Stevenses in Sevilla!

I was fortunate enough to have my family, including my Grandma, come visit me in Sevilla over Thanksgiving! Despite their jet lag they were troupers while I led them all over the city between fabulous meals.  It was a wonderful few days of laughs, skipping class, being touristy again and hanging out in comfy hotel beds.

I was waiting at the incredibly gorgeous Hotel Alfonso when my family pulled up in the taxi from the airport. My parents got my memo because they showed up wearing the exact same outfit as me: jeans, black jackets and black shoes.  The Stevens uniform, apparently.  My mom and sister were nice enough to leave me with some of their winter clothes since some unfamiliar cold weather followed us from Granada and for the past few weeks the 50° F weather had caused me to walk to school in two pairs of socks and sleep bundled up like a present in a sweatshirt, scarf and hat.

my two families! 

The very first night my family arrived, I threw a large, multilingual dinner at them.  We went to dinner with my host parents, Marta and Juan Luis, Marie, Reed and Don. Before dinner I took my parents to calle Luis de Vargas to show them my home of the past few months.  After the Spanish-English
introductions, which mostly consisted of Marie and me talking and everyone else smiling and nodding at each other, we showed them all around the house and then took off up the river to the restaurant.

At dinner I was entrusted with the task of seating everybody, which was rather more important than you might think considering the language barriers.  We enjoyed delicious food (especially salmorejo, which is gazpacho but better), fabulous company and discovering shared interest (e.g. motorcycles for some of the group… shout out to Ewan and Charlie and the Long Way Round).

The next several days reinvigorated my joy in Sevilla as I acted the tour guide and showed my family all of my favorite places, ordered them all of my favorite Sevillan foods (spinach with garbanzos is your favorite, what?) and attempted to showcase my Spanish skills.  Griffin might be turning into a ham after the amount of jamón iberico  that he ate. Here is a selection of my favorite pictures from the week.

the plaza with Grandma

the crew struts along the Guadalquivir

atop the Giralda

hi parents

Although it is possible to become tired of the plethora of European churches and cathedrals, southern Spain adds a whole new aspect to the tourist destinations with the gorgeous Moorish architecture.  I loved being able to explore the Alcázar again, this time not in the boiling heat.  In the Alcázar we stumbled upon a room filled with huge tapestries including a medieval map of the mediterranean world.  It seemed fitting to have found this fascinating map on my second visit to the Alcázar at the end of November after spending my semester exploring this same region.  Many of the tiny stitched cities on the tapestry surrounded by tiny stitched merchant vessels I was able to picture from memory. Sevilla, Lisbon, Marseille, Barcelona, Tangier, Fez - all important cities then and now. 

When I tried to explain to my family that there was a Roman aqueduct in Sevilla, my dad thought that I said there was an "awkward duck."  Which proved to be even more comical when we were tailed through the Alcázar gardens the same day by such a creature.

watch out for Sevilla's awkward duck

Real Alcázar

I have been instructed not to display our better family photos on the internet as one of them will be used in our upcoming holiday card. So if you are lucky (and if Mom and I get our act together enough to address envelopes) you may see the Stevens family's smiling faces in your mailbox someday soon.  For now you're stuck with this one:

that moment when the doorman jumped into our family photo

I could not have asked for a better Thanksgiving.