The travelling group to Sevilla!
I have three posts to put up in the next few days – I have taken trips to Sevilla (to see a bullfight), to Italy (Pisa and Florence!) and to Portugal. I’ll try to put up posts/pictures from those three trips over the next day or so….get ready!
So…Sevilla. The location of the big bull fight. We got up EARLY this morning (and had about 2 hours of sleep the night before…) and took a train over to the city to explore a bit before the 6pm bullfight. It was beautiful and sunny in Cádiz when we left…and absolutely pouring in Sevilla when we arrived. And it wasn’t stopping – it was one of those rains that you see in Seattle which is heavy but you can just tell that it is a long-term type of rain. So what’s a group of tired Seattleites to do on a rainy cold day in an urban city? Go to Starbucks of course! As you can see from the photo, we successfully found a Starbucks and sat there for a while hoping the rain would abate…
Unfortunately it didn’t. We walked over to the cathedral in Sevilla and took a tour of that building – it was pretty beautiful as well (and happened to be “World Tourism Day” which means we got in everywhere for free!!). Here’s a photo from inside the cathedral – I will never get tired of looking inside cathedrals here, every sing
le one is unique and beautiful in its own way. It was at this point, about noon or one pm, that we ate lunch and started to consider the possibility that the bullfight MIGHT be rained out. We weren’t sure. But the thought was creeping into our heads.We found a beautiful garden area in the city to spend some more time in, and I think that around 4pm we hit one of our low points of the trip. We were all completely soaked, it had been raining non-stop since we arrived at 10am, and the bullfight was in 2 hours. We had already gone to the bullfight ring, an dthey said the decision is made essentially at the beginning time. Anyway, we were in this cave inside the park, which was dry, listening to the relentless pounding of the rain, when we pretty much gave up going to the bullfight – we were thinking it’d be cancelled. We were planning out perhaps even getting a warm hotel room for the night and then heading back to Cádiz in the morning.
However- it stopped raining around 5 and the sun (kinda) came out, and it seemed like we would be able to see it after all! Everyone was going to the ring, the TV reporters were showing video of men working on the ground inside the ring, and the seats were filling up. We all took our seats and got ready for the bullfight…
Only to see a person walk around the ring with a sign saying that… the bullfight was cancelled. Yeah, that’s right – we all got into the stadium, but the matadors came out and decided it was too dangerous to fight on some slick ground (understandable. But still). Anyway that was a HUGE letdown to a day that was full of ups and downs. We arrive full of hope, then had the rains dash it, only to have the rains stop and us have lots of hope entering the stadium, only to have a dude with a sign ruin it all. No one else was very happy – you can see in a photo below all the seat coushins that people threw into the ring in disgust when they cancelled it. I put a few other photos of the ring down below … overall, it was a fun day but it was super disappointing to not see the bullfight after all.
I’ll update about Italy next!
