And now I’m in Seville

I feel like I’ve been missing in action from my blog for a while, even though it’s only been a little over a week since Cinque Terre.

Maybe because that was two countries (or four cities) ago, and I haven’t written about any of those places. It wasn’t uneventful though:

Avignon was small and kind of charming; I braved some local version of the Santa Ana winds in the early morning to catch my train to Barcelona, which is, incidentally, an awesome city. In Madrid I spent one night in a hostel, and then resigned myself — due to being blindsided by weekend travelers — to staying two nights in an expensive hotel.

There I took my first bath in adult memory and watched Sylvester Stallone and Daniel Dae Kim dubbed in Spanish in their respective movies. I also watched Sky News report breathlessly around the clock on beached ferries in England.

A couple days ago I met a Kiwi on the train who had lost €100 in a shell game on the streets of Barcelona. To compensate, he was sleeping on overnight trains rather than finding beds in hostels. To him destinations were not so much end goals as an incidental byproduct of having slept on a moving train through the night.

Five days — five beds I should say — before I fly back to London, I kind of feel the same way. As if I’m really only interested in each new place (and there are two more) in so far as they offer me another bed, another night, to cross off my countdown to London.

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I reached Seville in the early afternoon and had a stroll about. The one place I wanted to visit, the Giralda, was closed. Nearby, the trees in the Alcazar garden were swollen with oranges. Some had splattered onto the ground. I was amazed no one was picking them to eat. I saw an intact one on the ground and considered picking it up for the sake of vitamin C, but orange has never really been my fruit, let alone road orange.

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It’s late afternoon and I’m lying on my hostel bed staring upward, listening to the birds chirping outside and eating those long rolls of bread with chocolate bits in them — you know the kind. The French girl who is reading next to me is stealing glances at me, I can tell. Maybe I’m retardedly enjoying my bread too much. I’m almost done with Europe. Seville is so quiet. Life is good.