Mezquita

Breakfast this morning was at the cafetaria on Marcos's street, it was like breakfast many mornings in Spain: tostada a tomate y aceite, toasted bread with crushed tomato spread on top and a bottle of olive oil placed next to the dish on the table. ("The best olive oil in the world, in Andalucia", Marcos said before sprinkling it liberally over his bread.) Followed, of course, by the perfect black coffee that never fails to infuse with alacrity. Ten thirty is the first bus to Madinat al Zahra, the site of a palace city built by an early Islamic ruler. It is on a hill six kilometres outside Cordoba. There are three or four construction sites by the road as the bus leaves the city, but we come upon fields soon. The scourge of arriving by road in new places here, however historic, is that you must shut your eyes to the warehouse supermarkets and housing blocks that are the inevitable first signs that you are reaching your destination; Cordoba though has stayed small, urban development has not built its concentric rings around the town. In a few minutes we leave the Avenida de Madinat al Zahra and begin a gentle ascent up a hill -- stoney outlines on the hillside near the top. As the bus turns it is possible to look back towards Cordoba and its minaret centring it, visible clearly, and try to imagine what the view of the city might have been like to those who rode or walked up the hill to a newly built Madinat al Zahra.

The road passes through a few plots of farmland but mostly uncultivated fields of grass. The main entrance to the complex is much fun (and surely proved quite the deterrent for those who dared): down a long passageway first, a one hundred and eighty degree turn, then onto a maze-like pathway that greets you at right angles four times in quick succession. Inside, only the bases of the building blocks are left, the columns break off mid-way, others have large cracks along their sides. The mosque is bareboned, only its plinth is clearly outlined, on a small plateau on the hillside looking out towards Mezquita. In the main building only the central room has reasonably survived. While the colours of its arabesques are faded and the intricacies in the reliefs are damaged or flattened, the arches along the hallway identify it as a court in this once-palace. Outside, a particularly evocative series of steps upto the hall remains; up these steps the king and his entourage would have ascended on horseback, returning, maybe to ceremony, back from victory in battle, subjects who lived and worked in al-Zahra lining the route, or perhaps the king returning one evening from praying in the Mezquita, already a couple of hundred years old.

It adds to Madinat al Zahra's poignancy in ruin that there is nothing around it but bare hill, few buildings. In the heat of the afternoon sun Cordoba in the distance seems far away, distanced. The ruins look lonely, the buildings as though they have been pulled back under the ground in heaps (in fact the site is still being excavated), all but a naked blueprint laid to rest.

The bus returning to Cordoba drops us just outside the walls of the town, near where I was walking around yesterday. The sun is blazing but it is not siesta yet; the bridge that I crossed last evening to step inside the walls bears a different look, there are more people outside walking more purposefully, there are a few tourists, it is a working day. The Mezquita is only a few streets away, it is possible to find it in this maze of tiny up-and-down streets without knowing the way by simply following the turns down which there is more activity. There are the rows of souvenir shops on the immediate two or three streets near the Mezquita, but these shops are restrained, the trinklets are not in your face as you walk down the street, but safely stowed away behind glass cupboards inside the shop.

Mezquita does not announce itself; from the outside, there is nothing in the plain stone walls to suggest that it is anything other than a large old building. Around the pathways near the main entrance a garden has been created, with a few tall trees that provide shade. The wooden church doors through which you enter seem a little incongruous. The floor inside is concrete, there are round pillars in rows along both axes, of a faded granite that is cool to the touch. Two layers of arches are built between the pillars, painted an alternating white and red ochre. The stained glass built into the ceiling is unmistakably church-like - like many in Andalucia this was a mosque that was later converted into a church. Near the corners where I am standing the glass lets sunlight into the dark space, and illuminates a few arches suddenly.

Closer to the centre there are church pews, rows of modern wooden chairs. Among the round arches there are the pointed, Christian arches built in. There is much gold around the nave, and paintings of the crucifixion hung on the walls along one side. All along the centre of this building a white, Italianate cathedral has been built in. It is in distinct contrast to the reticence of the arches, as if a superimposed structure, whose jutting columns can be mistaken for an elaborate scaffolding. "Our mosque is beautiful", Marcos said yesterday. "But it is a pity. There is a big cathedral inside it."

Across the roof there is much stained glass inlaid that lets light in, in slivers angled down to the ground; around it and on the other side space and atmosphere is taken up by the inevitable tour groups, and talkative schoolchildren on a field trip. Still Mezquita is big enough, and there are parts of it, closer to the near corners, where there is no line of sight to the brightness and glitter of the church nave, and I am out of earshot of tourist chatter; where the space is finally like how it once might have been, dark, cool, and quiet, under the hallunicatory rows of red and white arches.

This is our filmoteca

It is seven in the evening when we finally leave the house; Marcos has a class to attend at seven thirty for a couple of hours, for me to wander around in the still-bright sunshine. His university is inside the walls, we pass the Mezquita only a few streets away ("In Cordoba everything is centered around the mosque"). Marcos's house is only a short distance from the fortress, as we approach it he points to the wall; Cordoba was originally a Roman settlement, "the wall is the town's history, on the wall you find Roman, Muslim, and Christian".

Cordoba is nestled by nature. The mountains form a natural fortress and a protective cradle around it, and, like Sevilla, the Guadalquivir runs around the city, and forms a moat around its fortress. When you approach the moat from outside, you are at a point where you must ascend a series of steps to cross a thick stone bridge, when great big walls stare back at you from fifty feet across the river bank. Yet this statement of magnitude is restrained to just the walls of the fortress, because inside, in the narrow streets where pedestrians must stand up against the walls to give a car space to pass, things are small, the street is quiet, and it winds up and down slopes, turns and twists to reveal other streets, an intersection with a small square, a bench with a soft lamp glowing over it.

