The Sounds of Sevilla

I remember coming home to St. Paul last summer and laying my weary head down on the pillow, trying to hide my eyes from the shades glowing in the light of the neighbors' porch light and thinking, 'It's so quiet. Do I really live in a capital city?'

Last year I lived in a 'suburb' of Sevilla and on a pedestrian street no less and there was noise at all hours of the day. There were the sounds of voices, the keyboard player, the man selling lottery tickets at 'siesta' time, delivery trucks, confused cars, not-so-confused cars, and the people in the bar near our house singing happy birthday, cheering about a soccer game and listening to live music (I will never forget the first weekend and the U2 tribute band concert. I wasn't sure how I was going to make it if that happened every weekend). Then there was the neighbor's high heels on the marble floor at 6 AM, the neighbor across the way snoring, the sound of the school kids screaming on the playground and the sound of a mother and daughter exchanging 'hola' for a minute every morning. And then there were the church bells that seemed to ring constantly on Sundays. (The video is of the lottery man at siesta time.)

This year I live in the city of Sevilla and although it's no St. Paul I think it's still quieter than Alcalá, despite the difference in population between the two. My room last year (in Alcalá) faced other pisos and a nearby bar. This year my room faces the street. In the morning, I'll hear the bread truck pull up to the panadería across the street at around 6 AM (only because I'm actually up at that time, it doesn't wake me up) and slide its door open to deliver the bread. You'll also hear the neighbor downstairs slide open what I assume is a closet several times around 7 AM.

Whereas last year we had to call to request a new bombona (gas cylinder used for hot water), this year, in the big city, the gas companies come to our street at least once a day. This is how they announce themselves:

On the weekend mornings you'll hear vans with loudspeakers driving slowly down the street (and the surrounding ones) trying to convince the 'Señora' to buy the sack of potatoes or have her 'sillas, sillones, butacas, sofas, descalzadoras' reupholstered. More recently there was the knife sharpening truck:

Parking is scarce in Sevilla. This town was just not built with cars in mind so it is common to see cars double parked in our neighborhood. There will be leagally parked cars, perpendicular to the curb, and a row of illegally, double-parked cars parallel to the curb. It often happens that a legally parked car needs to leave, but cannot due to the other cars in its way. The double-parked cars are supposed to be left in neutral so that if someone legally parked needs to leave, they just push the car or cars aside. Sometimes, though, the legally parked driver can't move all the cars in the way or is not physically capable of moving any cars at all (manually). In this situation, as you might guess, the most effective means to gain passage is for the driver of the legally parked car to lay on their horn until the driver or drivers of the double-parked car(s) come and move it (them).

A more relaxing neighborhood noise is the horse and buggy, whose trip home comes around 7 PM. You can hear the sound of the horse as it trots down the street.

And then there's the garbage people who come almost every night around 12:30 or 1 AM.

Throughout the night you'll also hear the quiet rush of cars and motorcycles as they cruise down the road at intervals. It's more background noise rather than disruptive noise. And on occasion you'll hear the hustle and bustle of the people on the street (or the drunken shouts of people going home after a night out). This is more annoying, but not that frequent.

More intermittent sounds include a nearby neighbor who plays his stereo at full blast for only a song or two and the neighbor on third floor hacking so badly that it wakes me and/or my gag reflex up (you're welcome for not recording that one).

The list is long, but I still argue that nothing compares to having a bedroom that faces the only bar in a small town that is open regular bar hours and on a regular basis. Or maybe it's just that even garbage trucks, car horns and megaphone advertisements are more tolerable than people drinking (if you aren't one of them, of course).

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:

Adventures in Bici-ing

The public biking program in Sevilla (Sevici = Sevilla + bici (bike)) is an amazing tool for getting around the city of Sevilla. And I mean 'getting around' in the 'travel from place to place' sense as well as the literal 'go around' (as opposed to 'through') the city sense. (There are no bike lanes in the city center. There are bike stations, but only regular sidewalks and tons of pedestrians. That is to say that you can pick up a bike, but you'll probably have to walk it to a street outside the center to actually use it.) Traveling by bici is faster than walking, faster than taking a city bus and, depending on the time of day, faster than the metro. Using a bici can also be more convenient than taking the metro because, with only one metro line, you are limited in destinations. With the bici you can get more places. There are 250 stations around the city and about 25,000 bikes.

The bike station locations

For just 25€ per year, you can use the bikes whenever you want, 24-7. There is a small catch though: you can only ride the bici free of charge for the first half hour. After that they charge you 50 cents for the first hour and 1€ for the second. Of course, if you park the bike at a station before the half hour is up and check out another bike (or the same one after you return it) you can keep your account charge-free. You can get to almost all locations in less than half an hour. I took a bici from past the big train station to my piso in Triana (a cross-city ride) and I still made it in less than a half hour (it was a Sunday night though, that helped).

