I left for Seville Spain recently with my wife to get away from freezing and recession hit London and celebrate my wife's birthday which happens to fall on Valentine's Day. My wife booked the ticket on one of the low cost airlines and we were looking forwards to a break.
Escape?
With London moored in an economic slump it seems determined and emphatic to get over, we were weighing up our options and thinking of what we wanted for the next part of our lives. As both of us are in London from different parts of the globe, like so many others, I feel at times like a balloon which has been set free from its mooring, adrift in the sky watching the view back uncertain of where we are heading.
Where to Stay
My wife chose a little self-service hotel, the Dona Flora, which is located just up Constitution Avenue in the center of the old part of the city on a street called Amor de Dios. We walked up the alleyways of the Medina-like interior of the city and admired the ornate Seville Orange trees which lined the cobblestone squares, ripened and untouched – surely they would have been picked clean in London – and noted with interest how we were left at the cafes to sit and relax, not bullied into settling our bill quickly like in other cities. Slowly as we walked around the Bullfighting ring, The Holy Church of the Macarena, the columns of Hercules, we got a sense that this was not a city for sale or for the selling (though there is a cap-in-hand beggar peering up at the entrance of every church).
Cultural Mix
The artistic and cultural attractions in Seville are rich. The city was conquered by successive forces including Phoenicians, Etruscans, Romans, Jews, warring Moors and finally conquering Lionhearts who seized the city in the eleventh or twelfth century and engulfed the city in the cloak of Christianity and transformed its elegant Moorish columns and annexed them as the largest Cathedral in Christendom.
The legacy of that time, The Alcazar – its size and gardens immense, the flavour of the food, tapas, paella, (steeped in Arab cultures) Flamenco dance (itself a hybrid of Arab, Jewish and gypsy dancing) are legion in the 21st century for all to see. There are plenty of guidebooks about this and plenty who will take these words as fact, stay at the hotels and restaurants which are suggested in them. We were looking for something different, we were looking for a change in our own routine.
Living Art
The lamp posts and walls are plastered with many artistic slogans for gatherings or university club events or even protests and in the shop windows are displayed every type of ornate Christian relic, cupola, Christ figure, porcelain sculpture or Madonna. In certain shops there are bags specifically for girls who ride scooters and in one part of town there were display windows for weddings which were as beautiful and textured as any painting I have seen in the Tate Modern. In certain areas, in all areas, the feeling is historical and romantic and the shop windows each tell a story. Not a bad choice for a birthday, certainly one which falls on Valentine's Day as well.
As someone who has been married for almost seven years and with the recent memory of the movie Black Swan hard-wired into my brain, the beauty and tragedy of the story with its fierce passions between the naturally talented and free black swan and the hardworking and fragile but virtuous white swan imprinted in my mind, coupled with my wife clutching her copy of Committed, and talking about the relationship struggles of the Brazilian man and his American wife in Eat, Pray, Love caused me to stare at the sight on a wall in between a church and a bar where we had been sipping coffees. It was a sign which signified out trip: Cisne Negro.
Day Away?
A day away in the Port of Cadiz is a must. The cats enjoy the sun, languishing on the rocks. There are cheap flights from London, though I recommend you Rent-a-car.