The sun has softened considerably, the cafe just past the wall has not opened yet after closing at three in the afternoon, people on the street go about their day's business quietly. There are a couple of buildings that now serve as hotels, and on one or two streets a quiet concentration of shops and cafes, but these streets are still primarily where people live. The houses are built close together and a series of houses will share walls, one house marking out its external boundary from the next only by a differing combination of colour along the lines of its windows and on the walls themselves. An old lady walks down the street back to her house. Are these the streets along which you will hear songs sung from the windows? I come to a square outside a building that says Auberge de Juvenil ('youth hostel') on a board outside, near the empty bench a man in a uniform wheels away trash, mostly fallen leaves, to a small van at the corner. I sit here for a while.

I meet Marcos outside his college, an old building with its paint peeling, with a plaque by its big wooden doors, Facultidad de Philosophias y Lettras. It must be the last class scheduled, this late in the day; there are hardly one or two other students coming out of the building. I look inside when the gate opens and they come out; the way inside is cobblestoned, leading to a courtyard. "Olmo, he studies in the Faculty of Electro-Mechanical, his faculty has a new campus, it is outside the town. And if he goes in the morning, he is just there, you know, on the campus till the end of the day. Mine is here, near the mosque, and near my house also, in this quiet place... it is a part of Cordoba. I like coming here."

We go to dinner, to a small restaurant a couple of streets away, still inside the walls that I am now seeing by night, when Mezquita has closed and the trinket seller sitting on its large steps has gone home. The entrance to the eating house is small and deceptive, for inside the seating area is a large, bare room with high ceilings. Two or three waiters in white shirts and trousers carry steel dishes to tables. Here Marcos orders us Tinto Verrano, the red wine drink served in a tall unadorned glass tumbler, Chorizo, the spicy sausage in a tomato gravy that I have seen at every cafe, and Flamenguin, a light-coloured dish the consistency of a batter. "This is the basic food in Andalucia", Marcos says when the Flamenguin comes. "It is bread. When it becomes hard, a little bit old, we soak it in water, till it becomes like this." It has tiny bits of tomato and meat sprinkled on top. It is cold, not warm, and light. "It is simple food", he smiles, "food that you eat at home."

We're back out on the quiet streets. It is night and there is hardly anybody around. Marcos keeps thinking of streets we can detour through: "Oh I will take you here", he will say suddenly, breaking out of thought. On one street I take a peek into an Arabic tea house with latticed windows in front, inside a small dark room with intricately embroidered cushions against the walls. "Maybe it is for tourists but still it is very nice", he says. "We can come tomorrow." The shops have downed their shutters, only some bars are open. "Oh you must see this street," he says again. Like all the others it is winding and narrow, but against the dark the lights are on in a few large windows, groups of women sitting inside. "Prostitutes. But all very old!" I look in through the window. Indeed, all the women sitting inside look in their sixties and seventies. Strange. A street or two away there is a large old building whose open gate leads to a front courtyard with, like all the others, potted plants hanging out of balconies. "This is our filmoteca", Marcos says. I follow him to the front door as he picks up a pamphlet with the schedule for the month. I take one too. "You know the movie The Good, The Bad, The Ugly? The guy who whistled the tune for the movie...", Marcos whistles the tune now, "...his name is Curro Savoy, he had come to the filmoteca!" "Yes he is Andalusian... he had come here to give a talk. After the talk, we could ask him questions and chat with him. The whole thing was great fun because there were only three of us in the audience."

A few buildings down we pass the gate of what looks like a house, "I must meet somebody, she is here", Marcos says as I follow him inside. We go around the building to the back, there is a Bar sign outside. Inside is a medium-sized room with a fire burning at one end, and people standing around talking. There is soft music playing and gentle yellow light, and now and then the girl standing near the fireplace begins to sway to the music. Marcos seems to know most people here, and is going to each of them in turn and striking up enthusiastically. As I stand here a little unsure of what to do other than get myself a glass of beer, the lady whom Marcos has just finished talking to comes up. She asks me how I've liked Andalucia, tells me about her struggle to learn English, talks about her work. She is a researcher in a chemicals company, she has worked in the field for a few years. "But after this summer I think I will not, anymore. I would like to do something else." Like Marcos most people here are in their thirties, men and women. As appears to be the norm everywhere, in cafes, on the streets, marijuana and hashish are freely passed around. Through this backdoor groups of two and three people arrive and leave; each group standing in their own circle, but everyone walking over to each other to chat. This is unlike a public bar, and more like a private gathering. "I am meeting them after a long time", Marcos tells me later. "Many have been away from Cordoba for some time. Some of them are going away again actually, next week, to study." "I like coming back to Cordoba", he says. "It is good to go outside, but when I come back I like living here."

It is past midnight when we get back home. I am tired, and try to choose between making notes about today or catching up on sleep for a fresh first morning in Cordoba tomorrow. On the wall across from the bed the man with the trumpet looms, on the table the handwritten cd labels are just out of reading sight. It is strange to be in a new country and new city and occupy the bedroom of someone who lives here. But somehow it all fits perfectly right now. I write two pages in my small diary with many sentences that end in exclamation marks, and fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow.

Fifty Three Degrees, 2005!!

I had called Marcos from Sevilla this morning; my couchsurfing luck is turning, kind people are showing up in my inbox at the last minute, giving their phone numbers and extending invitations to stay with them when in their city. Marcos will even come to the train station, he asks me to wait right outside.

I love the minutes, hours or days I spend in a new place when I do not have my bearings yet -- a couple of streets exiting a tube station, a neighbourhood you've only heard of before, a new city before you figure your way around. It is a bit of a blur (a blur in the best kind of way). Given enough time, I tend towards plotting my location, and begin to keep track: now taken the left from the road with the traffic lights, now perpendicular to the street with the movie theatre, now parallel to the main street where all the shops were, and slowly becoming conscious of deciding whether to go right or left next. But standing outside the railway station in Cordoba that afternoon, I could afford consciously not to. Marcos is here in five minutes (he picks me out from among the Cordobans easily enough), we fall into conversation as we walk towards his house. My first impressions of this place then are of it in the background; for once it does not matter which way town is, which side of the road I will have to stand on to get a bus, where these streets go.

