Almost there!
In the next week, we will be leaving for Europe for our daughter’s wedding in Greece, a one week trip to Bulgaria (one of the few places we have not yet visited!) and our group tour to Spain.
Having written a little about our plans for the group in Madrid, we can turn out attention to Sevilla. We will travel by AVE (Alta Velocidad Española), the high speed train, and arrive in two and a half hours. The trip used to take almost eight, and it was one I did regularly when I was a student in Madrid, to visit a boyfriend in Granada.
The hotel in Sevilla is called the H10 Casa de la Plata, a new place to stay for me. We will definitely visit the small but delightful Flamenco Museum, both for its charming exhibits of clothing and memorabilia, as for its very authentic “tablao” which takes place at 5pm. The flamenco performance we will see is not a tourist performance per se, in that the women aren’t wearing what we think of as fancy or flashy flamenco dresses, but more typical clothing with women’s hair up, a brightly colored shawl with some polka dots, and a dark colored dress with a few ruffles on the bottom. But, the “palmas”(hands clapping), “tacones” (heels tapping), along with the percussive guitar and plaintive voices all make for a moving experience.
We will have time to walk through the Casco Viejo, Sevilla’s maze-like old town, and visit the Fine Arts Museum of Sevilla with our own guide Luca. During our time in Sevilla, we will take a day trip to Ronda and the white towns (so-called because the buildings are all painted white), and Granada to see the Alhambra. We will definitely sample some specialties of the region, including garlic soup, local fishes, salmorejo which is a thicker, more delicious version of gazpacho, and orange wine.
Bienvenido a España!
