From the rooftop Sevilla looks all white and orange with a generous sprinkling of churches towering above, and some green here and there. The golondrinas have decided to come over from Africa. They're circling around me up here.

I spent the day like a tourist. Went into the back end of Santa Clara neighborhood on a bike, and decided to stop for a sherry at a bar.
Thermometers in different parts of the city registered between 22 and 26.5. The riverside cafes were full, music playing. I took my time between Puente San Telmo and Isabel II. Paradise. Now I am really living in paradise. Green water, blue sky, palm trees, a small motorboat drifting, the passengers sitting back, and Triana on the other side. It would have been too hot for Vancouver people to be wearing jeans.
I had intended to take the train to a random nearby town - I had an intense desire to get near some mountains. I decided to do more research, after going to the train station and being unsure of which one would have a return train on a Sunday.
In Plaza San Fransisco I stopped for a while on a ledge below an ornate building and looked down the road past the cathedral, and at the horses and carriages lined up under the shade. They only have beautiful, spirited horses, and I was taken by an intense desire to go riding and briefly wondered in vain how I could accomplish that. Little kids were using fallen oranges as soccer balls and dogs were fetching oranges. There are still some on the trees, but most have now blossomed and the smell is subtle but beautiful.

I made pancakes for the chicas this morning. I don't yet have any "tree syrup" (may have to make requests for some...) so made do with jam. I had difficulty explaining blueberries recently, as they don't exist here, and the same word is used for them as for cranberries. They call people turkeys here too when they are stupid, and in fact call the teenage years the "ages of turkey/being a turkey".

In Marta's hometown of Segovia, they had running of the bulls whenever there was a fiesta in her neighborhood. Neither her nor Alicia think highly of bullfighting, though it was a quite normal event for Marta in her childhood. Alicia went once to tell her children someday that she went with her parents, but both her and her mother cried. Marta explained that one time it went very badly. All the bulls run towards an enclosure, where the gates are closed and they are all safely inside. But one time they split off, and didn't get there at the same time, so the gate couldn't be closed. Then the ones that have arrived run out again. One bull jumped off a bridge, others were loose in the city. The purpose is to eat them, for the celebration. In this way, killing them is not such a bad thing. They would traditionally make a huge stew, or bull meat with sauce or something. But after mad cow disease, she is not sure whether they've returned to eating the meat at the end. Neither of the girls knew whether there was truth to the accompanying cruelty to horses that is said to happen in the big bullfights. Their dislike of bullfighting has more to do with personal distaste than the politics of animal rights that has seeped into Spain, but is not at all apparent here.
Rabbit as a meat is quite common here, they tell me, and Alicia listed several ways she likes to eat it. In her town, it isn't uncommon for people to kill pigs themselves and she described having witnessed this, including taking its blood first, to make morcilla, a black sausage. They use all the parts of it as food here, and Alicia explained about pig's face, which I was surprised to hear sounds exactly like they do it in China (the entire face, flattened and cured). Here it is sold together with the trotters and I think she said the tail.