Stef on Stuff: A Roman City, a Monastery, and Shrimp

Saturday was these three things. Courtney and I tragically missed our class trip to Italica, a well-preserved Roman city outside Sevilla in favor of our cultural exploration at the beach last weekend. Our hostfam graciously offered to take us this weekend to see what we had missed out on, but in a car, whenever we woke up, and for free. Sweetdeal. So Luis Manuel and Ana led the way to Santiponce, the equivalent of a suburb 15 minutes outside Sevilla.

No suburb I know has a monastery from the 1300s next to a gladiator-ready amphitheatre, but whatever. Save that, Santiponce is your average Spanish town: A church, a bunch of bodegas, a lot of white houses, a gas station, and a backdrop of mountains.

We picked up Luis Manuel's friend Jose Luis on the way. JoLu was the kind of Spaniard our teacher explained as a Pico - the type who wears brightly colored Ralph Lauren polos and lives in Los Remedios, the barrio with cute cafes and Tommy Hilfiger-clad children clutching their wedge-footed mothers' hands on their way to and from Catholic school. JoLu was amiable as they come and enjoyed speaking broken English to match our broken Spanish. If he hadn't been 30 and my height, Courtney and I might have even asked for his number.

In the monastery, we saw many preserved paintings, hymnal books from five hundred years ago, and a German-speaking tour group. The monastery reminded me of the abandoned jail facility in Wingdale, NY near camp... Incredibly extensive architecture, much of it barred off to society, and clearly holding incredible secrets, many potentially scandalous. I spent my time wandering through, imagining what noble families did to get their seals painted on the walls and whether or not San Isidoro actually sat on the piece of some well that the monks had worshipped as a relic. This Medieval religious artwork is becoming a casual everyday thing, and I like it.

We shifted a bunch of centuries earlier to Italica, down the street. Admission was free to wander around some Roman people's 'houses' and gardens and theaters and markets. While many of the walls are just a couple of stones or bricks high, you can definitely see the scope of the city, the size of the rooms, and a ton of leftover mosaics. So many mosaics. The people must have spent their entire existence laying tiles. Bird-shaped tiles, flower-shaped tiles, people-shaped tiles, mythic creature-shaped tiles. So many colorful tiles. It's weird that they built huge houses and those were all destroyed but colorful tiles have weathered a millionjillion years of Spanish droughts and earthquakes and such.

See for yourself. I had lots of fun with Courtney's camera's panorama setting - it only captures a fraction of what I saw which is only a fraction of how things once were. After we went back in time, we went to two different tapas places and had tinto de verano (sprite and wine), some local Mistela wine, and lots of cheese, patatas aioli, and tuna with roasted red peppers. The meat/seafood eaters had an ambiguous dish of presumable pork cubes and then, shrimp. Not just neat little pink shrimp cocktail shrimp. Shrimp with whisker-y tentacles and ugly little black eyes on their creepy boney heads. I was glad I don't eat shrimp. Luis Manuel still found it amusing to wave the shrimp's crazy hair in my face. I was less amused, but happy from tinto and mistela and a wonderful afternoon.

Middle ages or Roman imperial times, the world used to be way cooler. Living in Spain is probably the next best thing to time travel.