Almost as soon as he introduces himself Marcos says "I have just come back from Mumbai. Yesterday." He has spent twenty days there; and for the next few minutes he fairly brims with what he saw and how Bombay was (Cordoba seems small and quiet and is in Europe). We walk along slowly, him wheeling his bicycle along. Twice he comes across people he knows on the street -- old friends he hasn't seen in a while, he says later -- and stops to have a five- or ten-minute conversation. So Cordoba is that kind of town, you think, where you walk by people you know on the street. Then he tells me he was born in Cordoba and has lived most of his life here; maybe it is how all hometowns are.

Is there anything better than meeting a local once you are in a new place? When I entered Sara's house in Sevilla that evening the tone of my trip changed; what was bus routes and walking down strange streets became entering one of those houses with the round arches and courtyard that I kept getting peeks of, mentioning three days spent on the coast became Sara telling me about spending childhood summers on the beach, passing a Burger King outside Mezquita in Cordoba would become Marcos talking of how his small town has changed over the years. You are transported to the thick of a place for the time you are here, listening to stories and going to places that only those who live here can show you.

Yet there is no getting away from the fact that you are an outsider, someone who is there to look around (putting it a little bluntly). It is a feeling I get constantly, on this trip as well, "Doesn't this little corner seem 'authentic' and 'real', where there are only locals", you think to yourself, but at the back of your mind you can't escape also feeling (and seeing) "Aren't you the outsider here though, the one with the backpack, and the camera in the pocket, the odd one out, who has just stepped inside a neighbourhood's community cafe, who people are looking up at and are wondering what this person is doing here." It seems one of travelling's ironies that the more 'authentic' or 'real' an experience seems in a new place, the more telling your presence as an outsider in this new place is.

"I work for four or five months in a year", Marcos is saying. "Rest of the time, this year I am studying in the University, sometimes I travel... it depends." He points out the Roman walls of the city as we pass, his house is right around the corner from here he says, just outside the walls. He puts his old, worn bicycle in a roomful of old, worn bicycles by the landing of his apartment building; we take a rusting lift up to the sixth floor. "We must go to the roof. You can see the whole of Cordoba." He has not been far from talking about Mumbai today and asking questions, already he has thanked me twice: "I just come back, now I can speak to Indian person about my experience." It is touching: his English is limited (and my Spanish non-existent), every so often he starts to say something, then unable to word it further, attempts to communicate it by expression, eyes bright, dancing, hands drawing pictures in the air, coaxing, a smile sometimes, a slight, curious frown creeping into his expression at others. In the house he goes immediately to the kitchen to make lunch while I sit with his housemates Olmo and Lucia. Every two or three minutes he comes to the living room and begins to describe something enthusiastically; I know he is talking to them about it from the way he starts off with "y Mumbai?" ('and Mumbai?'), and the words that he's forced to hold back when he is talking to me come pouring forth. Olmo and Lucia listen intently.

They insist I feel at home here, and must feel free to eat the pasta using my hands. "No, really, you can, please", Lucia says. I tell her that we eat 'this' kind of food with a fork or a spoon, and 'our' food with our hands. "Even when you are in India? Why?", she asks innocently; I don't have an answer. After lunch we are lazing on the sofa, the TV flipping through channels on mute. The living room is separated from the terrace by a huge wall-to-wall window, sitting inside we can see the heat. "In the summer it is impossible!", Marcos says, pointing to outside the window. I remember reading a few years ago that it had crossed fifty degrees in southern Spain. (Amusingly they seem to be proud of it, in one shop selling souvenirs I saw bright red-and-yellow thermometers that said ecstatically, "Sevilla, Fifty Three Degrees, 2005!!"). For me it hasn't been like this since back home; for the first time since then I am sweating walking down the road in the morning, but for the first time since then it is the weather I know. Olmo is deep in concentration holding his cigarette lighter to a small, black clay-like ball, she watches the television; all is quiet. The sun blazes outside. Lounging in our chairs after our late afternoon meal, the blinds now adjusted to shade us from the intense sunlight pouring in, it seems like a natural time to ask them about siesta. "How much is it followed?" I ask. "It is, still", Marcos says, "For example, you do not telephone someone's house in the afternoon, from three to five, or six. You must call later."

I leave my bag in a tiny bedroom with cds and cassettes with handwritten labels piled high, a guitar case next to the cupboard, a big poster on the wall of a man playing a trumpet. Normally I would've gone out considering I had just arrived for one and a half days in Cordoba and there is daylight outside; today I stay. I go back out to the living room. Lucia gives up sooner, saying it in Spanish and asking Marcos to (barely) translate. Olmo doesn't do that: we talk in a mixture of single words and gestures; and break out into smiles each time we discover that a word is common to both English and Spanish, me going "yes yes!", him "si si si!" at the moment of illumination. I ask them if Davide -- whose room I'd put my things in -- is a musician. "Yes, also" Marcos says to that a touch enigmatically. "Olmo is a singer", he says and turns to Olmo, who just smiles and nods. Olmo then plays something on the cd player. A lone male voice calling out. It is unaccompanied by instrument. He says a while later, "This, flamenco tradicional. Only vocal. Afterward, the instruments come." When the song finishes there is a short silence, then the next begins. "They origin in India, Rajasthan no?", he looks up. He sings a phrase that has just passed in the song, some inflections are familar, there is the tinge of hindustani. "This... like Indian", he says. Then he sings another part: "This, like Arabic music". "El gitanos, the gypsies, their history is in the music." "What is he singing about?", I ask him. "It is religious. Christian. But different. Of Marie Madre, like a cult". "Is flamenco popular?", I ask. "It is more popular outside Spain than here!", Marcos laughs. "No, but this kind of flamenco, young people in Spain don't relate to. It is something we hear always, just around us. From when we are small children." He says after a pause, "You should have come two weeks later. It will be Semana Santa, you can hear people singing this on the street. You can hear it from the windows."

