Andalucia, Spain

I love Spain. After completing our river barge cruise and before sailing on the Mediterranean, we spent 4 nights in Seville.

Seville is a beautiful city. It has an awesome cathedral and the Royal Palace is drop-dead gorgeous. Even though it was built for Catholic monarchs, most of the craftsmen who built it were Arabs and, what we call, the Moorish style is everywhere. The cathedral has a bell tower that completely encloses an ancient minaret. It's called the Giralda and climbing it provided me views of the city of Seville and the wonderful architectural features of the church's Gothic architecture. I just love a good flying buttress!

While we were in Seville we took day trips to Cordova and Granada. The highway was bordered by miles and miles of olive groves. The trees were of different varieties and different stages of maturity. The mountains in the distance were the first-named Sierra Madres. How awesome to see the ones that are the originals! They are tall and steep, not terribly unlike their New World namesakes.

On our last night in Seville, we attended a Flamenco show. The power of the dancers, the costumes, their classic postures and expressions were memorable. They say that when the first northern Europeans landed in Spain there already was Flamenco. Whether it is a product of the aboriginal tribes of the Iberian Penninsula or the heritage of itinerant Gypsies, it's a wonderful thing to behold. It makes your heart race.

As a resident of the border between Texas and Mexico, I'm familiar with the Folkloric dancers of Mexico and I could see how some of the Flamenco of Spain migrated to the regional dances of Mexico. I love putting these kind of things together. I must have been an anthropologist in a previous life.

Tapas was something we tried to try. Unfortunately, tapas are served mostly in bars and in Spain, bars are filled with cigarette smoke. Neither of us was willing to inhale poison to taste them. We did sample some at the Flamenco place and we were not terribly impressed but we think they were "tourist tapas" and not the real deal.

Everyone eats late in Spain. Dinner isn't until 9 PM or later, so most restaurants don't open until 8 PM at the earliest. Between 4 PM or so and 8 PM it's siesta time and many businesses and most restaurants are closed.

One early evening after returning from a tour we found ourselves hungry. We knew of a pizza place a few blocks from our hotel so we went there only to find it closed for siesta. There was a bar about a block away that was opened and they had a menu on a chalkboard outside. We went in.

The host was a charming Spanish fellow with a wide grin. I drew a picture of a ham and cheese sandwich on the plain, white paper table cloth and wrote "jambon y queso y pan" under it hoping I communicated it properly. He returned with a platter filled with the famous (and expensive) thinly-sliced Andalusian ham and wedges of pungent local cheese. The "pan" was crackers wrapped in cellophane. We were too starved to care. We washed it down with some local çervesa (which was quite good) and payed the exhorbitant tab of €25, knowing full well that we'd been had but cherishing the experience as a souvenir of our travels.