Back in Seville, we returned the car, and having explained to the agent what happened to the rear passenger-side door, signed our paperwork and caught a cab to the hotel. We stayed at a Hilton Garden Inn in a weird part of town. Brand new office parks, lots of empty lots, and nothing else. But it was a Hilton (hello points) and it was close to the airport. Our flight the next morning was well before any reasonable human would be awake…
We got a cab back into town to walk around for the day. Seville is at the top of my list of Spanish places I want to get back to. We only had half a day there and I think there’s some stuff there I should still see. Did you know there are really old churches in Seville? Of course you did. But there’s also the Museo Militar, the Plaza España, the Parque Maria Luisa, the Alcázar…
Like most of Spain, I felt really comfortable in Seville. I wanted to sit and watch, have a glass of something and absorb my surroundings. But we were on a tight schedule, so we opted to walk fast. Quantity over quality you know. We ordered the tasting menu of old Seville.
After our illness, and so many days of wonderful Spanish food, my stomach was starting to crave my usual diet. It kept whispering “pizza Troy, you want pizza. Pizza is good. You like pizza. Pizza………”
There are a lot of pizza places in Seville. I picked one called “New York Pizza”, and it happened to be in the direction we were mostly headed. In getting there we found ourselves walking through a really charming neighborhood full of shops and restaurants. We walked through a little plaza and watched a busker dance while sitting. There were dozens of people with sidewalk chalk drawing messages wishing the earth well. It was lovely.
Seville is wonderful. Maybe in this one instance Captain No Plan dropped the ball. I didn’t have quite enough time there. Two full days I think, that’s what I’d like. Here’s a little insight into me as a tourist; I don’t like tours. I’m a twitchy guy, and the pace of the ‘herd’ drives me nuts. Sometimes I want to go slower, sometimes faster. And I don’t like it when people ask stupid questions. It’s a character flaw of mine. I get irritated by people’s character flaws. So usually tours make me twitchy and irritable. But maybe in this case it’d be a good idea. There were so many places where I wanted data, or I wanted to irritate some impatient blowhard with my stupid questions.
New York Pizza is very popular. The pizza looked perfect. Huge slices, handfuls of cheese. But, the line was very, very long. Troy’s stomach was not pleased, and that guy can be sort of a jerk. So we went a couple doors down, to a place that said they made “the best pizza”. They also had gazpacho, and Troy’s stomach likes cold vegetable soup.
The pizza blew. The gazpacho was good. But the pizza was… Dammit, it’s called ‘crust’, not bread. ‘Sauce’, not a tomato. And the cheese must, I repeat MUST, be melted. DAMMIT! I have to say though, the other food was great. We ate at a table on the sidewalk under a tree. I could’ve hung out there for awhile. I did however, find myself occasionally distracted by the attractive 40-something woman next to us who spoke and laughed and coughed and smoked like she’d been doing so since Rodrigo de Jerez introduced smoking to the Spaniards in the late 15th century. Did you know that when his countrymen first saw de Jerez blow smoke from his mouth and nose they thought he was possessed by Satan and threw him in prison? And that while he was in prison smoking became very popular? Ah, humans…
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