10-24 Flamenco

Flamenco

One man with a classical guitar, one dancer in two changes of costume and one singer/clapper, in a small club with folding chairs set up in front of a tiny stage. The three performers work up a copious sweat as they improvise, and each drop is pure "duende," or Andalucian soul.

Flamenco is Sevilla and Sevilla is flamenco. These three, in their twenties or thirties, are the real thing. First, the guitar plays solo, then the singer and guitarist do a few duets, and then the dancer comes out and blows the house down. We still can't figure out how she moves her feet so fast and so powerfully, like a tap dancer in big boots, in polyrhythms so complex and yet matched perfectly by the guitarist.

We're leaving Seville, to be in the Andaluz hill town of Ronda for a birthday dinner tomorrow, then moving on to Granada and an all-day feast for the eyes in the Alhambra on Sunday. It is pouring rain, off and on. We don't know if the Virgin of Good Travelers has any power in the Moorish Alhambra.

Seville is magic. We've decided it is no longer either wise or possible to be prudent with our pathetic dollars so we're drinking the good riojas now in tapas bars. Today, we told our buddy, the counter man who seems to spend half his hours slicing ham off the leg of one or another of the pigs you see suspended from his ceiling, to just bring us whatever he wanted and that's how we got to taste the Marquez de Murietta '06 Reserva Rioja, and to go with it the kobe beef with onion salpicon and the Iberico Salchichon, which is just the best salami you've ever tasted. We're talking small tapa servings here -- a few tapas and this glorious wine come to around €10.

We also had the pulpo yesterday - specialty of the house. Neither of had ever tasted octopus before and let me tell you it's meaty, not squishy, nothing like calamari, just slightly chewy, delicious fish, only with nothing fishy about it. Hard to describe.

We arrived in a total downpour - the cab drivers can't get a car into the old Jewish Quarter, now called Santa Cruz, because the streets are so narrow they're called 'kissing lanes.' It was like a hurricane. The cabbie collected his fare inside, then ran outside, dumped our roller bags onto the flooding cobbles and sped away. We had no choice but to run down a tiny, dark ancient road, trying to keep umbrellas over our heads while splashing through puddles looking for something that looked like a hotel.

The hotel is something like a hotel.

We'll be back to Seville in a few days