Acqui, acqui!

At twelve thirty on Thursday afternoon there is a train running from Sevilla to Jaen, cutting an arc on my map across northern Andalucia. It goes to Cordoba, and along the way it stops at the following stations: Lora del Rio, Peñaflor, Palma del Rio, Posadas. This train is called the Andalucia Express. I have to take it.

The terminus at Sevilla is entirely modern, the platforms roofed high by arching fibreglass. But it does not matter; when I find my coach and a seat by the window, it makes me think of the moment when the train will sail out of this modern platform, into Sevilla province and the afternoon. In my notebook I have written:

I am on the Andalucia Express! What a name for a train! This train stops at five or six towns or villages on its way to Cordoba, whose names on the platform I look forward to seeing, and flirt with the possibility of getting off at one that catches my fancy. Because buses are cheaper in these parts of the world this is my first train ride in months... how exciting it is to be on a train again!

Now I must look outside the window.

**

We pass villages -- just a few streets of houses -- painted white, the windows framed by paint the colour of sandalwood. In some houses, the windows have a brick inlay along their frames, in the now-familiar round arch formation. How simple these arches are! On some buildings, along the overhang of the roof, the same thick sandalwood colour.

In twenty minutes we are at our first station, stopping for less than a minute along the mostly-empty platform to pick up four or five passengers. The station is Lora del Rio. "Acqui, acqui!" ("Here, here!"), an elderly man shouts to someone up the platform, probably his wife, as he peeks into our compartment and sees empty seats. He waits for her to reach, then they both climb in with the satisfied smiles of being the first to spot the last empty seats in a coach.

There are more whitewashed houses now, entire villages of them, in rows and clusters one below the other on the side of a hill. The villages are always built along the side of a hill, so that in one view you can see all its houses, its lines of clothes hung out to dry in the bright sunshine, the spire of its church, the minarets. Inside the coach the old man who got on at the previous station is now standing at the centre. He seems to have made a statement or asked a question to no one in particular: in the beginning two or three people respond, then for a few seconds everyone on the coach is talking to each other. Now a young man in a sports jacket has joined him in the centre of the coach, and an audible conversation continues, maybe speaking in a language I don't understand, but each voice curious and different from the other.

The land is much more fertile here than the craggy, dry landscape on the coast. Just-cultivated strips of brown soil, goats grazing in enclosed pastures, the fencing old and worn thin. There are rows and rows of a dense bushy plant; and clusters of tiny yellow flowers on the ground along the tracks. There, a palm tree.

We stop briefly at our next station, Peñaflor. A signboard on the platform shows the time, 14:11, and the temperature, which has risen and risen outside the air-conditioned coach to 35 °C (at eight o clock this morning it was zero degrees). This section of the route roughly follows a river by its side, sometimes it is a hundred or a hundred and fifty metres from the train, sometimes we are right by it, the track following its course. It is not wide; its waters are a dark green and motionless in the heat. We reach a station and a settlement of maybe fifty houses: Palma del Rio. We have passed two or three stations called 'del Rio', identifying the village as being by the river; but the river itself is not identified by name, it is simply 'the river' for those who live near it.

While the Andalucia Express like the railway station in Sevilla is modern with nothing to distinguish it from elsewhere in these parts of the world, it is a Regional ("Ray-hee-o-naal"), which means it stops at small places along the way, in stations that haven't given way to modernity as much, and practices that seem anachronistic in Western Europe: at each station, the conductor, a young lady with short hair and a ready smile, still signals to the station-master by hand and shouts out to the driver that they are ready to depart, and uses a punching machine to validate your ticket before returning it to you.

Now we are at a station called Posadas: the station house's paint is peeling at places, brick showing through on the sides. There is a row of orange trees by the tracks. A number of young people, probably students, have got on. Along the way there are still tinier stations that we pass without so much as slowing down. Which train stops at these stations?

For perhaps the first time in my life, I wish I could paint. Then I would sketch these white houses, and the whitewashed buildings around them, in clusters on the hill, and the single palm tree, just the way I'm seeing them now, and it would mean more than any photograph I click on my camera.

A slightly tipsy man is talking to the ticket-lady as she goes about her work, following her up and down this coach full of people. She retorts to something he says, and the whole coach erupts into laughter. Not for the first time (or the last) on this trip, I wish I could follow Spanish.

A voice on the speakers announces the next stop: Proxima barada, Cordoba.

White villages outside Seville?

I wake Sara up to say goodbye, and leave the apartment with the round arch at its door and orange trees in its front yard early the next morning. Alcazar was just opening for the morning, the fortress whose high walls have never seemed too far off these last two days. I couldn't make up my mind about Alcazar - it has a beautiful central courtyard elaborately carved and woodworked in an Arabic style that is largely untouched, but there are paintings of major and minor Christian royals occupying swathes of wallspace; the gardens seem to be appendages that you are never sure if you should take seriously: the stone landscaping looks like a homage to classical Greek ruins, and somewhat of a non-sequitur to the palace. The courtyard inside the palace is crowded and noisy at ten thirty in the morning -- if weekends are for tourist busloads, weekdays are for schoolchildren dragged on field trips -- you move in line, to the next spot in front of you that clears, part of groups of people, soon you have unconsciously fallen in step with a tour guide (or a school teacher). The thing is I am still smitten, by Casa Pilatos, quiet and elegant, thinking about its courtyard. I follow the direction arrows around Alcazar through to the exit, into a large square.

