Singing Along the Journey

A funny thing happens to me when I'm travelling like I am this summer...I forget that I am travelling.  Yes, I start to think that this is my life (which it is, actually) and I start to think that, well, I live here.  I seek out the signs of settlement -- grocery stores, places to

Toro del Orro as seen from the river on my last night

pick up the little needs in life like pharmacies, places to wash my clothes and get them cleaned, where to pick up my favorite tea -- places like that.

And the same thing that usually happens to me happened today...just as I started to "settle in" at a hotel in a certain city, it was time to move.  And that is always a little unsettling.

My general tolerance as a guest in a city is, well, 3 days (guests and fish, remember?).  On the fourth day, I am a resident.

Today, however, was day 5 and time to get on the train and move to Granada.  And that I did, with great success.  Although now I'm a tourist again, at least for a couple of days.

My new address, if you are following my travels, is the Hesperia Granada...so far a quite pleasant hotel with an excellent air conditioner.  And that air conditioner is pretty important, even if it is cooler here in Granada than it was yesterday in Seville (109 degrees yesterday, only 96 degrees here today).  And tomorrow, it is back to the confronting the world of music.  I cannot say that I face that task without trepidation, but I will face it.  And we will see just what God has to say about this choice that I've made.

I love to visit museums when I travel.

The ones that I love most, however, are the quirky little museums that are off the beaten path.  I’ve enjoyed many of them in my travels:  the Musée de Dame aux Camelias, somewhere in the Normandy countryside of France (where I saw the personal items of the woman who created such a stir in 19^th century Paris, and who comes to us in the opera La Traviata and the classic movie Camille);  the Musée de la Vie Romantique in the 18^th Arrondisment in Paris, the Franz Liszt House in Budapest.

And today, I added to the list – I went to the Museo de Bailir Flamenco in Seville (The Museum of the Flamenco Dance).

It was an accident, really.  I didn’t have a plan for today, I’ve been kind of tired and tomorrow I move on to Granada for learning and singing (that is different than learning and sight-seeing, which is a lot more relaxing but equally exhausting), so I thought I would have an easy day of it, do a little shopping, visit the Plaza d’Espana from the Spanish-American exhibition, an event that created the sister relationship with my town of origin, Kansas City, and maybe end the day with a boat ride on the Guadalquivir River.

As I ambled across town to the shopping district, I saw the sign – Museo de Bailir Flamenco.  And I thought, why not.

Why not, indeed.  I arrived, bought my ticket.  Apparently I was the first person that day, because I had to wait while the young woman at the desk ran upstairs to start the exhibits (It was a multi-media museum).  But that wait was priceless—in the next room, there was either a rehearsal or a class, a room full of young women in long flamenco dress, learning the basic steps of their art.  What was so fascinating, however, was how very different  this class was from any dance class I had ever taken or observed.  The dance master would demonstrate a step, then, instead of the class performing the step in some sort of synchronous pattern as the music played, instead each participant took the step and attempted to make it her own in response to the music that was playing.  Some turned it into a slow, elegant, smooth movement; others repeated it rapidly over and over again, but each danced to their own step and their own feeling of the music.

I went upstairs to the exhibits and spent a fascinated magic hour, standing in exhibit after exhibit, surrounded by life-size flamenco dancers demonstrating technique, style, and the language of flamenco; I heard interviews from lifelong practitioners of the art of flamenco; I saw costumes and shoes and heard about the careers of great artists known only in their world of dance; and I marveled at how this artistic tradition was so carefully transplanted to Mexico and Latin America, and how I have seen it even in the dances of my fellow church goers who come from the culture of El Salvador.

And,  I was amazed to realize that I still harbor the flame of Carmen in my very own soul. You see, I want to blame the fact that I learned to sing opera on my first voice teacher, and he certainly did play a role.  But the real villain in this little story is one cigarette girl named Carmen.

I remember the day that I first experienced the opera Carmen (by Georges Bizet).  I was newly divorced, and, as many newly divorced women do, I was setting out on the new adventure of doing what I want when I want to do it.  There was a notice in the Kansas City Star about a community performance of Carmen in a church near the Country Club Plaza (a shopping mall designed to look like a miniature “Seville”, and the first shopping center constructed in the United States, according to Kansas City mythology), and I went.  I was mesmerized by the gypsy and her adventures, the romance with the policeman, the romance with the bullfighter, the way that she faced her death at the end of the opera.  And I have been mesmerized ever since.  The first arias I learned were Carmen’s:  I sing them still whenever I get a chance. 

But I thought that I had accepted that, well, I was long past ever performing the role of Carmen on the stage.  No one would possibly cast me, I thought, and I moved on to Wagner and Verdi and heavier, less romantic literature.

As I wander the streets of Seville, however, and in particular as I wandered through the Flamenco museum, I can tell, she is not out of my system.   I see her in my fashion choices, my jewelry choices –she’s in there, just waiting to get out.

Every time I think that I am at peace with no longer singer opera, I encounter Carmen.  And today was no exception.  Who knows what will happen after I actually go to the flamenco show tonight?

I just had breakfast in a lovely courtyard, next to a running fountain, with a cool breeze blowing, here at my hotel in Seville, the Vincci la Rabida.  Breakfast is my favorite part of vacation, in so many ways. And my favorite me in general.

I don’t know about you, but I can still here my mother’s voice saying “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

But things that we accept as nutritional and scientific givens are, like so many other things, also cultural in nature.  For you see, in Spain, as in Italy, they do not eat breakfast as we know it.  Breakfast is coffee and a roll, maybe a pastry.  And no one raised them to believe that breakfast was a nutritionally important meal for their life and well-being. 

The Breakfast Patio, Seville

My knowledge that there is a cultural lack of acceptance of breakfast as a meal figures greatly into my hotel selection process.  Because most of the people who come to countries like Spain and Italy eat a substantial breakfast (namely British and American tourists, and those kings of the breakfast buffet, the Germans), good hotels in both those countries work hard at providing a good and appealing breakfast buffet.  And I do know how to find that information on their websites—the fact that they feel it important to include a picture of their breakfast spread is usually a good clue.

Here at the Vincci la Rabida, they do an especially nice job with breakfast.  You can eat in the white-table-cloth restaurant, or on the tasteful all-too-Spanish patio in the courtyard.  In addition to a magnificent spread of fresh fruit, juices, cheeses, and meats, they have a full range of Spanish ‘tapas” items that for us mean breakfast and for them mean snack food – the tortilla Espanola with tomato sauce, plates of seranno ham and manchego cheese – AND they have standard British breakfast items like sausages and beans with scrambled eggs.  Oh yes, and in this land of cured pork products, they have the most amazing bacon, bacon that has only been rivaled in my affection by the bacon from Edwards of Surrey, VA, that I ate at the Blue Moon Diner the last time I was in Charlottesville.

So, if sometime you are having a discussion with me about hotels any time in the future, chances are my review will have more to do with the quality of the breakfast (and also the environs in which the breakfast is consumed, very, very important) than the quality of the rooms or the service:  I’m more likely to talk about the time I stayed at the Hotel Danieli in Venice and had breakfast on a rooftop patio overlooking the Grand Canal, or the Westin in Berlin, with the never-ending supply of smoked salmon and the view that overlooked Unter den Lindenstrasse, or the Hotel Brufani in Perugia with fruit and a tea service to die for; or, last but not least the El Dorado Royal on the Riviera Maya south of Cancun, with its chocolate fondue fountains and churros.

Mama told me that breakfast was important – she never told me it was romantic!