Teaching English as a Second Language, pt. 3: Five More Ready-made Lessons

Some of the hazards of English acquisition in Spain.
If you're not careful in this job market, they'll eat you up!

Here is a third (and final?) installment on some ready-made English lessons I've prepared as a TEFL teacher in Spain. In my first, I shared ten lessons, in my second, another five. Here I offer you five more. As in the previous entries, the topics and levels of English vary substantially from one lesson to the next, but I'm hoping you'll find there is something for everyone.

Since I last wrote, I've gotten quite hooked on e-books, so in keeping with my proclivity for digressions in these entries, here I'd like to first share with you some discoveries and friends' projects I've started following in the world of free or cheap e-books acquisitions. Life for the nomadic TEFL English teacher can be rough, not always being able to get your hands on new release books from your native land. Here are my top five sites for hunting down English-language e-books:

1) Project Gutenberg – for free ebooks, but mostly classics 

2) Open Culture – for free ebooks, but also free other cultural resources (videos, etc.) 

3) Freebooksifter – for free ebooks available daily at Amazon [full disclosure: a friend's project]
       – USA site | UK site | Spain site | Germany site  

4) Kindle Books Under $5 – not free, but very cheap ebooks... and all good quality reads [full disclosure: a friend's project]

5) Amazon.com Free Ebook Collection Page – Amazon's list of other free online sources for ebooks

So for those of you who are expat mercenary TEFL teachers, always on the move, I recommend you check these links out as you lighten your luggage by swapping paper books for digital ones. (Perhaps because of the rise of e-books and blog publishing, the world of book publishing and style editing has gotten more dangerous in recent years, as this The Onion article attests: "4 Copy Editors Killed In Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence".)

This is a fun internet meme that was circulating not long ago, great for us English teachers.

Okay, with that aside, assuming I've lost those of you with short attention spans, here are some English-lessons for those of you who are still reading...

***Lesson 16: Cooking – Vocabulary, reading and discussion***

This exercise requires some knowledge of cooking and a lot of pantomiming. Fortunately, when I teach I'm quite theatrical and I love to cook, so this was a fun class to teach. My students specifically requested it. I give them the following handout with two pages of vocabulary (one page focused on eating and dining vocab, the other on cooking and food prep vocab), and then two pages of recipes in English:

Click here to load a PDF of my Cooking Vocabulary handout.

I can't resist including this graphic in my handout,

to make the point that this regional division of the tongue

according to the four tastes is actually a total myth.

The idea is to talk with them about eating and cooking in their culture versus in Anglophone cultures, while showing how there is a rich vocabulary surrounding eating and evaluating, and cooking and working with food... and how much of that vocabulary ("sifting", "grind", "sizzling", "spicy") is used outside cooking in everyday language. The handout includes some discussion questions that are usually a success in Spain: What foods are traditional in your culture? What foods are new?

Or, to get them practicing numbers and fractions, you can ask them what they think of the U.S.'s non-metric measurement system. As a Texan, I also can't resist asking them what they think of spicy food. (Answer: most or at least many Spaniards hate it, despite being the country which helped import many chilis from the New World to the Old!) Then I have them read the recipes and consider the use of special language ("morsels" of chocolate chips), discuss challenges like countable (e.g. friend) versus uncountable nouns (time), how the two work with quantifiers ("a few friends", not "a little friends"), special countable nouns used with uncountable ones ("piece of cake", "glass of water", "pinch of salt"), and how meaning changes for some nouns that appear in both forms (i.e. "Cake! Cake! Cake!"). This is largely advanced vocabulary, but even intermediate students will enjoy it and learn from it if they are into cooking.

What I find amazing is that, while food vocabulary is quite common at all levels of English-learning, cooking vocabulary lessons are very rare in TEFL books. Does anyone know why? I think it is a great TEFL topic.

Wanna waste an hour? Try floating the following question to your European friend/student:
What do you think of the metric system? Do you think it's better
or no different from the U.S.'s measurement system? Five hours later,
you will have an elaborate thesis on what is fundamentally wrong with America,
and your friend/student will have had a lot of practice with new vocabulary and fractions.

