sevilla: the forgotten posts.

okay, so! there were posts that i did on my private journal that never made it to this journal, and now, a year and a half later, they've been added. they are beneath this post, and i will provide links below.

this post will also serve as the divider between my spain 2010 trip and my spain 2011 trip. :)

sevilla in three parts:
uno
dos
tres

sevilla.

i could live in sevilla. and i would love to live in triana specifically. it's such an amazing little neighborhood. it's so quiet and unassuming and tiny. the food is delicious and inexpensive (unless you eat along the river) and the people are really nice. it's just a lot of families and no one harasses you or is loud. all of sevilla seems to be like that, really. i mean, i've had some guys yell "guapa!" or wink at me and say "holaaa" but it's not at all the same feeling i had in madrid walking alone. the air smells different here. it's the fish and salt and dampness of the river and the flowers that are everywhere and the orange trees and the food always cooking somewhere. in the alleys it smells like homecooked spanish food and laundry detergent and the combination makes me miss flor, my señora in madrid. there are sevilla fc and real betis flags everywhere, everywhere. yesterday morning i was walking toward the river to get to sevilla proper and i was in a tiny alley and all of a sudden, i hear camarón from an open window, the sound so pure and loud that if i hadn't recognized his voice immediately, i would have thought it was live. and today when i was meandering around el barrio santa cruz, i rounded una esquina and i hear josé mercé singing "aire" and oh my heart. i followed the sound to the shop that owned it and bought things from there simply because they were playing grandes éxitos. and then walking across the bridge to get back to triana just now, i watched a few boys jump from the bridge down into the river in just. astonishment, really. at their brazenness and their lack of fear of... well, anything. and then as i walked away, i hear one of the boys start singing flamenco from the water! palmas y todo. and his voice was really amazing. i stood and watched him and he knew he had an audience so he was showing off. and he ended it with an "olé!" i couldn't help but laugh. it was so bloody endearing. sevillanos.

andalucían hearts unearthing old sorrows.

did the wind sweep you off your feet.

i have to write before i go to sleep because then i'm going to be up and going to madrid and once i get into madrid, everything i want to say tonight will be gone. tonight, a lot of things finally fell into place for me. i understand why people travel. i understand what it means to really fall in love with a city. i understand how it's a longing different than any other in the world. i've had to learn to say goodbye to something i love. it's so painful. it's painful to be sitting in this room in this city and knowing that it's my last night here, that the city is just out there and i'm in here and... and tomorrow it will go on without me, like it has for thousands of years before i ever came. because i've only been here for five days and that isn't anything in the grand scheme of things, it's just a grain of sand on a beach, really. sevilla is why i was meant to come to spain, i think. even after everything i've experienced in madrid, all the people i've met and seen, sevilla is what has stirred me. andalucía in general, but sevilla. i was nervous about coming because i'd talked to a few people in madrid and they'd all said that sevilla isn't as great as it seemed, that spending a week there is the perfect amount of time because after that, you've seen everything. well let me tell you: i completely disagree. i could make you a list right now of at least ten things i want to do. ten things that make me want to miss my bus back to madrid tomorrow so i could start working on that list. things i want to re-visit. things i want to re-visit everyday of my life. i can't believe people live here. that they have this city everyday. there is so much history and presence and weight and so many stories and so much... duende. yeah. that's the only word i can come up with. there is so much duende in this city that it's tangible. there's a spirit in sevilla. it kept hitting me all day, just little moments that reminded me of that. there's a mood here and it fits perfectly in my heart.

alhambra.

The Alhambra (Arabic: الْحَمْرَاء‎, Al-Ḥamrā' , literally "the red one"), the complete form of which was Calat Alhambra (الْقَلْعَةُ ٱلْحَمْرَاءُ, Al-Qal'at al-Ḥamrā' , "the red fortress"), is a palace and fortress complex constructed during the mid 14th century by the Moorish rulers of the Emirate of Granada in Al-Andalus, occupying the top of the hill of the Assabica on the southeastern border of the city of Granada, now in the autonomous community of Andalusia, Spain.
The Alhambra's Moorish palaces were built for the last Muslim Emirs in Spain and its court, of the Nasrid dynasty. After the Reconquista by the Los Reyes Católicos ("The Catholic Monarchs") in 1492 some portions were used by the Christian rulers. The Palace of Charles V, built by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor in 1527, was inserted in the Alhambra within the Nasrid fortifications. After being allowed to fall into disrepair for centuries, the Alhambra was "discovered" in the 19th century by European scholars and travelers, with restorations commencing. It is now one of Spain's major tourist attractions, exhibiting the country's most significant and well known Islamic architecture, together with 16th-century and later Christian building and garden interventions. The Alhambra is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

granada, day one.

i'm sitting in the bus station in granada with a little over an hour to spare, and so i finally have the chance to sit down and write out what i've experienced in the last couple of days.

it's funny when something that you've had a feeling about, something that you intuit strongly for no real reason, is actually reality. andalucía is everything i hoped it would be. everything and more, really. we left madrid at 8am after a night of an hour of sleep and took a bus for six hours down to granada. we slept for the first couple of hours and woke up at the first stop which was most certainly in andalucía already, you could tell the second you stepped off the bus. then when we got back on the road... god. i was panicking a bit all the while because i knew i would never be able to capture it in precise words. we got back out onto the road and the landscape was just. like nothing i've ever seen before. there were mountains in the distance and we were in them a bit, really, these tiny tiny roads on twisted, desert-looking hills and everything just looked untamed and untouched and wild. it looked so wild. in a way i could only ever imagine andalucía being. i put my ever-increasing flamenco playlist on my ipod and just stared and almost immediately started crying. i cannot explain what it looked like outside my window, nor can i explain how i felt about it. my immediate, half-kidding thought was "god, i can see why jesús navas has panic attacks when he leaves." the trees here are so different than any i've seen before. the sun is hot in a way i never imagined. there are lines and rows and rows of olive trees everywhere you looked and god, the buildings. just these ruins of buildings, nearly ancient ones, just out in fields, stubbornly and proudly standing. it was beyond beautiful and beyond perfect and i just had this overwhelming feeling of the importance of the moment in my life, the shift in it, the change. immediately. and as soon as we entered the province of granada i saw a grey-and-white dappled horse in a field and it's just... what better introduction to granada could you get?

SO MUCH I AM SO SORRY.

wow i am so sorry about not updating this thing more! i really have meant to, i just don`t know if anyone is reading anymore so im not very motivated? haha. (also sorry about my punctuation. im on a spanish keyboard and they drive me insane because i cant quite figure them out.)

okay this is gonna be a huge post so sorry in advance. and like before, please click on the pictures to see them full sized! i cant figure out how to just have them be full sized on blogspot so thats fun. and uploading to facebook takes a super long time. i will get them all on there eventually but for right now, this is as good as i can do.