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At the Crossroads in Seville

Photos by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen.

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Seville was where we all met at a crossroads in our lives. We were ten Brits, three Canadians and two Americans; ten women and five guys; late teens to late forties all on an English teacher training course (CELTA) at CLIC in Seville, Spain. We were thrown together for a month of intensive study, living together in small groups with strangers who became friends. Seville would be our backdrop, naively chosen by me and some of the others with the idea that by doing the course in Spain we would get to know the city, the people, the culture and maybe pick up a little extra Spanish while we were there. Except that the coursework proved so overwhelming that it left little time to see the sights and meet the locals other than those to who we were teaching English.

But in retrospective I am left with a very strong impression of the city perhaps because of rather than in spite of the workload, the busyness of our days. The standup espresso bars where I stopped several times a day for cheap but always good strong espresso to keep me going for the next lecture or the next assignment. Or the Friday nights standing in a crowd of peopleóother student teachers, our students and myriad strangersóspilling out of a tiny bar and onto the street. Our local friends had figured out that when you end up drinking on the street anyway, you might as well do so outside the bar with the cheapest drinks (albeit we were in a city and country where drinking was pretty much always cheap). Geoff would opine that the combination of a beer followed by an espresso was equal to a napóbecause what busy student had time for a nap?

I only have vague memories of The Alcazar or the famous cathedral but the Irish bar across the street I can still conjure up. The streets themselves though stay with me: a winding labyrinth of narrow streets lined with orange trees and uniformly well preserved historic buildings stretching in all directions. Occasionally you'd get a glimpse inside and realize their real richness was hidden inside with a huge interior patio. I could do the 15 minute walk between the school and our apartment a different route every dayóand often get lost for a while among the flat terrain which offered no landmarks other than the church steeples. Depending on the route chosen I'd pass trendy boutiques or touristy restaurants or local shopping streets or tacky dollar stores. If it was a weekend evening I'd pass teenagers drinking in the street in groups. Each group had a standard kit: a bag of ice, a 2L bottle of pop, a bottle of alcohol and some plastic cups, each one responsible for bringing an item, too young and too broke to drink in the bars which just ended up on the street anyway. On a Sunday, the streets near our apartment became a market specializing in petsóthousands of people and many thousands of birds, puppies, kittens, hamsters, mice, lizards and snakes crammed into a few blocks, so crowded it was hard to move.

At sunset we'd climb onto the roof of our apartment building which, at three stories, was the same height as everything else in Seville; only the cathedral was allowed to be higher. And so the roof offered limitless views along with hanging laundry. As the sun set, the church bells would all begin to ring for 9 o'clockóall on their own slightly off schedule so it was a game to figure out which one would chime next from which quarter of the city. On graduation night we hosted a party on that rooftop. Our Spanish friends thought the hour of the party was very strangeóthey weren't accustomed to getting together before 11 or 12óbut we wanted to share the experience of the bells. When almost no one had showed by sunset we figured the cultural gap was too large to overcome. Instead, as it turned out, I had printed our landlady's address on the invite and they were all a block away trying to figure out where the party was. She eventually figured out where they were trying to get to and the party begun. Until she returned later to kick us all out after complaints from the neighbors.

After the course some of us hung out in Seville for a few more weeks, either to look for work or just because we didn't know what to do next (or was that just me?). I moved from the somewhat modern 4 bedroom apartment where the guys had been placed to a very old traditional 9 or 10 bedroom house with some of the other students and a few other random roomies. The house was three floors plus a tiny room on the roof set around an open courtyard which was open to the elements. By this time the cold November rains had begun and they'd fall directly into the middle of the house and the dampness and cold would invade every corner. We'd huddle in the small shared living rooms which clustered around the courtyard or under a pile of blankets in our rooms or share a few bottles of cheap but always drinkable wine around the big dining room table until we no longer noticed the chill. Always accompanied by music from our resident DJ Dave.

Two and a half years ago we all went our separate waysóoff into the world to teach English, something I've yet to do. As happens I've lost touch with much of the group but it is perhaps more surprising how many times our paths have crossed. I went to Seville to learn to teach English and also to learn if teaching was for me. I worried that I'd be the only one questioning how I wanted to spend the rest of my life and that I'd be surrounded by eager twentysomethings. Instead it was such a diverse group, many of whom had questions similar to mine and an incredible richness of experiences and backgrounds that I couldn't help but learn something from everyone.

Subscribe to TravelBlogs Posted by Doug Dosdall on January 14th, 2006 in Articles.