A Siesta from the Fiesta

From Seville, Spain

Not a lot happened yesterday, and for good reasons. I decided that I needed a day off from all the running around, just to catch up with all the boring things in life that you often forget about while traveling, such as laundry. I pushed off doing laundry as long as I could, but when you start realizing that that foul smell is not coming from some place else...but from you, it´s time to do something about it.

I took a page out of my traveling companion´s book and tried washing clothes by hand in the sink. Since I only have a few shirts and shorts, it doesn´t justify going to the laundromat and dishing out 6 € to do the job. The washing went fine, but the drying part is what doesn´t work so well. You string the clothes up to dry in your room, and the place suddenly smells like a mildew farm. I´m sure my fellow roommates weren´t too happy. Since I had to go walk into town to buy a new camera, I decided to kill two birds with one stone. So I wore half my damp clothes outside so they´d dry in the warm Spanish sun. Within a half an hour, they were dry. In normal life, I wouldn´t ever go to the extremes that I´m doing here. But as a backpacker, you´re in a different world, having to adapt constantly and do things that most people would consider insane.

Buying a new digital camera wasn´t nearly as hard as I thought it would be. I had located my store the day prior, but spent 30 minutes wandering around the center of town yesterday trying to find it again. Spain has this store called "El Corte Ingles," which I guess means "The English Court." If you can imagine JC Penney´s combined with a Circuit City, Bed Bath and Beyond, IKEA and grocery store...then that would be El Corte Ingles. The town of Sevilla has about 6 of them, but each store only sells certain items in its arsenal of stuff. One store might sell furniture, while the other specializes in children´s clothes. So I ended up going to about 3 different ones yesterday until I finally found the one that sold electronics. They actually had some pretty decent prices on cameras. I ended up getting one made by Fuji, but the instruction manual is written completely in Spanish. Should be an interesting ride on the bus today figuring out how to work my camera.

I also stopped by El Corte Ingles´ supermarket. At a first glance, Spanish culture and supermarkets are very similar to what you´d find in the United States. But as you start digging deeper, you start noticing small diferences. For example, "No touching the produce!" The Spanish are very germophobic here. You must put on a pair of plastic gloves just to pick up a damn apple to buy. I made a mistake yesterday by picking up an apple to see how much it weighed, and the snippy employee yelled at me, so I dropped the apple and ran off to hide in the bread section. So I didn´t get my apple. Besides, produce is EXTREMELY expensive here. My cheap bananas in the U.S. are about 5 times the price here, probably because they have to travel a much farther distance from South America to get here.

Another difference you will find is that if you look around a supermarket, or almost any bar or restaurant in Spain, you will find these legs of cattle just hanging from the ceiling. Big, beefy cow hoofs which appear to have been preserved with a coat of laquer or varnish. It looks very unsanitary for a culture so obsessed with not spreading disease. They must use some special process to preserve the meat, so families can just take it home, throw the cow leg on the table and tell the kids to "dig in!" I was looking around the store to see if they had a vegetarian version of the cow leg, but didn´t see one. Now don´t get me wrong...I do like Spanish bacon...that´s some good tasty stuff. But I´m all about the presentation of my food, and if I see my meat coming straight from a nasty cow leg hanging up from the ceiling for who knows how long, then I think I´ll just order the vegetable dish.

One more slight difference you will notice about supermarkets is that employees won´t bag anything for you. That´s not a big deal for me, since I pretty much do it myself back home at the local WinCo supermarket. But it´s odd at first. The cashier will ask you if you want a bag (balsuda?), so you think he/she will throw your stuff in it. But they just shove the bag to the side and start pushing the next person´s food in with yours until it becomes a big mess. So you have to jump and start stuffing your bag quick so you don´t hold up traffic. Like I said, this is not a big deal, but when you´re not familiar with the culture, it can be a little awkward.

I spent Friday evening drinking cheap wine, eating a frozen pizza with the other travelers at the hostel and reading "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer. The book is about crazy people who push themselves to the limit by doing something extremely stupid on the other side of the planet, just to prove that they can. Sounds a little familiar, doesn´t it?

It´s off to Granada next. Catch ya again at the next Internet station.