors and/or shovels, broken down by geographical region and date of manufacture (by the way, I’ve seen probably three of those in my lifetime and expect to hit the bingo before this decade is out).
So it was that I started the morning checking things off my sightseeing “to do”s. Per my recollection of later dining here in Spain, the opposite is true – it’s a later start to the morning as well. Convenience and grocery stores near my AirBNB regularly posted “horas” that didn’t “abierto” until “9h” (9 AM). I wasn’t ridiculously early out the door from my crashed jetlag induced coma – it was probably 8:30-ish – but it was still odd to wander to a Carrefour Express or Dia and walk into the glass door as if I was a myopic pigeon slamming into a freshly washed window.
I am as guilty as the next tourist player in the game of sightsee – all too often my eyes were glued down at my phone trying to work out the GPS directional arrows leading me to my next checkpoint. And so after the third or fourth time of bumping into someone or having someone bump into me, I pulled a Luke Skywalker – I turned off my targeting computer — what was wrong? Nothing. I just needed to get my head in the moment, not looking down at my phone. While I didn’t use the force and destroy the first of many planet killing Death Stars from the Galactic Empire, I did manage to see some cool Sevllian sights.
Here for example is the Real Alcazar Palace, the Giralda Tower, and the Sevilla Cathedral (which I did briefly go inside… only the first part of it was open because a panhandler had opened a side door and was ushering tourists into it with a donation basket in front of him… I followed the crowd and felt like I was being sneaked into the big top at a traveling circus… which maybe I was).
As I was walking down the street, I looked at the cathedral’s carvings. As inside, I had my usual response to opulent religious buildings, namely “Man, they sure spent a lot of money on this place… was it Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where somebody asks Indy ‘do you seek the grail for your glory or for His?’ But I also thought about the guys carved here — you think if they posed for the carvers any of these guys got residuals? Hashtag: JusticeForStarvingCarvingArtists.
So, yes, yes… there was a checklist that was buried in my shoulder bag. And I did after the fact make checks on the things I did see… but most things were seen by wandering about and following the occasionally “i” tourism signpost. Sure, sure. I’d type something into my phone and get a rough idea of the direction I needed to go… and if I got really, really, ridiculously turned around, I’d take a few seconds to get the coordinates from my navi-computer phone… but for the most part I just… let go. And wandered.
That also meant I was disinclined to wait to go inside several places. It wasn’t so much the admission fees. It was more the people-ness of it all. Large groups lead by various upside down umbrella handles waving a different colored rag paraded about me and I just couldn’t see myself waiting in line to wander about inside the gates of the Real Alcazar Palace or the Real Maestranza bull ring (which wasn’t open yet when I went by). In my defense of the latter skip, something was going on at the bull ring and it wasn’t a bull fight – I’m not sure if you can see it in this surreptitiously framed photo but that’s a local policia setting up a sniper position for security… there were A LOT of security forces armed to the teeth milling about the entryway to the bull ring, checking badges and IDs of well-heeled (figuratively and literally) official looking people going inside. Me in my Run Kevin Run jacket and sporting a Criterion Channel t-shirt apparently didn’t past the snooty nose in the air smell test. So be it, Espana. So be it. I didn’t want to see the inside of your crummy blood and sand bull ring anyway. Actually, I did… not to see a bull fight in action, but just to see… it. The room where it happened, ya know?
So instead, I kept a wanderin’. I bounced over the bridge to Triana, the former Gypsy quarter, and now kinda funky French Seine-ian cultural and artsy and foodie vibe. I heard somebody describe this neighborhood on the west bank of the Guadalquivir River as “the soulful Sevilla.” I didn’t spend a lot of time there but I’ll certainly swing back before leaving.
The reason I wandered back over a different bridge to the other side of the river was that I wanted to see the Torre De Oro (the Tower of Gold). I thought it’d be more, ya know, yellow… goldish even. But as I was snapping this unimpressed faced selfie, I stole a tour guide’s whispered explanation. “It’s not because it’s made of gold, although there are some gilded accents at the top,” he said. “It’s because of all the taxes and gold that was unloaded there from the New World.” So, ya know, it’s a monument to plundering.
I updated my mission goals for the tourism game and went on a quest to see a Rosita’s Balcony, rumored to be the inspiration for the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. Albeit when I googled that probably apocryphal tidbit, it seems like this balcony is also according to legend, what inspired the The Barber of Seville. Whatever the truth… or the legend… it is a pretty sweet balcony. I chose to ham it up for an Instagram post about not being able to find it but I felt like a bit of melodramatic flair was befitting its guidebook anecdotal backstories.
I packed a lot into the day of sights but perhaps not a lot of depth. It was less about delving deep into the nitty gritty and more about the people-watching, building viewing, walkabout-ness of Sevilla. I will look into actually going INSIDE a few of these places in the next day or so, but in the meanwhile, I’m trying to walk up an appetite for tonight’s tapas tour.
How much will I eat? Only time… and maybe this blog… will tell.