Sevilla!!

Well it is back to the sea for the MV Explorer!  We were supposed to leave at 8:00pm tonight but the SAS sponsored trip from Barcelona had airline trouble so they weren’t able to get here until 10:30pm which delayed our departure to 11:00pm, but we are now officially back at sea.  It is kind of weird to feel the rocking sensation again after being on land for 4 days.

Anyway, Spain was absolutely AMAZING!!  The people here were so great and I can easily see how everyone comes here to study for a full semester.  My trip went all over Andalucía (Southern Spain) and I’m going to post city by city because I’m pretty sure I would exceed our email limit if I tried to post it all at once!  I know how much you probably love my marathon postings…

So we started off at 8:00am on Thursday and headed off the ship for Sevilla, the capital of Andalucía.  It was about a 1.5 hour bus ride to get there, but it was good to have some naptime after my long day before.  Once we were in the city a tour guide got on our bus and told us a little about the city and some of the buildings as we drove into the center.  Then we all got off the bus and walked to the royal palace.  It was incredibly beautiful and we learned all about how unique it is because it has Islamic, Jewish, and Christian influence in the decorations (We learned over the rest of the trip that this was not unique to this palace alone, but it is unique to Andalucía because of its history).  Then we went to La Catedral de Sevilla which is the 3rd largest cathedral in the world (the largest one with gothic architecture) and it was absolutely amazing inside.  It was huge and the altar was like nothing I had ever seen before.  We also saw the tomb of Christopher Columbus here.  We had our tour guide throughout all of these locations which was really helpful because otherwise I would have had no idea what I was looking at or any of the history behind it.

For lunch we went to a restaurant called Hosteria del Laurel.  It was definitely my favorite meal of the trip!  There were bottles of wine on the table for everyone to share (a really delicious Spanish syrah) and then the food just kept on coming.  There were tapas of jamón, asparagus, mushrooms, tortilla hispañola, and calamari.  We were all pretty full after that but then they brought out lunch dishes of pork and chicken and then slices of ice cream cake for dessert.  It was sooooo good and everyone left feeling like they would explode!

After lunch the tour guide showed us around the old Jewish area.  It was more of a living area with the cute narrow streets and tall buildings.  The tour guide also told us cute stories about old Spain like how women used to have to be separated from the men and they would use their fans to send message to the men.  Then we had about 20 min of free time to look around the nearby shops.  I wish we would have had more time to wander around but there was so much to see that we just couldn’t.

We went back to the bus to have a panoramic bus tour of the rest of the city.  We saw a lot of pavilions and buildings from the 1992 world expo that was held in Sevilla.  It was interesting to see the more modern looking buildings mixed in with the classic looking Spanish buildings.  Apparently 70% of the expo buildings have been destroyed so I can’t imagine what it must have looked like then.  The bus ride ended at the Spanish Square where we all got off and took pictures just for a few minutes because it is located in a very random part of town.  It is just a big fountain with a semi-circle shaped building around it.  Apparently the semi-circle faces toward South America and represents Spain’s welcoming arms for them.  It is also featured in the movies Lawrence of Arabia and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones…haha.  We were all exhausted after a full day of touring so we loaded up the bus and headed for our next city: Córdoba!