In Sevilla streets begin and end in public squares. Some squares are big, like this one, the kind that represent a city, with streets from all sides leading to it, long sturdy blocks of wooden benches to sit on and a sculpture in the middle of a fountain spouting cool water in the heat, and smart shops lining it on all four sides; some are small, part of a neighbourhood, like coming upon a clearing in the woods of those narrow streets, to a street which ends in a quiet church, a small square with a few orange trees and a single bench in front of it. The small streets leading out of squares wander off in whimsical directions, some arching out unexpectedly, some narrowing down to become even smaller, where pedestrians have to stand even tighter against the walls to let cars pass. The side-walls of houses are pressed up against their neighbours', the grills of their balconies black against the yellows and oranges of the houses. If I'm lucky, someone is entering or leaving a building just as I'm passing, to take a peek inside as the door opens or shuts: a glimpse of a short front corridor leading to a room-sized courtyard, round arches on all four sides, a large potted plant or two in the corner, stairs on one side leading to rooms upstairs, blue-on-white ceramic tiles lining the four sides, its cursive patterns flowing like Arabic hand on the wall.

In the large square outside the entrance to the fortress there are some tourists now, gathered on benches around the small fountain, and men in hats who have pulled up their horse-drawn carriages on one side, waiting for customers. "Hi there, do you speak English?", asks a confident voice. "Yes?", I say turning to a man of about forty five holding a folder with sheets of paper and pictures sticking out. "Would you like to take a tour of the white villages outside Seville?", he follows up, in a crisp, Americanized twang. "Thanks, but I'm leaving town in an hour", I tell him truthfully and walk along.

Sevilla's magic is all over it, it paints the town. It is clearly a city that has continued to be prosperous since the middle ages when its greatest identifiers, La Giralda, Alcazar, Torro del Oro came up. There are buildings of different eras since - many churches with their very distinctive architecture (much unlike Gothic-style churches in countries north of Spain) that came up in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when they would have been built with lots of new-world money from its colonies; buildings that are probably a couple of hundred years old that typically now serve as official premises of some kind; and then new ones, like the handsome structure at the park near Sara's house -- she said it was built for Sevilla's World Fair (that took place in 1929) -- and even apartment buildings like Sara's that are no more than thirty or forty years old. None of these seem out of place or not in sync with the other; it is like there is a fountain from which those who have contributed to building Sevilla over the centuries have taken from and still take from. There are curves, in the round of the arch above a gate, in the patterns on the ceramic, in the frame of a doorway. Everywhere the building is colourful, lavish in expression, full of elaborations and intricacies; with the distinctive round arches and minarets, a fountain that clearly had its origins in Sevilla's Arabic period.

I find my way out of this set of streets around the fortress and get back to Avenida San Fernando, to a dull roar of voices that sometimes rises in unison. Further up the road there is no way through, an election rally is in progress, a group of a few hundred, some with banners, almost all men, one or two of them rousing responses through their loudspeakers. I track back a little and take a new set of roads around Avenida San Fernando, and cross to the bus station. "Hola Señor!", the old man who looks after the luggage greets me. By now we are old friends. I pick up my backpack, say goodbye to him and take a bus from where I arrived two days ago, to the railway station twenty five minutes away.

Ensaladilla de Gambas

There is finally a positive reply on Couchsurfing -- I had sent my requests late, only a week or two before leaving, and at the start of this trip I had resigned myself to hostels until the last two nights at Granada (from where a couple replied immediately with an invitation) -- earlier today I stopped at an internet centre to check email on the off-chance, and lucked out: Sara from Sevilla has replied, and offered to host for two days. I find Felipe Segundo, the street name on the paper I have written down, two stops by bus from the bus station. There I find the building number, then go to a small cafe next door to finish dinner before going to her house.

It is around eight o clock, at the café people are gathering to watch Sevilla FC play a Uefa cup match against a Turkish team. Through warm-ups and team formations this little place has filled up, although I’m the only one eating. It is a European quarterfinal and the team whose home ground is right down the road -- Sara tells me later -- is playing; those gathered at the cafe, like the staff who wait for the coffee to drip from the filter into the cup placed underneath, watch.

At the house I meet Sara and Juani, I leave my bag there and we go out soon after. On Felipe Segundo every cafetaria and bar that I passed on my way here has filled up. People spill out onto the pavement; all are watching the football. "So everyone supports Sevilla FC?", I ask. "And Real Betis. In our city it is fifty-fifty." Sara is from a small town called Caceres, in the East of Andalucia, when she talks about her hometown her eyes light up. Juani is from Huelva, "It is a small place in a corner of Spain. Nobody knows it," she says rather self-deprecatingly by way of introduction. "Your football club, Recreativo Huelva, yes?", I ask, and her eyes almost pop out of her head. We grin; I remember Recreativo as one of the other teams that used to be involved in Star Sports's La Liga Match of the Week, the 'other' that used to get whipped by Barcelona or Real Madrid or Valencia. I don't mention that to her though.

We are going to Carboneria they tell me. I have come across the name before: when I had emailed people on Couchsurfing one had replied saying "Sorry I have people already, but when you are in Sevilla if you want to see our authentic music and dance you should go to Carboneria. Visitors go there but locals respect the place too." Near the large wooden door there are in-house posters of past performances. The walls are not even or polished, the rugged, jagged edges of the stone poke through the whitewash. The roof beams and benches are trunks of wood. It turns out there is an hour before the night’s performance begins, there are not many people here yet. This place has a rustic feel, and slightly dingy, like it is in the back of a building. Beer does not seem right tonight, no, Carboneria wants something more... solid. Maybe the Tinto Verrano? Sara suggests. It is an iced drink of red wine with soda, something of a national beverage in these parts where the temperature can hit fifty degrees in the summer. But, she says, when one is in Sevilla one must drink Agua de Sevilla -- Water of Sevilla. She delights in telling what goes into it: "it is made of rum, whisky, gin and vodka", counting each one off on her fingers as she's saying it, as her friend grins and nods her head vigorously in agreement.

