Sultans, Sangria and Hot Hot Sun in Seville

"Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Portugal any more"

Foodie moment

Hyped as the oldest tapas bar in Seville, El Rinconcillo is quite the experience. The bar is manned by perhaps the oldest waiters in Seville who don't seem to have much patience for tourists. Regardless, you stand at a barrel or the bar, guess what you want from the menu, it appears quickly and your waiter chalks the tally of the bill on the bar in front of you. Noisy, atmospheric, tasty but not the best tapas we have had so far.

Our trip to Coloniales tapas bar was the start of an annoying tradition of us finding our favourite restaurants, on our last night in the city! The prices were cheap, the portions were huge and the food amazing. We had beef in port wine sauce, Quail eggs with pesto and Stuffed eggplant with cheese. We highly recommend this one!

Cultural moment

After being in Portugal, it was a bit of a shock to return to Spain and find an unwillingness to make an effort to communicate with us in English. This is particularly the case with bus drivers, old man waiters and any shop keepers in general! It was hard to get used to not being able to rely on English as a backup again.

Seville have an interesting way of designating bike lanes. The use silver disks on the footpaths to create a path, safer for the bikes, but be careful if you're a pedestrian!

Wow moment

The Real Alcazar is truly the highlight of Seville sightseeing. It is a royal palace built during the tenth century and is the oldest royal palace in Europe still in use. Many highlights of Spanish history have taken place here, and the amazing mixture of architectural styles is amazing to see. With a large focus on Arabic designs, tiling and scripture it was unlike anything we have seen.

Plaza de Espania was much more impressive than we were expecting, it is a large square that features towering buildings surrounding a man made lake that flows around the outside of the square. It has tiled murals with mosaic designs of each region of Spain. There are neat little bridges that cross the lake at points. The whole place is very symmetrically laid out. You can hire row boats for the lake as some teenagers did and we watched them mistake them for dodgem cars with each other.

What we learnt today

Although much of history focuses on the conflict between the Moors and the Spanish, in fact the times of peace and even mutual respect were much longer. There are many traces of Moorish culture which can still be found in Spanish culture.