Seville Part I - Tapas Tour

Why should I pay more?

Hostels should introduce a snorer’s card. It would work like this: a snorer wakes someone up and that person reports them to reception. If two people in the same room report a snorer, the snorer gets a mark against their name, linked to their passport number and stored on the hostel chain’s database, so they can be identified where ever they go.

Once a snorer wakes up, say, 10 people in a month, they get put in a snorers room for six months. Snorers either sleep, reform, or get sick of staying awake at night and decide to pay for a hotel.

Paying for a hotel is what I have to do now to avoid people who snore in hostels. Why should I pay more to sleep quietly? Ear plugs, you say? They never stay in my narrow kinked ears.

Hotels are isolating, especially cheap ones, so in Seville I book a hostel. Because youth hostels have failed to treat snorers differently, I pay for a private room with a shared bathroom that costs more double room in a two-star hotel with a private bathroom.

From reception my room is five minutes walk around Seville’s narrow, graffitied streets to another building, up three flights of stairs, through a four-bed dorm and past a shared bathroom whose major plumbing is in the paper-thin wall next to my bed.

So I pay more to not actually stay in the hostel, to wait for the roar of water through the shower pipes and the fall of piss and the plop of shit into the toilet bowl, and the flush that follows.

Tapas Tour

The plus side is that the hostel organises social nights. Thursday is tapas tour night, starting at nine o’clock. Six Euros gets you the first drink and a tapa; later you pay the guide a tip, although no-one tells you this at the start.

Once the group is assembled at the ground floor reception, we pay and get a ticket stub for entry to the first bar.

‘Shall we have a drink and a tapa here?’ the guide asks.

Everybody nods and we walk upstairs to the hostel bar, hand the stub to the barman who gives us sangria and salt-hardened vognole drowned by oil. It takes half a dozen transparent serviettes to soak up the grease. We all praise the young, gangly man behind the bar who made them.

So I’ve paid six Euros for a promissory stub downstairs which I give back to the hostel a three flights of stairs later. Why the subterfuge about paying the hostel six Euros?

After the vognole we follow the guide for half an hour across the Guadalquivir River and come to a street where the tapas are supposed to be cheaper. I take in nothing about the walk. I cannot see the moon or stars for the clouds, lose all sense of direction. It is a free feeling, following a guide, not caring where you’re going, just looking to enjoy the company of whoever comes along.

The Spanish guide

It turns out the guide is a compact, strong looking sculptor who works for subsistence pay form the hostel so he can sculpt in the other hours. He rightly fears the Spanish national election in a week. The conservatives are sure to win, which means big cuts in public spending, especially art. Spain is in big trouble with twenty-five percent unemployment and forty-five percent youth unemployment.

The guide has already heard the answer to Spain’s problems on the radio – “fixing things”.

‘Fixing things?’

‘Yeah. The guy on the radio said Spanish people have always had high unemployment, and because of this we are good at fixing things ourselves. If we can just start fixing things, we will start the economy going again.’

I’m no economist, but surely fixing things just gets you back to square one. It’s no solution. If you could export fixing things, who would you export it to – somewhere worse off? There are few places worse off than Spain. If I were a country like Germany, with the lowest unemployment rate in twenty years, I would not want to pay Spain to fix anything.

The only way to export fixing things is to export people, which means fewer people to do the work and get the economy going again, which in turn means nothing will actually get fixed and suddenly your worse off.


It's no good talking politics and economics to an artist when it comes to the national economy. Artists think individuals matter – which they do – but national economies are about production, where individuals don’t matter – which they don’t.

He takes us to two tapas bars, where presumably he gets a payback, and then to a series of empty bars with glaring light and bars of spoke-thin twenty year old women with too much lipstick waiting for guys a bit younger than us to tell them how beautiful they are.

The guide wants us to talk to the women. He must think that the allure of sex at the end of the night will keep everyone following him. Oddly, he does not consider the practicality that nearly everyone is staying in a dorm, and that many Spanish women live at home until they are married.