By the time the performance starts Carboneria has filled up, eighty or perhaps a hundred people packed in, sitting and standing. On the small stage, in the backdrop of a collage of posters for music and flamenco festivals, three men sit leaning slightly forward, one with a guitar, one with a flute, and one man who uses the wooden floorboards of the stage and the crispness of his handclap to begin and to drive each song. A tall, muscular woman in a glittering orange dress is in front of them, as she begins to dance, the man starts to sing.

Happily, no one here buys Agua de Sevilla by the glass -- it is on half of the tables around ours and at the bar -- it is only procured in pitchers, large quantities of strong drink. Past midnight when the crowd has thinned -- and I am the only remaining non-local -- the music has become more impromptu. The musicians have short exchanges between songs to decide on what they will play next. A lady who was sipping a drink at the bar comes up on stage; while the gypsy dancer is more arresting, this lady in the shirt and jeans is more beautiful, with a sensuous figure and black hair flowing past her shoulders. From her first twirl on the tiny stage the crowd responds with vigour, shouting calls in time to her twirl, her clap adding to the polyrhythm, the men's claps more urgent, demanding of response, the rhythms are quickened now, cries of "olé!" from the tables below...

The taxi into which we gather ourselves outside -- the ground beneath our feet staggered too much tonight to walk -- drops us off at the beginning of Sara's road by the park; now we must stagger the five minutes to home. The day is crashing to an end, my head is spinning, but for a day like this, it does not seem an unsuited way to end. Unsightly maybe.

**

Next day starts late, three in the afternoon late; Aguas de Sevilla has taken its toll. The sun is shining brilliantly, especially in the Parc de Maria Luisa down the road from Sara's house. I walk the short distance to the streets near the bus station where I arrived yesterday, to go to the bocadillo shop I saw then. Its entrance is shaded behind the row of orange trees on the street, and you face the counter as soon as you enter. It is a plain shop, with a minimum of things in it. In the shelves by the counter there are large blocks of different kinds of meat, some processed and sausage-like, some raw, pale pink. Next to it are two big blocks of cheese. The price list on the walls has a single heading: Bocadillos, under it, y Queso ('and cheese') is common to all the items on the short list, beside it, the names of each of these meats. There are two men buying lunch in front of me, when they place their order, either verbally or by pointing to a block of meat, the man wordlessly takes it out from the shelf and places it on the counter. Then, using a machine (or a tool) whose action is not unlike that of a guillotine, he shaves a thick slice first off the block the meat, then off the cheese. The long bread is opened along its median and the slices are placed in between, their ends sticking out on all sides. Nothing else is added to it, no suggestion is made either: no "toppings", or "extras" can or will come in the way. It is probably to do with the foreignness of white bread to our food (even when bought to make a meal of at home), and also something to do with the way it is sold permutated and packaged as a staple of junk food pretty much everywhere in these parts of the world, but it is difficult for me to imagine a sandwich as traditional food; today, I'm seeing how it can be.

But even a good honest lunch cannot extinguish a hangover sometimes: I am only in the mood to amble now, I will go to the Alcazar tomorrow. Past a large square with benches and sculptures, at least ten streets with names like Barcelona, Valencia, Zaragoza, Madrid leading off from it, through Zaragoza past a small shop selling guitars, up a small street with many boutique shops but also a young man sitting on the ground by the pavement singing and playing chords on his guitar. Here I stop to watch for a few minutes. Weekday afternoon has turned to weekday evening, a steadily-increasing crowd of mostly office workers are now out (although it is difficult to imagine how anyone can work inside an office here -- it is easy to start thinking in a place like Sevilla that every person around you must also be ambling about dazed by orange gardens and streetnames). At the end of the street a lottery-ticket seller has set up a cycle cart and is calling out his wares. The tram, that remarkably noiseless vehicle, is fairly crowded with passengers. I sit at a bench near the square a few metres from the cathedral, and watch the tram go by every twelve minutes.

Mostly because I don't feel upto anything else yet. Again cursing the traces of this hangover that has still not completely disappeared, I head back towards Sara's house as the sun sets, deciding to stop off for dinner on the way. I had lost most of today to a late start, but I would make sure end the day well I reasoned, finding myself facing up to a tapas house five buildings from home. It is a lovely place inside, high ceilings and only a few tables in the large floor space. Each table has its own corner, some people standing in groups glasses of wine or beer in hand, an upright barrel forming their table, some eating quietly at tables, one or two standing at the counter smoking a cigarette and sipping beer, all left alone. A corner table is unoccupied, there is a long list of items on the menu, each with three prices listed according to the size of the dish: Racion / 1/2 Racion / Tapas. I put the guidebook to use presently -- in my toothless Rough Guide to Andalucia (must stick to Lonely Planet) there is a surprisingly detailed food glossary at the end -- and translate each dish on the menu before making my choice (the waitress grinning widely as she came up to my table and figured out what I was doing). I asked for Ensaladilla de Gambas, a salad of finely-chopped vegetables -- carrots, beans -- and tender, crisp prawns, mixed in a light cream. I ate it with pieces of bread -- this time I knew to ask for pan -- and a small glass tumbler of cerveza -- there is only one tap, one variety of beer available, no need to specify a brand. And then I went back to Sara's house for sleep.

If there is ever a single reason to come to Spain, it can quite possibly be for Ensaladilla de Gambas.

