The Rain in Spain

By a stroke of luck and good friendship, it somehow worked out that two of my best friends were able to come to Sevilla to visit. Shelley and Renée left husbands, children and jobs behind for week to come and live the lavish lifestyle of a Spaniard with me (each of them for the second time).

They came over Semana Santa 2012 because I had the entire week off. Unfortunately, Iberia (the main airline in Spain) also decided to take several days off to strike, one being my faithful friends' very day of travel to Spain. The strike was strategically planned for Semana Santa so it would affect the maximum amount of travelers, thereby making their cause more widely known. For Renée and Shelley, it meant their flights from Minneapolis and Green Bay to Chicago went as planned, but the flight out of Chicago never left (although they blamed it on mechanical problems, according to the Iberia website, there were strikes). In any case, Shelley emailed to say that their flight hadn't left Chicago and they were spending the night there. The plan was to get up early and be at the Chicago airport at 7 to try to get placed on a new flight. Believe it or not, after lots of stress and waiting in line they did get on the flight the next day. But the flight plan left them with a LONG layover in Madrid before getting to Sevilla: arriving at 8 AM and leaving for Sevilla at 10:45 PM! The plan was as follows:

Okay here are our flight details:
- Chicago to philly flight #AA2296
- philly to Madrid flight #us airways  740 arrives in Madrid at 8:25am on 4/1
- Madrid to Seville flight # 102 departs Madrid at 10:45pm arrives Seville at 11:55pm.  We will try to get on an earlier flight or take the train.  Right now all earlier flights out of Madrid are fully booked is what we've been told.   We'll call when in Madrid to update you.  Espana here we come!

After having convinced myself their trip would be called off, I was ecstatic to hear this news. They ended up just taking a train to Sevilla from Madrid, as it was the fastest way there (and they had already been traveling two days). I picked them up at the main train station and we hitched a ride on the C1 city bus to my piso.

After getting to my apartment and settling a little we decided to try and find a place to eat. It was still early, so there wasn't much in the way of options. We managed to find a restaurant not too close from my place on Calle Evangelista that seemed promising. I asked inside if they had food available and explaining that my friends had just arrived from the US and were hungry. They said they could find some options for us. When we sat outside and asked the waiter for this food, he was unsure that it would be available. I want to say it was about 6 PM. I knew we would run into trouble at this time of day, but we did end up getting some sandwiches at least. After that we walked a few blocks away to a pastelería on San Jacinto. Here we got an assortment of three desserts to go. We took them back to my piso and devoured them.

I think Shelley and Renée went to sleep shortly after, or tried to at least. You see, there were good things and bad things about my room in Sevilla. The good thing was the black-out blind. That thing made it so dark in the room you could sleep for days and never realize the sun had even come out. Then there were the bad things. Soon after they shut the bedroom door I heard the lights go on and 'where did he go?' I knew what was going on. It was the same thing I dealt with on a nightly basis in my room: the mosquitoes.

It was a night ritual to kill the mosquitoes in the room before going to bed. If you didn't, you wouldn't sleep. You see, these were not ordinary mosquitoes. These were large, slow-moving, blood-sucking Spanish (or possibly African) mosquitoes. They would buzz in your ear all night long and feast on you while you slept. You could try to ignore them, but they were persistent and relentless. And so, the routine went that I would crawl into bed, turn off the light and wait for the hear the buzz in my ear (it usually took a minute, two tops). Then I would turn on the light and watch them fly to a safe place on the wall. I would then pull out my weapon: a roll of brown paper wrapping paper. If I missed them, I'd follow them to the next spot and try again. Often getting a good whacking angle involved standing on the bed, desk or dresser. And actually hitting them often took several tries. Sometimes they would disappear, so I'd have to turn off the light and crawl back into the covers to lure them out again. A few nights I'd be almost in tears struggling to get them. Sometimes I'd fall into bed, calm and relaxed thinking I could finally get a good night's sleep, only to hear the familiar sound in my ear.

This wasn't a problem for me only. I talked to Spaniards who told me I just needed a special spray or candle, or to eat more garlic to fend off the mosquitoes. None of these seemed to help. The only thing I could do was plan to go mosquito hunting before getting a good night's sleep.

So when I heard the noises coming from my room when Shelley and Renée stayed over, I knew what was going on. And when they had completed that mission and were ready to lie down again, they closed the door and shut off the light. Then I heard laughter and 'geeze'. That would be the other, slightly less bothersome nuisance in my room at that time: my neighbor had a terrible cold. His loud, juicy hacking could easily be heard in the room below. It was loud enough to wake me up at night. They were lucky to experience them both their very first night.

Once they did fall asleep they were impossible to get up. Like I said, the room is so dark, you have no idea the sun came up. That, the jet lag and the fact that they hadn't slept in in ages since they have young kids, made them sleep for hours and hours.

We still managed to see a few things that day. I took them to Alcalá de Guadaíra and to the Plaza de España in Sevilla (where they had both been with me before, about a decade earlier).

Shelley at the same spot, different angle (2001)

Summer 2002

Here we are again! 2012

And in Alcalá 2012:

We also took a day trip to Córdoba:

We have two almost identical photos of this bridge.
On the other side: the site of the Feria.

I distinctly remember walking across this bridge playing a 'game' of conversation. We were mumbling a fast conversation and still somehow understood what we were saying. I wasn't sure if it was because we were that good at English, or knew each other well enough to know what we were saying, even when we couldn't really make out the words.

The Mesquita

Shelley in front of the Immaculate Conception statue.

And my Alcalá/Feria/English student friends took us on a short tour of Sevilla:

Learning about the 'Setas'.

Shelley always got mistaken for the Spanish speaker among the three of us.

Despite the rocky start, we still had a good amount of time together. We had tostadas and tapas. Shelley had Spanish coffee (but not to go. We tried to find some one morning, but ended up having to stay at the cafe to enjoy it because there was no 'para llevar' option). But although it was Semana Santa, we didn't go out to see any Pasos (mostly because there weren't any: it rained almost all week so few pasos went out!). We did catch a glimpse of a nazareno though:

Nazarenos in the white outfits.

The night before they left we ordered pizza from a good place on Calle San Jacinto. We walked the 10 minutes to go pick it up and walked back.

The pizza place during closed hours.

Open 2 PM-4PM and 9 PM-12 PM. Closed Mondays completely and Tuesdays at lunch.

Then I called a taxi to be at my piso to pick them up very early at 4 or 5 AM. I helped them with their suitcases and made sure the taxi driver knew they were going to the airport. And they were off. As they drove away I teared up, as usual. But we'll all be back in the Plaza de España again one day.

And the view of the Puente San Telmo from the Triana bridge as a parting gift: