I have a new city crush - Seville.
The high speed train from Madrid to Seville, or Sevilla as they refer to it here, whisks you through the Castilian high plains and mountains. The scenery seems familiar because it's from Clint Eastwood "spaghetti" westerns; vast sparse golden dry grasslands interrupted with staccato stands of dense green olive trees. Even at a very pleasant 70 degrees it feels like a hot place.
The plains we see now mostly support fully cultivated landscape; intense agriculture of wheat and olive groves and as you get further south, orange groves and sunflowers. The fields of corn we expect after traveling the US don't exist here, and it appears that's the result of an animal husbandry system not centered around feedlot beef and chicken. Animals are grazed here. Beef and chicken which sit at the center of US food production, take a back seat to pork in Spain for the famous Serrano ham. Red meat is rarer and when it appears, is featured in lamb and goat even though beef and chicken do appear in the international-centric restaurants.
This makes eating a challenge for my all-American travelling partner for whom all these foods are strange. We get off the beaten tourist paths to explore, but return to the mainstream once it's time for fortification. She humors me with expeditions, goads me into adventurous eating, then reacts with revulsion as she watches the foreign repast. "I can't believe you ate that. That's disgusting."
Trekking Sevilla
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| A great Sevilla trek blends tourism with a romantic sunset and a panoramic stroll through local nightlife |
After Madrid, Sevilla does feel a little gone to seed. It initially does not feel as urbane and clean. This may have been due to the bus stop=seedy neighborhood equation, because there it was - a bus station. I realized that this was because my first stroll took us right up to and alongside the local bus station. Here, like in America, a bus station seems to carry the worst karma and vibe like; "you've arrived!... at the bottom." This striking analogue to the US public transportation echelons; planes first, then trains (which are a close second here, maybe even first) and then buses.
Bus station detritus aside, Sevilla turns out as a safe place to wander. While the twists and turns make it easy to get lost, almost nothing dead ends, so you can make a wrong turn, keep walking without having to double back, and come out close to where you were heading anyway.
We set out to something familiar to eat, so went to the local Mercado along the river between bus station and two main bridges. Nestled up against the corner of the bridge, in a window-walled enclosure sits the local mercado. Unlike Madrid's Plaza Mayor mercado, Sevilla's is understandably smaller: essentially a collection of Tapas vendors.