Torro del Oro

Everything inside is made of wood, proud logs of deep, dark maroon wood. Great rumps and thighs hang from hooks over the counter, like dressed up carcasses. The man who makes the coffee is also the butcher, after he places a cup in front of me he goes back to chopping the meat on the table into large chunks. The high chairs at the wooden counter are mostly occupied, the two old men next to me are discussing the newspaper spread out in front of them. On the wall there are photographs: some in black and white, some in colour, of matador and animal, its horns in survival position, him holding the cape close to his body, like a fan about to be unveiled. There are close-ups of bullfighters, shot just before he goes into the ring, eyes intense in approaching combat, droplets of sweat just beginning to form on his forehead, clinging to his skin. Next to it there is a picture in black and white of four or five men sitting on wooden chairs drawn together in a semi-circle. One man cradles a guitar in his hands, the others lean forward, all looking up at the woman next to them, a strong-looking woman with sharply defined features. Then there is a close-up in profile of one of the men, eyes lost in thought. No one is smiling in these pictures, not musician, not bullfighter. They are about to make music, she is about to dance, he is about to step into the bullring; the snapshots are of the inward moment just before.

The old men next to me are joined by another, they ask for a bottle of red wine, which the butcher pours copiously into large glasses. Everyone sitting at the counter has a lit cigarette in their hand, the cigarette idling away for the most part as they focus on their coffee or their thoughts, the smoke drifting up into the legs and thighs of meat suspended over the counter. I empty my cup and leave the cafe, once again into bright sunshine.

**

Back up the main road past the garden there is a busy intersection, a tour group of American teenagers, office workers, a class of school-children waiting to cross the road, cries of "Anamaria!", and "Ey, chica!" piercing the air. From here I can see a tall minaret with church bells at the top, La Giralda and the cathedral are only a few streets away. Down the road from the intersection, there are the tall walls of the Alcazar, sprawling, extending half the way to the river, so that Sevilla's fortress is not more than a hundred and fifty metres from the water. The buildings along the avenue by the river Guadalquivir, like those visible on its opposite bank are large and prosperous. The palm trees planted along the two levels of the terraced promenade are well-tended, of uniform height, regal. The lines of palms converge at the Torro del Oro, a single white tower that forms the nucleus of this section of the riverbank, near which boats are docked. Six-lane traffic of cars and scooters zips by behind; the road by the water, like the beach road in Almeria and Malaga, the pride. Every so often, somewhat incongruously, an elaborately-decorated horse-drawn carriage that seems to have escaped the gentler surrounds of Santa Cruz or the small streets around the cathedral finds itself trotting off from the traffic light, the driver of the car stuck behind it wearing an impatient scowl on his face.

On the other side of the road there is a row of three or four souvenir shops. From this side the usual share of souvenir tack is visible, up close the postcard rack has, by the over-pigmented photographs of palaces and courtyards with 'SEVILLA' in multi-coloured letters below, black-and-white pictures of flamenco dancers in the midst of a pirouette, small prints of posters for an Extraordinaria Corrida de Toros ('Extraordinary run of bulls') in Sevilla in 1947, photographs from a music festival. Inside, these motifs of flamenco, bull-ring and guitar are repeated across t-shirts, posters, bookmarks - perhaps not as fortuitous as coming upon a real flyer being handed out for the evening's flamenco performance or bull-fight, but interesting, evocative souvenirs all the same.

I spend a few minutes there, and left the shop happy, knowing what I'd bought for whom. Torro del Oro is behind me, I was walking in the opposite direction, I turned again and again to look at it. Its white, pale, thick stone stands upright against the water flowing by. It once served as a lighthouse to boats on the Guadalquivir, when the city must have been smaller and the river ran freer, and people on the last leg of their journey would look for its single beam from up this twisting, turning river in the dark of nights to complete their journey safely. It is made of stone, sturdy and symmetrical, a single colour and texture, consistent. Its base, perhaps two hundred feet high, upon which a further, smaller tower capped by a round green dome stands, looks like the rook on a chess board. Torro del Oro is the rook, quietly giving strength by its unmoving presence. It is a sense of permanence, that things can stand the test of time, that it is possible to hold steadfast against oncoming winds.

I pass the compound of Plaza de Toros de la Maestranza, Sevilla's bull-ring. It is a quiet afternoon, there is an old man outside selling postcards and keychains, but hardly anyone else. Outside the stadium on the walls is a poster with a list of dates for 2008 and seat prices, still a couple of months away. Past the arena a street turning left takes me off the avenue; just around the corner is an old shop. It is dimly lit inside. The glass window in the front behind which things are displayed is slightly unclean. The sign above it says Sestreria, behind the glass, there are velvety jackets, pointy shoes, and embroidered, richly-coloured corset-like vests. Maybe they rent out to toreros who cannot afford to buy the regalia yet. The walls of the bull-ring, visible from here, look new, painted a luminous white; this place with the vests and the jackets is old, like it has been around since before the arena. The street is full of shops (including one called 'India', its display window filled carefully with strange colourful things), but hardly any people, and the shops in their absence of customers look innocent. The road turns now, unconsciously I am headed towards the cathedral and the Alcazar again, towards what would have once been the nerve centre of this city.

**

There is still light, past seven thirty in the evening, the bright March sun is only now on its way out. In front of me is a building about five storeys tall that looks like it is used as offices now; there is dirt and soot on its maroon and beige facade. The grill on the balconies is wrought iron, curving patterns of hearts and flowers and twists, like italicized script. Another building's dome is a stricter interpretation of something Dali might have done (maybe he took inspiration from here, who knows). I sit on the steps outside the cathedral, La Giralda behind me, the Alcazaba looming, the fortress's high walls only a few metres away. A man at the corner plays his violin. Although Sevilla's mosque was later brought down to make way for a cathedral, Peter and his son Ferdinand, Sevilla's first Christian kings after Muslim rule, let it stay, "the policy and practice of the Castilian monarchs had been not to destroy the monuments of the Islamic past but to appropriate them and write over them lightly."* They instead decreed it a church, and the rulers themselves continued to use it for prayer. Even later on, when a more radical time conspired to bring the mosque down, the minaret that crowned the mosque, now called La Giralda, was ordered by the Castilian king to stay; the story goes that he could not bear the thought of seeing it pulled down. This minaret is still standing, in the centre of Sevilla's cathedral.

