My day in Seville was an unexpected one. I had planned with some other girls, who were studying abroad from LMU, like me, to go on a trip to Morocco through a tour group that was leaving from Seville. We had to take a separate bus that took us from Madrid to Seville. We ended up buying our tickets for 1 am Friday morning (we didn’t have the itinerary for the tour group yet) and found out afterward that our bus from Seville to Morocco wouldn’t leave until 5pm. So I ended up having two trips in one weekend, one in Morocco and a short trip in Seville. I didn’t know that I would be exploring Seville until the actual morning I arrived. It ended up being a pleasant surprise  to see Southern Spain for the first time (even though I was sleep deprived from sleeping uncomfortably on a bus all morning).

The day ended up being gorgeous and the city greeted me with the familiar palm trees I see so much back in California. Like the rest of Spain, the city and architecture was beautiful, but Seville was much different than Madrid. First of all, their metro system was outside, above ground, rather than being an underground transportation system. It was more like a trolley. While walking on the streets we had to keep an eye out for the metro so we wouldn’t accidentally step in front of it. Another thing was that I saw horse-drawn carriages everywhere. What was funny was that I saw horse-drawn carriages not only on walkways, parked in front of castles and churches, but also mixed in traffic along with cars and buses. It was an interesting scene to witness.

It was Valentine’s Day weekend so all of us girls had to follow the tradition of eating ice cream (ice cream always successfully replaces our lack of a man). We decided that we needed to document our moment with our jumbo ice cream cones and ended up snagging two Spanish guys to take our picture. One of the guys ended up jumping into our picture (so we had our Valentine after all). Although I chose one of the horses as my own personal Valentine. Once we happily scarfed down our ice cream we began to explore Seville.

We walked along the Guadalquivir River and then decided to search for the Plaza de España, since it was one of the places that we supposedly had to see while in Seville. I soon found out why. The Plaza de España is located is the Parque de María Louisa, which we noticed was a lot different than the Parque Retiro in Madrid. The park seemed to have a ‘jungle’ look to it, as my friends said, with luscious green, wild plants. When we spotted the Plaza de España through the trees, I gasped and instantly went crazy with my camera. I had no idea what the plaza looked like and I definitely wasn’t expecting this beautifully decorated building with a little moat going through it. What was especially interesting was how the little bridges and benches along the plaza were decorated with colorful, flowery tiles. Watching a horse-drawn carriage drive through the plaza definitely completed the scene before me. Even though I didn’t get to see all of Seville and even though I was running on about three hours of sleep, I was happy to have had an extra mini-trip added to my trip to Morocco.