Seville3 – Thursday - bus tour

I got back from my run and the troops were already awake.  We stopped at the breakfast buffet, fueled up, and headed out to find our hop on/hop off double decker bus stop after some hasty directions from the concierge.  Kate asked a couple more people in the street and got us where we needed to be fairly quickly.  One of the workers at the bus spoke very good English so we hit him up with extra questions, including which bus to take to get us to the train station for our ride 3 days out to Malaga.  He was incredibly helpful. We found out that our 24 hour ticket was extended to 48 hour ticket and also that two walking tours were included.  We rode the full loop once just to see the sights.  The hop ons and offs were a little few and far between.  Only 4 of them on the entire loop and the route only skirted the old downtown so few true areas of interest to hop off at that we couldn’t walk to.  One area of interest we certainly wouldn’t have seen without the bus was the 1992 World’s fair exposition along the river.  On the first loop through I’d noticed how unused it was, almost defunct.  The recorded commentary said that businesses were starting to reuse the buildings and transform the area into a technological center.  Sure, right.  We’d read that there was heavy politics to get the exposition to Seville in 1992, because Seville was suffering from severe unemployment at that point.  The building of the centers for the exposition were certainly a boom for the city, but unfortunately the city was evidently unable to maintain much of it and left many of the buildings go.

  We walked through some nice gardens that were still being maintained, but unfortunately we were the only people there besides the maintenance workers.

  We did see three local teens come down to the park and start swimming off the pier, but that was about it.

  Maybe it was simply the heat of the day and the park is more used in the evening.    I’ll be curious to see if the same has happened in Barcelona with all the infrastructure they built for the Olympic games.  We were now in the heat of the day as we walked past more unused buildings, reaching our bus stop just as one of our buses was pulling out.  About 30 minutes later, one of ours pulled up.  Luckily we had a spot of shade to wait in and the kids were happy enough pretending to play soccer with a brown dried out orange while seated in the shade.  

We arrived back at our initial departure point.  I’d hoped to stop back at the restaurant abutting our hotel, but poor behavior on the bus by the boys meant we were heading back to the hotel.  We ate the remainder of our groceries from the day before and took siesta.  Kate attempted to solve our Travellers Checques woes over the phone.  While out looking for a Western Union for them to wire our cash too, I bumped into an ATM and thought I’d give my worn out card another try.  This machine was sensitive enough to read it and I returned with what felt like a fistful of cash.  After Zeke and Jane awoke from siesta we walked to the nearest grocery and got supper.  I attempted to get a nice 5 euro bottle of wine for Kate and but accidentally bought the fizzy wine.  Yes carbonated wine.  Oh well, maybe it’ll taste better when it goes flat.  Tomorrow the cathedral.  the largest gothic cathedral in the world.