I actually came in to check my email, but for some reason this computer won’t let me access it. Some stupid security setup I expect. So I’ll anecdotalise instead.
I went into a restaurant for lunch today – Easter Sunday – and they were playing the ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ soundtrack on the stereo. Sly satire?
Seville! City of tiny platesful of food!
The food has indeed been yummy. Garlic prawns, morcilla (the local version of black pudding), scrambled eggs with garlic shoots and ham, etc etc. I haven’t been getting my 5 servings of fruit and vegetable a day, mind you. Even if you count bread and breadsticklets as seperate vegetables. The trouble is, you order a half portion of ham or prawns or something and they bring loads of bread with it, and that’s pretty much a reasonable meal. Being Easter, it’s also the city of men in pointy hats. With, on the one hand, men in loafers, neat blue jeans, smart shirts, cashmere jumpers tied around their shoulders and designer sunglasses, and on the other, long parades of people in penitential hoods marching through the streets, it feels a bit like turning up to a party and realising no one told you the dresscode was ’80s or KKK’.
I can’t quite get around the sheer number of people taking part in the parades. Each one seems to have hundreds of participants, in pointy hoods carrying candles, in floppy hoods carrying crosses, a few carrying incense or the main figures of Christ or the Virgin, and a largish band to play dirges and thump drums. Since each church in Seville has a parade, and there are a lot of churches in Seville, it must represent a significant proportion of the city population every year. I’m sure the degree of real religious feeling varies – it seems like it’s as much an expression of local tradition now as a display of penitence – but a lot of it must be heartfelt. It gives me the creeps rather. An upbringing in a country where people who deny the literal truth of the resurrection get chosen as bishops is no preparation for mass displays of fervour.
On Maundy Thursday, lots of women appeared wearing mantillas. And dark glasses.
Trivia of the day: one of the statues of the Virgin is called the Macarena, after the area of Seville where the church is, many Seville women get named Macarena after the Virgin; the cheesy pop classic is named after one of these women.
If you’re ever in Seville, I’d definitely recommend the Real Alcazar, the Islamic/Renaissance palace started by the Almohads, and continued both in the Moorish and classical styles by the Spanish kings after the reconquest. It has large and rather lovely gardens which are almost as good as the palace itself. It’s a kind of second-rate version of Alhambra, but Alhambra sets such a high standard that second-rate is pretty good. I’ve always loved the idea of a house built around a central courtyard, but of course in Britain you wouldn’t be building a shady oasis, you’d be building a dingy hole that, at best, spent much of the year acting as a windbreak.
OK, I can’t get to my hotel because there’s a procession in the way, which seems like a good opportunity to blog the first week of my trip. Or to go to a bar and have a beer and a little tapa of something, but blogging it is.
I went to a town on the borders of the Coto Doñana National Park called El Rocio. Next to the town there’s a huge lagoon called Madre de las Marismas (mother of the marshes) where there are lots of birds, and there are some convenient other birding spots nearby, including a mix of habitats: pinewoods, scrub, deciduous trees along the rivers. So it’s a good place for birding on foot. I did pretty well on the bird front, getting most of the things I would have said were target species – Azure-winged Magpie, Great-spotted Cuckoo, Purple Heron – as well as some rather less glamorous lifers like Great Reed Warbler. Oh, and flamingo, spoonbill, stork and so on. So that was good. I hope I’ve got some quite nice birdy photos out of it, but those may have to wait until I get back to my own computer before you see them.
It also had enormous numbers of nightingales. Really a lot. I got quite annoyed with them after a while, because I rather hoped one would be a Penduline Tit or something. Nightingales are famous for the beauty of their song, or course, but actually I think they’re really famous because they’re very loud and completely indefatigable. Not only do they sing at night, they sing all day as well, absolutely belting it out. They do make some quite nice noises, to be fair – including Coleridge’s ‘one low piping sound more sweet than all’ – but they also make some very peculiar squawks, rattles, grunts and so on.
El Roco is quite an interesting place – all one-storey white buildings and sand-covered roads. Very pictureskew. All the guidebooks accuse it of looking like the set of a cowboy film. On the other hand, after a long day on your feet, carrying a telescope, birdbook, water, binoculars, camera, suncream etc, walking on sand really saps the strength out of you. The locals get around on horses, dirtbikes or 4-wheel drive.
El Rocio’s other claim to fame is that it’s the site of Spain’s biggest annual pilgrimage. A million people come, apparently, many on horseback or in oxcarts, and much piety, drinking, eating and generally debauching around the campfire ensues. In flamenco costumes. So there are whole streets of buildings marked with ‘Hermandad de Sevilla’ or whatever – a different brotherhood for every town in Andalucía. There must be hundreds of them and, of course, they’re all empty for the 51 weeks of the year when they’re not hosting pilgrims.
Anyway, I was mostly birding and I won’t bore you with too many details about that. I’ve now been in Seville for a day and a bit, but I think that my Seville thoughts can wait for a moment.
… and annoyingly I haven’t brought out my bit of paper with email addresses on it, so I can’t email my friends and family. Oh well, that too will have to wait.
Tomorrow I’m going to Spain for three weeks. I expect I’ll get to an internet café and blog something sooner or later, but I don’t know when that’s likely to be. I’m planning to keep napowrimoing, and I’ll post them when I get the chance.
When I started planning a trip to Andalucía, I posted a message to BirdForum asking whether my plans were practical. One of the people who replied was John Butler, who, I’ve since discovered, not only runs bird tours there but actually wrote the book on birding in the area. One of the things he said was:
Do not miss Sevilla. It is a beautiful city and well worth visiting for the sights of the city, but there are also lots of birds to be seen. Lesser Kestrels live in large numbers around the cathedral and these will be joined by Pallid Swifts from late March onwards. Lots of good birding can also be done in the Maria Louisa gardens, less than a km from the historic centre of the city.
I can’t tell you how much it made me smile to read that “Lesser Kestrels live in large numbers around the cathedral”. There’s something special about going to a place for the history and architecture, and seeing good birds there. Partially it’s just because it’s double the pleasure, but also the bird makes the place more memorable and the place makes the bird more memorable. And because birds play a large part in my sense of place, they can bring somewhere to life beyond its historical context.
Some examples – White Storks nesting on the top of marble columns in the ruins of Ephesus; a pair of Scops Owls in a tree outside the museum at Corinth; Cirl Bunting at Mycenae, Long-legged Buzzard at Troy. Perhaps the best of the lot – swirling flocks of thousands of Alpine Swifts coming in to roost in the walls of Fez in Morocco.
I’ve been trying to learn a little Spanish before going on holiday. I have no illusions that a few weeks of cramming will enable me to walk alongside the Rio Guadalquivir reading Lorca in the original – or even make small talk about the weather – but at least it might give me a starting point when reading menus and trying to find the right bus. My vestigial French and Latin seem to be even less useful than I expected, although trying to learn the verb forms in the present tense did give me flashbacks of doing my amo amas amat, amamus amatis amant.
I’ve been using an excellent open-source javascript flashcard program called jMemorize. You gotta love the open-source people.
EDIT: I just realised I that I even got the title of this post wrong. That doesn’t bode well for me developing mad skillz in conversational Spanish.