Sevilla

September 15-19, 2005

We stayed in Sevilla from 9/15 - 9/19 and it was a blast; we broke from the tourist thing a bit. We stayed with our friend Marc, and his roommate Aaron, who has been there since July. (So Aaron definitely knows his way around) Aaron’s girlfriend Kellyn flew in from London for the weekend as well, and the both of them speak very good Spanish. They taught us how to say a couple of key phrases, but aside from these we didn't have to work very hard to communicate because they did all the talking and ordering. We went out just about every night, because it is really cheap. You can get a beer (cervezas, mostly the brand Cruz Campo, which is the only thing they sell in a lot of places) or a tinto de verano (summer wine; red wine mixed with lemon or orange Fanta and served with ice) for one Euro, and a Tapa for two euro, a smaller portion of food, but usually enough to fill you up. And people stay out really late there, probably because they get a four hour siesta in the middle of the day (between 2-6 everything is closed so that people can all go home and take a nap, which is what siesta means). But no, we didn’t just party all the time…ok, we spent a lot of time going out, but we did other cool things.

We saw the cathedral in Sevilla which is the largest Gothic Cathedral in the world. We went to the top of the bell tower which was really cool; you could see the whole city. It was very spacious, but the architecture itself didn’t seem as impressive as the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

The five of us (Peter, Bea, Marc, Aaron and Kellyn) all went to the Museum of Contemporary Art on Sat. which is housed in what used to be a Monastery, and later turned into a tile factory. The building was pretty spread out and though it could have housed a lot of work it only had 3 galleries open. The only ones worth talking about were some paintings that were huge and hung in the chapel. They seemed to be about decay and went perfectly in the chipping walls and fading colors of the room. There was also a really cool installation of glass droplets hung from a ceiling in a prayer room or something. These two pieces were absolutely amazing in this setting, but the rest of the art was just too modern for this old serene building. Seeing the building itself was really cool too. There was also this huge half pipe in the courtyard of the monastery. Overall, this building was so cool, but the fact that is was a Museum of Contemporary Art was a little bizarre.

That basically sums up what we did in Sevilla. We saw a few cool things, hung out with Marc, Aaron and Kellyn and went out a lot.