Engel (and Brownell) Blog: Sevilla for New Years

We celebrated the New Year in Sevilla. We stayed in a GREAT hostel that was beautiful and had a friendly climate (and FREE internet access). It was an especially great place to hang out when it was raining outside.

Sevilla has everything - a cathedral, huge palaces, a winding river, and many parks with no end. There are also Starbucks to no end but we didn't stop at any. We visited the parks, rode the river boat, went to see the palaces, and climbed to the top of the cathedral tower.

For New Year's Eve, we went to the city square. There wasn't a countdown so we shouted our own countdown (about a minute late). Notice: Yana and Maria were too embarrassed to shout the countdown.

Then we looked for nice place to eat for New Year's Eve. Ha ha HAAAAA. I guess we don't get out much. The menus were about 100 euros MORE per person than we had expected. The restaurants didn't want us to pay for one meal and split it seven ways. So, we made sandwiches and drank coke. (New Year's Eve is one of two days a year the kids can drink coca-cola.)

And ... we made our own FUN!

At the Alcazar palace, we pretended that we were little snotty royal kids running around ... complaining about how our 100's of personal servants don't wipe the bottoms of the partridges after the partridges go to the bathroom. Of course, in jest but as a reminder of how many servants it must have taken to the maintain the whole place. We hoped that the servants were treated well. (Indeed, one of the servant houses was twice the size of our house in Evanston.)

It was easy to capture Bronson's attention in the Cathedral ... just tell him that we were walking over tombs with skeletons. We climbed to the tippy tippy top of the cathedral ... just in time to hear the church bells close up. DING! DONG!