Wednesday, April 16, 2008

School visit and Seville

Today was an interesting day, to say the least!  We started off by going for a visit to my school... the teachers were excited to finally meet my parents, and all of the English teachers (and some others too!) were eager to practice their English on them.  Afterwards we drove the rental van to Seville, stopping at the way (and only getting a little bit lost!) at some ruins just outside the city called Italica.

  Seville 005

After about an hour of walking around and sightseeing, we carried onto Seville, where the GPS proceeded to direct us down the narrowest, most awkward streets in the entire city of Seville!  Now don't get me wrong, a lot of Spanish towns are completely made up of narrow little streets... however, Seville is not one of them!  The main area where they are concentrated is the tourist area, and you do NOT under any circumstances want to drive a gigantic van around in them (and lost, no less)!  Below you can see the back of our van, and one of the streets we carefully drove down... and this was one of the widest ones!

  Seville 042

Eventually we all got pretty claustrophobic, and were afraid of scratching the rental vehicle, so we stopped and since I was the designated translator of the trip, I asked someone how to get back onto the main, wider streets!  He told me, but warned that it would get very very narrow right at the end.  Assuming that it couldn't possibly get any narrower than it already was, we continued on... boy were we wrong!  When we came to the last section of the street, we realized we could hardly move an inch in any direction, for fear of scratching the car, or worse... getting completely and utterly stuck between the two walls ahead!  We managed to get out, but only after a stressful 15 minutes of careful inching ahead, and having to pull the rearview mirrors in.  Well, that and the fact that we had an amazing driver and a great navigator in the front seats!

Unfortunately, by the time we found parking (on the other side of the city!) we were too late to see the cathedral and Giralda bell tower, so we just went to the Plaza de España (which happens to be my all-time favourite site in Seville, and maybe even in all of Spain!) 

Seville 061

Afterwards, we did a whirlwind tour of the rest of the tourist sites... by horse and carriage!  My favourite part was that I got to sit up front and talk to the driver in Spanish, then translate for the other 4 in the back (although he did speak English, so I think it was just for my benefit that he gave the tour in Spanish!)  The most interesting part was when I asked him how he came to give this kind of tour as a profession, and he told me that his grandfather had done it, his father had done it, and he had been doing it with them since he was young.  So it seems that it's something that's passed down through the generations. 

Seville 107 

Luckily, we made it back to Rota just in time for dinner at my favourite Irish Pub (it's actually called O'Grady's, but we call it Patrick's because when we first arrived in Rota, we made friends with the Irish owner, whose name is Patrick!) and happy hour!

Rota 011