Spain Part 2 – Flamenco & Culture in Seville….

…..having experienced an excellent flamenco singing, albeit lousy cook/waiter/barman our first night in Seville we set out the next day to find some more. We encountered a guitar player in the Square around the cathedral and started talking with him. He spoke no English but it just happened that a fellow student of his from the Flamenco School, stopped by to see him. Yuki is Japanese, spoke fluent Spanish as well as very good English! We set up a rather bizarre 4 way conversation around where was the best place to see flamenco dancing, singing and guitar. Yuki offered to take us and show us the venue in the maze of streets around Barrio Santa Cruz. He was fascinating to talk with, a professional guitarist in Japan, had spent 2 years riding a push bike from Alaska to South America and was now in Seville studying flamenco guitar on a 3 year course. That night we went to the place he recommended and it was everything flamenco…. passionate, stirring, romantic. So accomplished and complex is the guitar technique that Rod has given up all hope of learning anything but a smidgen!!!!
The Cathedral, like a lot of Christian stuff in Spain has been built on the site of a great mosque, it’s been added to over the years and is now the largest church in the world and has something like 28 side chapels which are monuments to the wealth and style of successive ages. Christopher Columbus is entombed there. It was impossible to photograph the immensity and grandeur of it, but from the top of the bell tower (part of which was once a minaret!) – you can see the courtyard, which has become a cloister. In Moorish times the worshippers would wash their hands and feet in the fountain before going into the mosque. In the Sacristy are the keys to the city, presented to the Christian Conquerers by the Moors and Jews to keep it all intact – astonishing!! However the keys are inscripted in Arabic “May Allah render eternal the dominion of Islam in the city” - watch this space………..
On a much lighter note, this guy was busking for most of an afternoon, the temperature was around 24 degrees……he got our money! Miss you all heaps and will continue this saga…………………..