I let others talk to the guide.

The lanky Frenchman

In the crowd of around eight is a lanky Frenchman who on the way to the river walks into me every alternate step. I can’t decide if he uncoordinated, arrogant, stupid, or if he just has no sense of space or direction. He helpfully corrects my French when I try to explain to him what I do. We don’t talk much after that, but he is not all bad – the next morning I hear him laugh at a mumbling fast-talking American who is travelling from Seville to Brussels and then back to Rome (“a triangle without the third side” the American calls it) in two weeks so he can say he’s travelled Europe.

The Canadian and the northern suburbs Melburnian

There is a vivacious woman from Melbourne’s northern suburbs who mostly talks to an already-drunk Canadian about golden showers and how a friend of hers had to 'pretend to be gay' to be in a porn film for money.

I don’t spend much time talking to them either.

But I find out it is his second visit to Seville in a week. ‘I don’t care where I go,’ he slurs. ‘I just want to spend my time with other travellers. Get to know them. So Mel says she was going to Seville, and I said OK, lets go there then. Tomorrow we can catch a bus to Granada.’

I imagine him as a lost and lonely young man. He says he is travelling with Mel, but must have spent some hours by himself today to be smashed by the time the tour starts.

The Belgian

A Belgian brings his heavy camera because, as well as being a photographer, he loves taking photos. He constantly clicks the camera at Fanny, who doctors in Geneva and is holidaying alone. Just about everyone fancies her – including me – but only he chooses the seductive technique of photographing her while she takes money from cash machine.

It’s hard to trust creative people who love what they do and take their tools everywhere. People I know with a real creative ability love finishing what they often find frustrating to do: they love achievement, not activity.

I am glad he is photographing her and not everyone else, especially me. I want too much to be invisible.

The Irishman

There is an Irishman who doesn’t stop talking about Ramses II once I say I’m going to Egypt. I have half my hearing tuned into what he is saying, and half my sight focused on Fanny, the first single woman I have met since New York.

‘Is it a good time to be going to Egypt?’ he asks.

‘People have been asking that question for 20 years.’

‘True.’

‘Maybe it will be worse in a year’s time. Last time I looked at the British Foreign Office website the news wasn’t so bad. They weren’t saying people should stay away.’

‘You don’t sound English.’

‘I’m Australian.’

‘What did their website way?'

‘I didn’t look.’

‘What?’

‘I’m not sure I trust travel advice from Australia. I’m never convinced about the wisdom of Australian foreign policy. Take the relationship with China. For the past 60 years Australia has had the same policy – trade and contain. In the 50s and 60s we sold them wool and wheat, which we thought they might be used to make uniforms for soldiers who were helping North Vietnam fight a war against the South. At the same time we sent troops fight the North. 

‘What we do now is to sell China every material we can to help its domestic economy. We support it to become an economic power that will challenge US power in the Pacific, yet we keep forging closer ties with the US to contain China militarily.’

‘Maybe this trade and contain policy shows a long battle between Foreign Affairs and Defence about what our foreign policy should be, but in the end it is a hedge. I’m just not convinced that the government understands where the threat actually lies. If it doesn’t know the threat, how can it give advice?

‘Besides, I want to go to Egypt.’

The Dutchman

The last person in the group is a copywriter from Amsterdam who speaks at least five languages.

‘Where are you from?’ he asks. ‘I’m trying to work out where people are from by their accent. Yours sounds a bit American.’

‘Most people in Australia think I’m English, but English people think I’m Australian.’

‘So what are you then?’

‘I’m Australian.’

‘Why are you in Spain?’

‘I came to Seville for the Cathedral. I’m going to Cordoba for the mosque, Granada for the Alhambra, Madrid for the art and Barcelona for Gaudi and anything else I can find.’

‘Where have you travelled so far?’

‘San Francisco, Toronto, New York, Paris … Slovenia, Venice, Rome, Florence, Switzerland. Then here. It’s been about three months so far.’

‘What’s the highlight?’

