Sevilla and a coach and four...

My attempt at arts-fartsy photography

There are horse and carriages everywhere!

Part of the Plaza de Espana

Blue and yellow ceramic at Plaza de Espana

Plaza de Espana

Our guide, Francisco

First Communion

If you have a beautiful courtyard, you leave your door open for everyone to admire your garden!

Small street in Sevilla

Street performer

50 euro for 45 minutes

These are column that the Moors built. They added lead between the column and the stuff above so that when an earthquake hit, the column would move but the building would not fall down. Pretty great!

Part of our 100 euro lunch

Coach and four

The bride

Our coach and 53

We are getting jaded or worn out or tired or something. Seville was gorgeous. And Mallorca. So was the Alhambra (I learned that the ‘h’ is silent if you are Spanish). So was Valencia. And Gibraltar. But we are exhausted from all the tours! And we have another today in Lisbon. At least we don’t arrive in Lisbon until 11am and leave at 6 so an all day tour can’t be THAT long!

An hour-and-a-boring-half-hour drive from Cadiz (pronounced Cad-EETH by the Spaniards) to Seville (pronounced Seh-VEE-yah because, duh!, it’s spelled Sevilla here) to see the Alcazar Palace and the local cathedral. The local cathedral is the third largest Christian church in the world after St. Peter’s in Rome and St. Paul’s in London and the largest Gothic church—but don’t ask me what exactly ‘Gothic’ means! But we had to choose between lunch and resting our feet or the cathedral. Our stomachs/feet won!

Sevilla is a beautiful city, lots of Moorish influences and lots of Spanish color, especially blue and yellow. On a sunny day, which yesterday was, those colors are spectacular! We especially loved the Plaza de España, although it may be impossible to describe (but you know I’ll try!). It’s an oval as large as four football fields (but much prettier) with 2/3 of the circumference enclosed by buildings covered with literally tons of mostly blue and yellow tiles. Lots of arches and niches. A stream meanders through and several arched bridges—also covered with blue and yellow tiles—cross the stream. The Plaza itself is paved with stones and has an immense fountain in the center. One of our group happened to be dressed in blue and yellow so the rest of the group all wanted to have photos of them by all the tile work. Because she stood out so well, we also used her to find our guide (who didn’t do a good job of letting us know where he was)! I almost lost the group once by staying back to take a photo and started to panic because we were an hour-and-a-boring-half-hour away from the ship and I hadn’t a clue how I’d get back there if I really lost the group! But I saw her yellow shirt and thus was saved from complete panic.

Lunch was delicious, the scenery gorgeous for our lunch (we were right across from the cathedral), people-watching was great. Then we got the bill. Our ‘appetizer’ that the waiter recommended was 40€!!! The bill for 2 beers and an ‘appetizer’ and a chicken dish that we split was 100€! We should have climbed the cathedral tower!

Then the best sight of all! Waiting for our group to reassemble, up comes a ‘coach and four’: a beautiful coach drawn by four matched white horses, three grooms all in white (including white three-cornered hats), and a bride and groom! EVERYTHING was black or white except for the bride’s scarlet-red bouquet. So striking! Lots of photographers, everybody ooh-ing and ah-ing. Shortly after another bride arrived in a black Mercedes with a groom covered with medals, but we all said to each other, ‘Too little, too late!’ Kind of a, ‘I’ll see your Mercedes and raise you four white horses!’

Back to the ship to rest up for our next adventure in Lisbon.

Minor misadventure: Randy’s watch battery died (he had it replaced in Tucson a week before we left!) so we’ve had to buy a cheap watch ($10) on board and hope it lasts until we can get home!