November 29th Beautiful day in Seville

Today we caught the train from Granada to Seville; it’s sort of interesting in that Granada is a dead-end destination for the train.  We backtracked on the rails for an hour to the town two stops back and then turned and went west.  It appears that Spain is building a new high speed rail bed into Granada and perhaps out of it for the future.  Anyway as I said we started west towards Seville through olive orchards that ran almost without ceasing all the way to Seville and as far as the eye can see from train on both sides.   Interestingly we saw only 2 or 3 crews harvesting them so I’d guess that those are the early ripening trees because all the trees are laden with olives.   We arrived about noon and got to our hotel very quickly, it’s located directly across the street from the Alcazar and very convenient.   Once we got unpacked we headed out on a perfectly sunny and warm day and into the ancient section of town where we spent the afternoon. 



We didn’t venture into any buildings other than a restaurant for lunch but concentrated our efforts on walking around the old town.  Once again, it is a maze of narrow streets and colorful buildings with iron balconies extending out over them and flowers blooming everywhere.  The citrus trees are heavy with ripening fruit however they are the bitter oranges used for marmalade and not really edible.   I made that mistake once on my first visit to Phoenix many years ago, at Christmas; I saw all the fruit on the trees and decided to have a fresh orange.  It was so bitter and acidic that my mouth burned for over an hour, what a total waste unless you like bitter orange marmalade.  We wanted to try a lunch at the restaurant suggested to us by Pablo the chef who owns and runs La Cuadrilla in Madrid.  That’s the restaurant in which we had the lovely Thanksgiving Day meal.




Anyway he said to find El Patio San Eloy and have lunch there so we did.  What a fun place this is, I think it must be mostly locals because it’s such an eccentric little place, they specialize in Montaditos which are little sandwiches.  They always have close to 20 different types of sandwiches on hand and you order them by the piece or in groups of 4 or 6 different varieties.  After looking at the menus we decided that we would try the sampler plate of 6 sandwiches along with sampler of tapas (we think 7), but when I got to the counter to order I saw how big the little sandwiches were and quickly changed the order to a sampler of 4 and decided to wait on the tapas until we finished first plate.  Good plan as it turns out because the 4 sandwiches were very tasty and substantial; however we wanted to try some tapas so I got two tapas as a second course.  We plan to go back and get another sampler again but with a more realistic view towards ordering next time.  


A charming trait of this restaurant is that one end is a gallery of tiled steps, sort of like an outdoor theatre, where you set your food on the step next to where you sit and eat it picnic style.  Tomorrow is supposed to be rainy so we will tour the cathedral, which is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world and third only to St Peter’s in Rome and St Paul’s in London in floor space.   Christopher Columbus is buried here so it will be our effort to close the loop on all of the main characters in the 15^th century rediscovery of the Western hemisphere.