Rowing in Star Wars

We spent today wandering about Seville and getting a feel for the place. Overall the jury is hung right now.

There are some very, very beautiful places but they are separated by stretches of ugly urban decay. I don’t feel we know enough yet to draw a conclusion about Seville other than the fact that so many locals seem to use the edges of parks as a public toilet is just horrible. The human refuse is demonstrably, but rather less offensively, reinforced by the horses from the vast number of horse-drawn carriages. In stark contrast to Germany, Belgium and Austria, where they also like their horse-carriages, there is no cleaning up after your horse here. Crossing the street can be a medieval trial.

Our favourite stop was the Plaza de Espana. This huge area was built for a world exposition in the 1930s and is a lovely construction of of a huge plaza and surrounding building. With the addition of a couple of futuristic elements it formed the backdrop for a couple of scenes in Star Wars Episode 2. They didn’t change much, but in spite of a lot of looking we didn’t see R2D2 anywhere.

What we did do was hire a rowing boat and navigate the circular canal  The boys gave rowing a good try with Jennifer providing the slave-master drumbeat to keep them working roughly together. What better reason for travelling with your children than to have the row you round an exotic Spanish plaza?

The other futuristic element we discovered on our walk was the Seville rubbish disposal system. The locals bring their rubbish down to these disposal points on the corner (which, now I think of it, look a bit robotic) and vacuum-power whisks rubbish away to a central processing unit.

Now if only the brains behind this had applied themselves to the horses problem.