Feasting

You wait a whole month for an entry, and then two come along at once. Part one is here.

Whenever you travel somewhere new, its tastes and colours and sounds rush at you like a happy child. Like in my favourite photo from Andalucía; the one I never took.

After a morning of wandering around Cádiz, we stopped at a pavement café just up from the markets for lunch. Not the best food we’d had, but some of the best entertainment: at the table behind me a small boy was capering about in full Spider-Man costume, lacking only web-shooters and the bit covering his chin. Jane pointed him out just as he ran past us and uphill to the end of the block. He turned around; paused; and then galloped back down with a big toothy grin on his face, his eyes meeting mine as he passed. Click. (If only.)

Jane watched him throughout the meal, and I snuck a peek once or twice. He was hiding behind the waiters as they were taking orders and watching for customers. Their professional mien was undermined a bit by juxtaposition with a five-year-old in red and blue.

Eventually a woman in her fifties (it must have been his grandmother) called him over and started shooing him up the street. He skipped and danced around her—then give her a Spidey-powered poke in the bum. The last I saw of Marvel’s most popular superhero, he was being chased around a corner by a feisty señora twice his size.

The next morning we drove to Seville, my favourite of the cities we visited. Its cathedral is huge (a contender with St Peter’s and St Paul’s for biggest in the world, depending which measure you use); but even better was the Alcázar, my first taste of insanely ornate Moorish palaces. I can’t say I’d be that keen to spend a lifetime inscribing the Koran in plaster, but you have to admire the results.

Córdoba, although a lot smaller than Seville, was even more Islamic in feel, with its hidden tea-houses, sunlit alleyways, and sprawling mosque-turned-cathedral. The Mezquita’s interior is row upon row of columns and arches, hypnotic in their regularity, although the gothic church built smack in the middle tends to break the trance. Not as much as the aural accompaniment, though: the whole place was under restoration, and we soon learned that enormous, enclosed spaces are acoustically perfect for carrying the sound of jackhammers. No delicate plasterwork being restored here, unless they were carving the Koran in letters eight feet high.

You can see all of these, and more, in Andalucía part two. But you can’t see the best bits, because I ate them: like the beautifully simple combination of bacalao (strips of salt cod) with peeled and sliced onions and navel oranges, dressed in olive oil—a specialty of the Taberna Salinas in Córdoba.

Seville, though, is the true home of tapas, and nothing beat those few warm nights of walking past the spot-lit cathedral into the Barrio Santa Cruz, hopping from bar to bar and trying a bit of everything: tortilla, chorizo, queso, pollo, and the best olives I’ve ever eaten—fat, fleshy fruit the size of plums. I found a one-and-a-half kilo jar in a supermarket and brought it back with me. But I’m loathe to open it, because once the last one slips down my throat it all slips into the past.

Not yet, though. There’s still part three to come.

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