Elsien's Traveblogue

Sevilla, Saturday 11th December 2010
I am just so lucky, being sent here to work .... For a start, the temperature is around 20 degrees, ten times that of London, Brussels or Paris where snow brought traffic to a standstill yesterday, I saw on the Spanish news .... It reminds me of Guangzhou, actually, where we used to sit around outside the Golden Mango in T-shirts at Christmas. It's similarly humid, a bit sweaty, but the locals all wear woolly pullovers and wintercoats ...
The place is beautiful, even the little bit I have seen of it so far – yes, I did have to do some work for two days, inside a boring building, even if it was part of the World Exhibition in Sevilla in 1992 ....
There are oranges – loads of them – on trees just on the sides on the city streets, palm trees as well and the architecture is that wonderful mixture of Moorish and Baroque that gives the city a vaguely oriental feel.
There's music, as well. I know Italians have the reputation, and yes, they do burst into arias regularly, in the street, at work, but here they start singing snatches of Andalucian songs, even on the plane. There was quite a large group of Andalucian students on my Ryan Air flight from Brussels. They were pretty noisy most of the way, in that very Spanish way: chatting very loudly and animatedly with each other – they hardly sat down. Then on the last leg of the flight, some started singing – in harmony, others joined in, clapping rhythmically, like castagnettes, quite amazing. The girl sitting in front of me kept starting these Arabic sounding tunes, she was excellent. Welcome to Seville! Here in the city I notice it too – I catch snatches of song, coming from houses, bars, just people walking along and suddenly I remember: I was here way back in the year that Franco died, a student myself, but working as a tour guide for French-Canadian students. The Quebecquois were studying Spanish in Madrid and us three tour leaders had some time off, and the atmosphere in Madrid was tense, scary even, so we hired a car and went to Andalucia. I can still see Cordoba and Granada quite clearly, but didn't remember much of Sevilla, until I heard the singing. Then I remembered that we stayed in this little pension with a courtyard full of flowers and there was singing all the time, from inside every flat around the patio .... A Proustian moment!
I had a little more time today to explore the place: on Thursday and Friday I came back to the hotel in the dark, pretty tired, with just enough energy to eat something and have a glass of Rioja before collapsing in a heap on my hotel bed, with half an eye on Spanish CNN ...
Today the weather was still beautiful, although the temperature this morning was only 18 degrees, but this afternoon it went up to 22. There was a bit of sun as well and the town is just stunning. It's lively too, before Christmas: it seems to be a day for neighbourhood brass bands to march around and collect money for charity. The ones I saw were good and seemed to play quite musical and melodious stuff, rather different from what I'm used to from oompa-bands ... There were spontaneous little street parties as well,where someone pulled out a guitar, started to play and everyone else was soon clapping and singing. The little squares were buzzing with the noise of people talking, drinking cerveza and nibbling tapas in the sun, while the children were playing. Most of the city seems to be traffic free ... What a wonderful place!