I´m sitting in a pub, it´s 11:30 pm, I am here in Sevilla Spain for the same reason that all the other tourists are here...to see the grand Christian monument that is the Sevilla cathedral. I´ll be there soon enough, for now, I am trying to beat the midnight heat with a little drink and some tapas that come at only 1,50 Euros. It´s quite a deal. Tapas are these mini kind of sampler dishes that basically put together whatever the chef feels like putting on the menu that day. For a lesson on Spanish cuisine, check out another blog, or ask me if you really actually do want to know. What I am struck with, more than anything, is the irony of what my senses presently are taking in. American music, and therefore English music, pipes out of the bar´s speakers at a rather catchy volume, I am ordering whatever tapa sounds like a cool name because I don´t speak an ounce of Spanish and the bar tender certainly speaks even less English. So far I´ve been lucky. My head is buried in a book called ¨The British Empire¨ by Nial Ferguson who is going to great lengths to demostrate the many precarious ways in which it just so happened to turn out that the lingua franca of the world ended up being english. And then I here the clop clop of yet another horse drawn carriage whisk by. The lighting in the bar is reminiscent of an old tavern travellers pub which this place could very easily be on some of the trading roads I´ve been riding my bike along the ancient trade roads that linked the Moors empire between Cordoba, Granada, and Malaga. And that´s where I find my imagination taken back to...even amidst the reality that I am sitting in a pub, sipping on a drink, probably made in England or China thanks to the effects of globalization, listening to modern day American pop that my bar tender hums along to without knowing what any of it means...hearing the trot of horses that take the wealthiest visitors from the cathedral who probably not too long earlier arrived by airplane...all the while as I read a book written by a modern day scholar (perhaps even British but he could be American!) intent on disiminating the knowledge required to tell future generations why it is that I am listening to this music at midnight in a pub a block away from the largest Christian cathedral in the world. It is as ridiculous as are the flying butresses that jet out of the Cordoba cathedral! Take one of the largest mosques in the old world and convert it into a cathedral. You wont fool too many. Somehow the mezquita stand or is supposed to stand somehow triumphant as the gem of the Christian reconquest of the 15th century when the Moors were pushed further South and eventually off of the Iberian peninsula. Such is the history of Spain, of Empires, of defending and invading, of a world we have still not shaken.

Comments

[Tam]

I want to know!!!! I am a curious girl and would like to know about the spanish cuisine. Well, I am glad you are having a good time so far and can't wait to read more. Will talk to you later as I need to go get ready for work now, miss ya!!!

[Elishia B.]

Hey there stranger!! So glad to see that you are posting about your adventures!! Cant wait to see some pictures!! We all miss you here, and hope that you are having as much fun as your blog says :)

Cheers!

[D. Spencer]

Matt,

1) Love the beard.

2) Niall Ferguson is a Scot. He came to the states a couple of years ago (to Harvard), but not too recently to have been corrupted by the American way.

3) You should talk to Katrina when you get back. Her graduate thesis at Columbia outlined why the EU will ultimately fail. Plus, she was a missionary in Prague, so you can swap stories about Budapes, Lubljana, et al. I have a feeling that your stories will be much richer than hers.

Cheers.