As we were walking along one of the main shopping streets in Granada on Reyes Católicos, I walked past a store that made me do a double take. There was a stack of Spanish ham sandwiches with cheese. I told myself this would be my train snack as we headed to Sevilla.
We packed up our stuff and went to the shop right as they opened at 10 to grab sandwiches before going to the train station. I was excited to eat this later. I’m glad I bought a small container of tomato paste and olive oil as a dressing because the sandwich was a bit dry but the ham was very good.
Traveling to Sevilla went very smoothly. There was a woman at the train station with a University of Wisconsin luggage tag. I told her that we were all gophers and she said “I’m sorry about that ^_-“. Her and her husband are traveling Spain for about 3 weeks, she’s a badger but they live in Florida. It was fun swapping travel stories as we went to the museums they didn’t have a chance to go in Madrid and they went to the main castle with the conquistador armory that we chose not to go to.
The scenery wooshing past our train is very different than the landscape I’m used to seeing in Japan. Here in Spain it’s very arid and dry with tons of olive tree farms.
We walked out of the Sevilla train station and it was HOT! Temps in the upper 90s. I’d say we’ve been very lucky to have 60s in the evenings and 80s during the day which has been very comfortable. We got to the airbnb and took a siesta to wait out the heat of the day until it got a bit cooler for dinner. Around 7pm, we chose a direction to wander to find a tapas place for dinner. There was a city square with a bunch of restaurants and we just picked a random one called Casa Manolo. Dinner was fried eggplant in tempura batter with salmorejo and ham on top, grilled scallops in a green chile sauce, potato croquettes with ham and cabbage and a side of fries, and boiled potatoes with broken eggs and ham, and of course 3 pitchers of sangria. The boiled potatoes the most breakfasty thing we had on this trip, was kind of like corned beef hash.
After dinner, we got some ice cream and just wandered the city. It’s definitely much smaller than Madrid or Granada but it feels more Spanish-y? The streets are very narrow but it seems like it’s a lot more densely packed with people, or maybe we just see more tourists. Spanish culture is so different where we were walking around at 10pm at night and elementary aged kids were running around playing in the playgrounds while their parents were having full on dinner nearby. The city was just so vibrant for a Thursday night.
We found ourselves at a huge light up art installation thing called the Metropol Parasol. It was built in 2011 and apparently the world’s largest wooden structure.
My feet were getting tired and I called it for the night. We were 2 min away from the airbnb and I heard some yelling farther down the street with lots of people running past. We decided to go find out what was going on at 11pm. Apparently there is a 5mile night marathon held on the last Friday of September starting at 10pm and goes to 5am with 23,000 people running.
I couldn’t tell if this was for some sort of charity but it was really cool seeing the community get together with people of all ages running. It was such cool event to have come across just by chance that I decided to join them for a block.
