While we were out today, our rep had the wifi fixed so everything is fine in the apartment and it has made its way into my top 10 apartments I have ever rented. Tons of storage, good location, loads of room. For example, here's the living room with the Eames chair.
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| Living Room
And here's that picture of the chocolate Pieta from the Chocolate Museum in Barcelona. I couldn't find it yesterday. You can't tell from the picture, but it is almost life size, unlike the small Don Quixote scene:
The touristy part of Seville which is close to the Cathedral and Alcazar has some fine restaurants. Most of them have very few tables outside but that's where everyone wants to eat because the inside of most of them is not air-conditioned. That's all very pleasant except for the fact the sidewalks are narrow and the tables are 2 inches from the street. So you're taking your life into your hands because cars will parallel park one inch from your table.
Yesterday, we wondered who in their right mind would stand in a long line and wait to get into the Cathedral, especially when it was going to close in a half hour. We found out that in order to get the no-line tickets, you had to buy them the day before so we bought them at a tourist information shop. Then we ordered tickets online for the Alcazar for today which you can download onto your phone. So we spent a few hours touring both of these sites.
Another magnificent cathedral here in Seville. It has a tower which we did not go up because it takes climbing many steps to get there. One of its claims to fame is that Columbus is buried there (supposedly) after having been moved around from country to country. It is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world and the third largest church.
 
This blog is doing that weird thing where it won't let you caption so above is the tower of the Cathedral and to the right is a representation of Columbus' funeral which is in the cathedral.
The Alcazar royal palace is a two minute walk from the cathedral. Again, we bypassed the long line and went directly in although we had to produce our passports to prove we were old enough to have purchased the senior tickets. The palace was originally a Moorish fort; it is the oldest royal palace still in use in Europe. The palace is huge and contains beautiful tile work in every room as well as some ancient tapestries. It is the garden, however, which is the highlight of this place. The garden has various sections with some kind of fountain or waterfall as the center of each one. If you had the time, you could spend a day roaming around the gardens.
Below is a picture of some of the arches in the Alcazar and one of the ceilings.
 
For dinner, we went to the oldest bar in Seville, El Rinconcillo which serves traditional Spanish cuisine. It was originally a convent but has been a restaurant since 1860, passed down through 7 generations of the same family. It is famous as a stand-up tapas bar but we decided to sit at a table and eat a meal. That was the wrong choice; the food was mediocre. We also got a little turned around getting there. Lola had made the solemn vow never to get lost in Seville even though the streets are narrow and windy and almost as confusing as Venice or Prague. She has been a perfect navigator until tonight but we had strayed just a little from the correct path. It is not so bad getting turned around or lost at night since it's much cooler then.
Tomorrow we are going to Granada to see the Alhambra. The train takes about 3 hours so we are taking an overnight bag and staying there one night. We're going to walk to the train station because that seems to be about 10 minutes less than by taxi or bus. When we originally were driven from the train station, even the driver laughed about how, because of all the one-way streets, we drove in a gigantic circle to get to our street. Besides being one way, the streets are so narrow that those without sidewalks force pedestrians to go into a doorway to allow cars to pass.
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