A tram glides silently down the tracks in the middle of the road. The air is filled with the slow, tearful notes of a man playing Air on the G string on his violin. There some old men have stopped to watch him play, until the end of the piece.




*The Ornament of the World - Maria Rosa Menocal

Barrio Santa Cruz

On electric posts in the centre of the road banners flutter, with a sketch of a bull tumbling over, a blood-red arrow piercing its hind: "Toros, Sevilla 2008." The bus station is new, the shelter outside with a row of eight or ten buses pulled up built probably twenty or thirty years ago; its fresh coat of paint is restrained, its white and yellow just like the white and yellow of the houses on the neighbourhood streets that our bus passed. Like the house in the fields this morning, the side of the station building has four round arches; behind the buses, a single tended palm tree. I deposit my backpack in a sparsely-filled luggage room with an old man smoking a cigarette (he talks enthusiastically for a minute or two, like many I encounter here undeterred that I do not appear to follow what he is saying). I am unencumbered by only a small rucksack of essentials, it is a bright ten in the morning, the street outside the bus station is lined with orange trees.

Its leaves and fruits hang over parked cars. A few old men trudge along the pavement beside it. The fruits hanging down from the branches are copious, tens and tens of them, full, ripe for the picking. They are not very high up, probably ten or twelve feet above the ground; these men who walk along the pavement underneath, why are they not reaching out to pluck them? Will it seem strange if I do?

The bus station is surrounded by these small quiet streets with pavements lined by orange trees, buildings white or a pale shade of yellow, here and there an arched doorway to a small shop selling cold drinks and bocadillos. Across the main road there is a garden. At its centre is a compound whose walls are the colour of sandalwood. There are castle-like crenellations on its high walls, and tall palm trees visible inside. Vines grow along one wall. Around a small fountain nearby the benches are tiled with ceramic, cursive blue patterns on a white background. One or two old men sit reading a newspaper, another sits on an adjacent bench alone, glancing at his watch and looking around. There are orange trees along every path, oranges just above your head as you're walking, oranges fallen to the ground. At one end there is a whitewashed house, lines of sandalwood-coloured paint on the perimeters of the windows and along the roof, like decorated borders on a large picture frame. Behind this house a smaller fenced-off garden lined by a row of shrubs, a crowd of tall palm trees rising above it.

It is a small area, Jardin de Murillo, I must have walked through it atleast three times then. The restless man is occupied now, his long-haired lover is here, for their mid-morning tryst. At the end away from the main road a street of large three-storeyed houses overlooks the garden; I go up the lane that empties into it. It is paved not with asphalt or concrete but with a patterned mosaic, immediately the impression is of walking through an enclosed, intimate space. The houses on either side are not more than fifteen feet across from each other; the two- and three-storeyed buildings are alternatively white, yellow, maroon, ochre; yet never in shades that call attention to themselves, dignified. A flyer outside one announces Cursos de Guitarra ('guitar courses'), Academia de Paco Padilla. The streets are narrow, and narrower streets branch off from them to the right and left, all taking eventually a downward slope back towards Jardin de Murillo. Leaves and branches of trees are spread over the front of houses; creepers run down walls; potted plants on tiny first-floor balconies; in this neighbourhood of tiny streets there is the wisp of the garden that sits beside it.

One such narrow, curving street opens out to a small square. I find Plaza Pilatos on the map, near Jardin de Murillo. A site is marked out at this spot, the key below says "Casa de Pilatos. Mansion most representative of noble Sevillan families."

It is a strange, eye-catching mix of styles: the large courtyard is decked with marble sculptures of the European Renaissance, while the building surrounding it would not be out of place if it were cast as stately rooms in a Mughal palace. The round-arched courtyard is in the same palette of colours as the houses in the neighbourhood, with intricate, kaleidoscopic patterns woven into its arches and ceilings. At one corner of the courtyard a man is standing on the lower steps of a ladder cleaning and polishing the relief set against the wall. His job is intricate: the bristles of his brush must catch the undersides of the relief, his hand learning the pattern embroidered on it. Outside, the garden is geometric and its pathways are strictly defined, but this is offset by playful touches: little square tiles inset into the flooring, each one sketched with a plant, a flower, a hunter drawn just like Shikari Shambu. Creepers of vine hang loosely and copiously down the walls, the potted plants in the balcony are not unlike those of the houses outside.

This is a house long inhabited by royalty, but what is most endearing about Casa Pilatos is it is a building of lineage that -- unlike counterparts of Renaissance or Georgian or Victorian origin in Western Europe -- is not all grandiosity. It is grand yet not heavy, it wears its features easily; while it is quiet inside, it is not a hushed reverential quiet, rather its air bears the easy quiet of the neighbourhood of which it is a part. Outside, in the square, there is an old man with a small hand-cart selling caramelized peanuts. The one-euro handful is handed over wrapped in a cone of magazine paper. A few people are out now, some stopping at the small shops that are only the size of the front room of the houses they have been converted from. The peanuts are sweet; my step slower. I read the nameboards on the doors of houses and the names of the streets. This neighbourhood is called Santa Cruz, it is just lovely. Where it ends and joins a main road, there is a cafe. It has been three hours since I arrived in Sevilla; I had meant to get coffee soon after the bus journey, but I have been captivated from the moment I stepped off the bus. I step inside the cafe happy. I could do worse than a cup of perfect brew, to savour the rush of this new place that I still feel in the midst of.