Seville : Saturday 16th April

All of the days have blurred into one so I'm struggling to remember everything correctly...

On the Saturday morning we went for a walk along the river in the Triana area and headed into the centre. Here are lots of pictures of the Spanish streets with an incredibly attractive young lady sat in front of the Guadalquivir river!

Wow, she is incredibly attractive!

We decided to head down towards the infamous Seville bull ring and got some how caught up in a parade or demonstration about something or other...!

This is the bull ring from the outside.

We got a guided tour around the bull ring and learnt a lot. We were led into the main arena, which unusually is oval due to construction mistakes (I think, if I remember correctly).

There's that incredibly attractive girl again!

This is where the members of the Royal Family sit. If there are no royals present then this booth stays empty.

Spectators can choose whether they would like to sit in the sun or the shade and tickets cost from €25 to €150.

There are four entrances into the arena. One for the bull, one for the bullfighter, one for the bullfighter to be taken away and given medical attention if need be, and another for the bull to be dragged off once killed by three mules.

We entered the museum that was covered in hefty, scarily hung bull heads. All of the heads are of the bulls that had put up an admirable fight in the ring (wouldn't you, if you were being teased to your death?!). The heads were pretty daunting, I'm sure once dead the bull could still kill if that head fell on you! Some of them had their ears cut off, apparently the bullfighters cut them off and kept them as a trophy. Nice.

The guide told us that bull fighting originally started as military training. There was a statue of an eagle balancing on a stone with a ring in it's mouth and the soldiers would have to thrust their lance (oi, oi!) through the right whilst on horseback and detach the ring from the bird. Another exercise was similar but there was a statue of a man holding a wooden head, suspended by a metal chain. The soldiers had to disconnect the wooden head from the statue, again using the lance on horseback. Here are a few pictures of the outfits they used to wear, if anyone cares to see!

I can't quite remember what happened but somehow they replaced the statues with bulls and then it became more of a show than military training. Also the cavalry were used to tire the bull before a bullfighter would take on the bull on foot. The 'game' consists of thrusting arrows into the bull and then killing the bull in the most painless manner possible, reducing the bull's suffering, as she said! I'm not sure if I've remembered that all correctly but it was something along those lines! Whoops! I've tried to look it up on Wikipedia but it's not quite what the woman told us. She did tell us, however, that since 1992 there have been two deaths in the ring across Spain (bullfighter deaths, the bulls are always killed) and both unfortunately happened in Seville. She didn't mention the number of injuries that have actually led to death out of the ring, which I can imagine is crazily high. She showed us around the bullring's hospital (every bullring legally should have one) and also the chapel, where the bullfighter can pray before entering the ring.

We took a walk around the the outside of the ring (I've been told I've been putting too many photos of things and landscapes and not enough of me so here y'are!).

We wandered along the river in the boiling sun and made our way to the Plaza de Espana, normally the biggest and most beautiful park of the city. It didn't disappoint! Check out the photos!

Yes... It was hot!

Dark, but another one of me for y'all!

There are tiles all around the Plaza dedicated to the main towns in Spain and Annalisa and I took photos of the towns we were going to visit or that we had already visited. Not interesting but I have photos so they're going up! We were disappointed to see that they didn't have Melilla!

We sat and chilled in the sun all afternoon reading in the Plaza de Espana before heading back to the hostel. We timed things badly and everything seemed to be shut, or not serving food. We settled on a MacDonalds (ssssh!) and went back to the hostel to play cards with a German guy in the flat. He said he had a bottle of red wine and cracked open a posh box that was a present for his brother! It turned out the wine was sweet dessert wine that is stronger than normal wine - therefore fairly difficult to digest in normal quantity like a glass of Rioja. Anyway, we played a few games of cards, got scared by a humongous cockroach that decided to come out to play and hit the hay quite late.

Christian with his brother's gift from Spain - yum!

Our friend, the cockroach.

I'm putting full albums of all the photos we took each day on Facebook if you're interested in flicking through those. There are just a few from each day on the blog.

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