Sevilla

For our post-marathon treat, Rosa and I hobbled our way to Seville, Spain, a destination which had been on my top ten places to go list for years. We'd planned it to be there during Semana Santa (Holy Week), which had both its delights and shortcomings. The first major shortcoming happened when we tried to book accommodation. Every hotel was booked, even the expensive ones. This is how we found ourselves in a suburb of Sevilla, called Camas (Beds). Our arrival was filled with pathetic fallacy--the skies tipped down on us as we made it from city bus to bus station having left umbrellas in London. It was late. None of the local bus drivers really knew where our hotel was. One tried, a man named Alonso who we would come to know very well in the coming hours. Rosa spoke her Spanish and he guaranteed that he would stop at our hotel, even though it wasn't on his route. We drove and drove and drove. I saw a sign for what looked like our hotel, but we both shrugged it off because Alonso was taking care of us. Half an hour later, he turned around, bus still careening forward down the road, remembered that he’d forgotten about us and cursed up a Spanish storm. This is the only reason we ended up in a Spanish man's car driving through backwaters of an Andalucian city at midnight. He offered to take us back to his house and feed us bisteca, vino tinto and cerveza. In his own words (and in spanish): 'I am not a pervert, I promise. I'm just trying to make right my mistake. You seem like nice girls and you need to get home safely.' We opted for the McDonald's drive-thru instead. From there, the week turned into a series of wine and tapas crawls, flamenco watching and spot the processions of men, women and children in eerily KKK-style robes. It rained all week so many of the processions were shortened or cancelled. But as the pictures suggest, it was quite a city to sit in and enjoy the scenery, odd people and plentiful rioja.