Day: November 15, 2015

Wynette: We are on our way home. Took a train to Madrid today and will fly to Albuquerque tomorrow. So we had to say goodbye to Sevilla this morning.

Charlie and I both had pretty bad colds the last half of the trip. It slowed us down a bit and we often crashed in the evening, instead of writing a blog post, but we still had a great time. There is more we want to write about. We plan to do some more blog posts about the trip after we get home so if you check back in a week or two (or more?) there will probably be a few more posts.

Last night we did our last paseo (evening stroll) in our neighborhood of Los Remedios. All over Spain, and probably Europe, people come out of their houses in the evening to stroll and socialize. There’s a perfect mixture of old, middle, and young people. All ages. Lots of young children playing with each other. If you click on the above photo to blow it up, count all the baby strollers.

In Spain they call it the paseo.  In Italy they call it the passeggiata.

Wynette: A few days ago Charlie and I did another Segway tour. Three hours this time. We were the only ones. A private tour! We told our guide, Jose, we’d been in Sevilla for over 4 weeks and had seen most of the main sites so he was thrilled to take us up north to places he doesn’t usually get to go, where tourists don’t go so much. One of the sites we saw was an old monastery. There were some modern art installations there. A nice combination of the old and the new. You probably can’t miss the art in the photo below.

We rode our Segways for 10 miles. We might write more about the tour (and Jose) after we get home, but wanted to post these two photos. After we got back to the Segway office at the end of the tour, we asked Jose if we could take his picture and, at that, he orchestrated for us to get back on our Segways and for another person at the company to take a photo of all three of us.

We were all saying “patata” while his helper was snapping pictures. “Patata” is what the Spanish say to make a smile for a photos. As our airbnb host explained to us, the Spanish don’t say “cheese” because the word for cheese in Spanish is “queso”  (kay-so) which sort of makes you frown. “Patata” (pah-ta-ta) is the Spain word for potato (as opposed to “papa” in Latin America).  Something about a bunch of people saying “patata” together makes you want to smile.