You might be thinking, 'Wow, that sounds too good to be true!' and the truth is that you will face some challenges when using the Sevici service. First of all, you will notice that the bici lane may be painted green and have a picture of a bicyclist in it, but it is merely a suggested use for the area, really. The lane is also enticing to pedestrians, dogs, rollerbladers, small children, and people with rolling suitcases, shopping carts and strollers. There are a few reasons for this: 1. the regular sidewalk is textured. The bike lane is smooth and much more enjoyable for pushing things with wheels. 2. the bike lane is green, which I think makes it more inviting than the dull, grey sidewalk. 3. the bike lane is usually less occupied than the regular sidewalk, which makes it a perfect place to walk when you need to pass fellow pedestrians as well as a place where kids have more room to play. 4. dogs just don't know the difference. Sometimes you find it necessary to use the bell provided on each of the bicis to announce to these bike lane dwellers that they are in violation of the bici lane code of conduct. Other times you feel bad that you are on a bici in the bici lane because it is ruining the flow of pedestrian traffic when they have to move to let you go by. You encounter all sorts of people in the bike lane: those that hear or see you coming and move out of the way, those that turn around, see you, and give you a deer in headlights look, those that snatch their kids out of the way before you run them over, those that turn and look at you and keep walking and still others will yell at you for riding too fast, too close, or too much in the bici lane.

There are some places where there is hardly a sidewalk and the bike lane takes over and other places where there is such a small bike lane that you end up riding more on the sidewalk, especially if there are other bikes passing in the opposite direction. Take Calle San Fernando for example. It is a main street in the center of Sevilla, close to the University and the Catedral. It's a hotspot for tourist traffic. I have to ride a bike down it at least twice a week. Can you see the bike lane markers? They are silver and planted on the ground on the left side of the photo. Not only are they hard to see, but because the regular sidewalk is packed with restaurant outdoor seating, there is no other place to walk and you assume you are in the right place as a pedestrian. Not surprisingly, this is the area where I have the most close calls when it comes to bike crashes.

There is also a place in Triana where a tree is growing at an angle and you have to duck to pass by on a bici and another place where there are big bumps and you have to engage the brakes (if they work) and brace yourself for the bounce. The most intriguing and sometimes annoying part of the bici lane is the way it winds and curves around. Some of the corners are so sharp you have no choice but to go on the sidewalk. The Sevici bikes do not have such a sharp turning radius. Sometimes the bike path is one way on both sides of the street and sometimes both directions of bike traffic ride on the same side. This means that you might have to cross traffic (wait for stoplights) twice if you want to follow the bike path as it was designed. It's in these cases that I feel a lot like Billy from The Family Circus, taking all sorts of turns and detours to get where he's going. The obvious way to get where I want to go is to just keep going forward, but the bike lane wants me to cross the street, go up here, around there, cross the street again and finally go forward (I'm looking at you, Avenida de la República Argentina).

And then, of course, there are the normal traffic considerations of biking: cross-traffic: cars, buses and motorcycles, stoplights, stop signs and construction. But none of that can be experienced until you actually get on a bike, which can sometimes be challenging. The first step in using a bike is to find a Sevici station. Once that is done, you have to make sure there are bikes available to rent. Sometimes the bikes are there, but the station doesn't register that they are there. Sometimes there are bikes there, the station recognizes that they are there, but the system won't read your card so you can't check any of them out. Sometimes there are bikes there, but they are unusable or undesirable for a host of reasons. (The bike rider's unofficial code to warn a fellow bicyclist of a broken bike at the station is to turn the seat backwards.) Here's list of the bike issues I have encountered:

1. The chain is broke/off the gears/missing.
2. The brakes don't work.
3. The bell doesn't work.
4. The gears can't be changed.
5. The seat can't be adjusted (so you can't touch the pedals to ride it or you feel silly riding a bike with the seat all the way down).
6. The bike has no seat.
7. A pedal is missing.
8. Something is rubbing on the tire making it impossible to move much faster than your walking pace.
9. The bike has a flat tire.
10. One brake handle is missing.
11. There's too much bird poop on it.
12. The brakes are always engaged.
13. The handlebar covers are missing (meaning the exposed part is metal, making your hands colder/hotter during the ride, depending on the outside temperature)
14. The bike seat cushioning has been partially picked away.

(Side note: with so many bikes and so many people using them, you are bound to have problems, of course. And the bikes and stations are serviced on a regular basis. I have seen the bike service people more than once at a station checking the bikes for problems and loading them onto the repair truck to take them in to be fixed. One morning at the bus station, I was returning my bike and the service guy asked me if the bike I had used was OK, or if there was anything that needed to be fixed.)

And still other times you just simply can't get the bike to be released from the bike holder at the station, even though it appears to be in perfect working condition. But the worst times are when you see bikes available for check-out, but you know that you shouldn't take one because there will be nowhere to park it at the station near your house and you will end up doing laps around the neighborhood looking for a station with an empty bike slot, only to find one at a bike station further away than the one you got the bike from. For your convenience, you can look up the status of each of the bici stations online and nearby bici station statuses at the bici stations themselves. It will tell you how many bikes are available and how many parking spots are available. And if you get to the station and you find it's full, you can log in and request another 15 minutes to find a parking space so you don't get charged for going over your free half hour time limit.

There are 17 bikes available and one parking spot open.

Despite all of the challenges, I have never spent a better 25€ in my life and, in my opinion, there is no better way to get around Sevilla (unless it's raining). You get action, adventure and exercise when you use a bici in Sevilla. Also, you can see a report of where you've been and how long it took you to get there. (The 0h 0min or 0h 1min mean I got a bike, but it wasn't rideable, so I returned it right away.)  If you like action, adventure, exercise and reports, you should try bici-ing.

Memories...