‘I’d go out to museums during the day and see the purchased art of Europe from the last thousand years. Hardly anything was American. Then I’d go out at night and listen to jazz, the great American contribution to 20^th century music.

‘The art that is lasting, on the walls and in the display cabinets, is European. And the American music ephemeral. It was as if nothing bound the city together in terms of a concrete American identity, except the buildings and the Brooklyn Bridge. Amazing place, but strange in this way.

‘Have you ever lived in New York?’

‘No.’

‘Overseas anywhere?’

‘Not really.’

‘That’s a shame. I think you would have enjoyed that.’

‘Yes.’

The Irishman joins us.

Fanny

‘Where do you think Fanny is from?’ asks the Dutchman.

‘Switzerland,’ I say.

‘Really? How do you know that?’

‘She told me.’

‘But she doesn’t sound Swiss, and she speaks French and English fluently.’

‘Spanish too,’ says the Irishman.

We look at her.

‘She is something,’ the Irishman gapes.

‘She’s travelling on her own too, and she’s really nice,’ says the Dutchman.

I say nothing and wrinkle my forehead up in a silent, understanding smile that squeezes my dimples in. She is tall and slim and lithe and soft and she has the kindest eyes of anyone I have met who wears calf high tanned leather boots with a matching hard purse that straps long over her shoulder to her hip.

She squints just enough to focus her eyes properly on who is speaking. People who watch your eyes when you speak want to know what you are feeling, and that almost always means kindness. If you notice the colour of someone’s eyes then you have already lost sight of the person.

I decide Fanny is someone I could easily fall in love with.

The end of Part 1

Eventually the Dutchman and Irishman and I get sick of the white-glare and spoke-thing-young-girl-lipstick tapas tour. We let the group leave us around midnight and then we find some sedate bars where we can talk properly.

Fanny follows the rest of the group outside but she leaves her scarf behind.

‘Don’t take it out to her,’ says the Irishman. ‘Maybe she wants to stay. Maybe we can convince her. I’m not sure she is enjoying every else’s company that much to want to follow them.’

It’s good thinking. I could get drunk on Fanny’s company just listening to her talk.

When Fanny comes back she takes her scarf. Before she goes out again she pecks each of us on both cheeks, as we each did when we met.

As she does it she says to me, ‘Maybe tomorrow.’

She is gone by the time I start to think about it – ‘Maybe tomorrow?’ Did that mean definitely tonight? And what about tomorrow anyway?

Stop. Wait. How will I know where to find you? What time? Don’t go with crowd. Stay. We can walk home together and I’ll tell you a poem about souls growing deep like the rivers when we walk across the bridge.

But she is gone before any of this enters my mind, and I don’t even think to remember whether she said it to anyone else.

Hours later, after red wine and Heineken, and talking with the Dutchman and Irishman and watching Fanny in my mind, I go to the hostel. Somehow I let the Dutchman talk me into the shortest route home through the curvy streets the guide walked us down, even though I can see the longest route clearly along the river.

I walk, and I walk.

It is quiet and still and warm. The only hint of Autumn anywhere are the oranges on the trees which are everywhere, only just starting to ripen. The only people in the sparse city are street cleaners and security guards. All the windows are dark.

It should only take half an hour to walk to home. After about an hour I realise I am lost and I wished I’d paid more attention to where the guide was going at the beginning on the right, or that I had taken the long route.

It is about then that I remember something I learnt from a friend in Sydney, who made delicious marmalade every year from his abundant back yard lime tree: the best way to love a citrus tree is to piss on it once a day.

Eventually, I unbuckle my belt and rip open the button fly and bless one trunk in a shadowy square without breaking the night’s silence. Relieved, I recompose myself and start walking again. It takes another half-hour before I arrive at my building from the opposite side to what I should have. I have walked around the city without understanding how.

As I walk inside the door I trip over shoes someone left the parquetry floor. One person startles.

I work for an hour in bed on the Basel photos before publishing them. By then it is after four o’clock and I close my eyes and think of the soft French doctor from Geneva with the kind eyes.