Kansas City's sister city

We arrived in Sevilla on January 3, ate a very late dinner in a restaurant where the lights kept turning off, and went to sleep. We spent all day January 4 in Sevilla, which was our longest stay and our busiest. That means this post will be the longest and have the most pictures. Plus, stay tuned, it has another video!


The first thing we did in Sevilla was walk to the cathedral in the center of the city. The area looked a lot like the Plaza in Kansas City (it's the whole sister-city thing; if you're related you look alike):




We sort of accidentally went to a High Mass in the Spanish cathedral, which was cool for the first fifteen minutes and then cold for the next half hour until we could leave (ha, a pun, get it? There's no heating in old cathedrals...). Then we went into the Alcazar Castle, which was built by Peter II in some century, was added onto by some other kings in other centuries, and is generally very big, expensive, impressive, and architecturally Islamic-influenced. The big plaza in the middle was one of my favorite parts:


And here is a bit of trivia I bet you didn't know. According to my friend Chris, "This image is from a video game called Hitman 2, a lot of people died here in that game." Reid's response? "If you look closely, you can see only two other people are in the picture. That's because the rest are dead. I'm actually holding a gun in my left hand, you just can't see it." As a non-video-gamer, I can't decide whether this is disturbing or amusing. But anyway.

Peter II and the other Spanish kings really liked gardens, and Alcazar Castle had the most impressive garden I'd ever seen. It even had a maze! I am short enough that I got suitably lost in the maze, but Reid was able to find his way out using his periscope-like height:


Here is a picture of the gardens from the second story of the castle:


And that's just a small portion. There were also eight million orange trees, a small herd of ducks (gaggle of ducks? Pride of ducks? Oh, wait, flock of ducks), the biggest non-predatory fish I have ever seen in my life, several gazebo shrine things, and enough bushes to encircle the Kansas City metro area.

We ate lunch at a tapas restaurant, where we had some "hamburgers" (that is, pieces of beef and slices of onion on top of fried bread) and something called "croquetas de pucheros," which kind of tasted as if they had breaded a pureed mix of mushrooms, cream cheese, cow spit, and leftover grease.

Next was the Plaza de Espana. It is gigantic. Here is a picture of a third of it:



See the ants in the picture? Those are actually people. This place was huge. Another illustration of its grandosity (warning: that is not a real word):


Then, Reid and I went to a bullfighting arena! I am quite glad that the bullfighting season doesn't start until March, because I don't like blood. Or angry animals. Here is the arena:


It's special because it is not perfectly round like most bullfighting arenas. Instead, it is an oval.

The last thing we did that day was visit the cathedral again, this time for less religious reasons. I think the cathedral kind of looks like a cruise ship:


But maybe that's just me.

This cathedral has a huge tower (originally a minaret, which is the tower from which Muslims are called to prayer; the cathedral used to be a mosque, until Christians took over everything). We climbed the 24 flights to the top (there were literally 24 landings, I am not exaggerating), and looked out over the city:


Our hostel is somewhere in there. The inside of the cathedral was gorgeous, definitely worth seeing if you ever make it to Sevilla:


We ate dinner at a restaurant two blocks away from a Spanish version of Chuck E. Cheese. There were eight children in our immediate vicinity, all of them with balloons, two of which popped during our meal. The restaurant was full inside and outside (we were outside) with at least 75 patrons, and there was one waiter and one chain-smoking drink-server. However, it was one of the best meals we had.

That night, we went to flamenco dancing. I had never seen true flamenco dancing before, and it was ridiculously amazing. I've heard the phrase "sang from his heart" before, but had never seen it truly in action until we watched the flamenco singer. The guitarist (who, incidentally, kind of looks like Adam from the library) played so fast that it sounded like three people were playing. The flamenco dancer made funny faces and could have lifted a large elephant with just her calves. Flamenco dancing is kind of like tap dancing, if tap dancing could have a two-hour-long sugar high caused by a million Pixi Stix and twelve gallons of high-fructose lemonade. Here is a picture:


And here is a video (click the play button):

They only let us video the last five minutes or so of the performance, and this video doesn't nearly do the whole thing justice. Anyway, here is the amazing flamenco dancer:

It was seriously, genuinely, literally one of the most impressive things I have ever seen. Those three people worked so hard that Reid and I were tired just watching by the time we left. So we went to bed.

The next morning, we woke up very early and caught two buses to the airport. Before we left, though, we took one last picture:

We love Kansas City. And we loved Sevilla. It was like home, in Spain, with more orange trees and no English. Also a terrible mass transit system, but you'll hear more about that in my next post. Coming next: "Barcelona: is it a lisp or an accent?"