Part 3: Sevilla

Part 3: Sevilla

As if it wasn't enough fun the first time, we took another night bus from Lisbon to Sevilla on Tuesday night. We arrived at the Sevilla Oasis Palace hostel just before 6am and luckily for us the guy working at the front desk allowed us to check in early and go lay down immediately.

The hostel was awesome. There were tons of young people traveling around Europe. We met girls from Canada, Australia, Argentina, Hungary and all over the United States. We met people traveling for 2 weeks to one boy traveling for 7 months! Suffice it to say, these people were a great source of information regarding other places to travel, transportation, hostels, and sightseeing. There was a fabulous sense of community among the people staying in the hostel and it was great to be a part of it.

We met up with four other Dartmouth kids on my program, who were also staying in the Palace hostel, and spent Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday morning exploring Sevilla.

Here's a view of the terrace on the roof of the hostel.

We went on a tour of Sevilla's bull fighting stadium. Bull fighting is a big part of the culture in Southern Spain and clearly there is a lot of history behind it. It was cool to learn about, but I don't think I could ever watch a bull fight. It's banned in Catalunya. Here's a photo of me, Grace, and Emily in the stadium.

Another reason the hostel was great was because they organized a number of events every day. I went on the free walking tour of the city, which lasted more than two hours and included visiting the most important and historical places in the city.

This is the Plaza de Espana and it's probably one of the coolest buildings I've seen so far in Europe. Here's a better photo (link).

 The building is shaped like a semi circle and around the whole first floor there are mosaics of about one hundred Spanish cities. The mosaics show something noteworthy or historical about the city. This is a photo of the tour guide talking about the mosaics in front of the one for Barcelona.

Here you can see the famous Cathedral of St. Mary, which is the largest gothic cathedral in the world.

The hostel also offered reduced-price tickets to Flamenco shows, so Grace and Emily and I went to a show on Thursday night. I thought it was really cool. The music (guitar, clapping, and singing) is super intense and suspenseful and the dancers were nothing short of awe-inspiring. We liked it so much that we went to the Flamenco museum the next day. Here's a photo of the Flamenco performers.

Then we went on the hostel's guided pub crawl where we met more travelers with more stories and advice. The next day we went on a tapas tour, which included four different tapas restaurants and a lot of foods I didn't recognize. It's safe to say that I'm becoming a more adventurous eater while in Spain.

And lastly, I was pleasantly surprised to find a little Vermont flavor in Sevilla: