see robertson go: Sightseeing in Seville

Since Seville on Easter Sunday was virtually lifeless, Amy and I moved from our temporary hotel to our hostel and passed the day nursing headaches and walking around our new neighborhood. It was a lazy day for the most part, catching up on sleep and getting a game plan for Monday, which included a walking tour coordinated by our hostel for 5 euro and another Rick Steves rec, a tour of the cathedral and La Giralda (pronounced more like hear-ahl-da).

The walking tour of the city was done on a whim since it seemed like the best way to get a feel for the area, but the cathedral tour was important to us because without the history that accompanies those things, it's just a big, old church with Renaissance art.

The walking tour ended up just consisting of Amy, myself, an Austalian guy and our guide, a girl from Massachusetts who has lived here for 4 years and teaches English to school children on weekdays. Coincidentally, the Australian, Trent, was an art director at Nitro in Brisbane before he burned out, quit, and took off for a year-long trip around Asia, Europe and North America. Small world. He was shocked to be on a tour with two former ad girls, and even more shocked when we asked him to grab tapas with us for dinner later.

After ending our walk, we headed for our history lesson. Being brief, the cathedral in Seville is the third largest in the world and the largest Gothic church in the world, and you know, I love me some Gothic architecture -- it's good stuff. The Giralda (the bell tower that accompanies it) was originally attached to a Moorish mosque and was used to call Muslims to prayer 5 times a day until 1401 when the Christians recaimed the city and tore down the mosque (but spared the tower and courtyard) to build the cathedral. A portion of Chirstopher Columbus is also buried in this cathedral, after first being entombed in northern Spain, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and now, Seville. He also made one last journey to the new land in Dallas, Texas a few years ago for DNA testing, in an effort to prove that Seville had (at least a portion) of the real Columbus.

We ended the day with what's become a routine of a late tapas dinner, but this time with the addition of our Australian art director. We decided to stay one more day in Seville instead of trying to rush through Madrid on Tuesday so we're waking up to a leisurely pace for one more day.