***Lesson 17: Six Fun Kids' ESL Games – Reviewing is fun! Honest!***

This year I'm teaching a group of kids, ages 8-11, which is a little different than adult foreign-language learners. They're sponges when it comes to pronunciation. More likely to listen and repeat, and then retain new vocabulary sets. But they also get bored. One day a couple of months ago, I realized that I was starting to lose some of them, and sat down and thought hard, looked around for ideas for how to make the class more entertaining. In short, I came up with, found online, and/or adapted a variety of different games to the purpose of introducing, testing, and reviewing English vocabulary and grammar. In this PDF are a list of my favorites (by which I mean their favorites), which I encourage you to sprinkle into your teaching schedule here and there in order to liven things up. I list the games in order of increasing complicatedness:

Click here to load a PDF of six Kids' ESL Games handout.

Colleague's hand-scribbled
instructions for "Wheel of Fortune"

Those are just the games I had time to try out and liked, but there are many others out there. For example, sometime I would like to try this ESL adaptation of Scrabble, which requires creating board pieces, but looks like fun. And this Tic-Tac-Toe game looks like it has the potential for being another Hangman-like classroom staple. For more ideas, I recommend you check out this ESL-kids.com website or the FunEnglishGames.com site.

After I implemented Operation: "Win the Kids Over with Games", I found them more excited about class (though I do now have to stave off their persistent requests to play games). But let's face it, it's also useful to have some games on hand for whenever you need to kill a bit of class time, or for after that test or on those days when your kids are tired and need a break. So it's worth the time prepping games... and, yeah, I'll admit it, it's also really fun :)

My pre-class preparation for the Jeopardy game. Which reminds me.
I had my students keep a "Weather Diary" (write down the weather for a week)
 the week before, which was also a nice homework activity for kids. 

The board after playing "Double Jeopardy". Looks like Team 1 won.

***Lesson 18: Travel/Geography for Kids – Vocabulary and discussion***

How many states can you name? Together as a class,
my kids came up with 22, which impressed me.

Being an American, my Spanish kids are occasionally curious about U.S. geography or culture. (This is especially the case whenever it has anything to do with whatever video game they are playing.) Even without this cross-cultural dynamic, kids love to show off their ability to list things, and world geography is high up on that list of listy things. Once, when I wanted some of the more advanced kids in the class to be distracted as the others were finishing a task, I asked them to make a list of as many of the fifty United States of America states as they knew. This ended up being a mistake because pretty soon the other students were trying to make their own list, rather than finish their work. That experience, and some cool activities in the textbook we use —Caroline Nixon and Michael Tomlinson, Kid’s Box, Book 5: Activity Book (Cambridge University Press, 2009) [a great book, by the way]— inspired the following lesson for kids:

Click here to load a PDF handout for a Kids Geography lesson.

This activity is good because it teaches them the English names for places, as well as the differences between city, state, country, and continent (which confuses them a bit even in their own language). You can build on this activity by using geography names in the "Alphabet Relay" game I explain above. Invariably, this activity also leads to conversations about here and there, which is an opportunity to share cultural things with them, to the extent that they are interested.

I don't have a handout for it here, but another great activity with the kids
was singing the "Peanut Butter & Jelly" song, an American classic!
For a nice, detailed explanation of the song and fun hand motions,
watch this video. Great for teaching vocabulary on how to make a sandwich.
"First you take the peanuts and you crunch 'em, you crunch 'em..."

Too complicated for kids, this American English Dialects Map is incredible,
and worth sharing with your adult students. Go to the link and you can
click on the map to hear different regional dialects and pronunciations.

***Lesson 19: Conditional Tense – Conversation and grammar***

In this economy, it's even more important to teach
the conditional tense, as this cartoon illustrates
with Mario Draghi's conditional, prevaricating language.

Another new duty I've had this year is leading some of our conversation classes. Frankly, if I can boast, I'm great at conversation because I'm a chatterbox! But to make them valuable and effective, pedagogically, I have to make an effort to pick subjects that encourage students to exercise a particular area of language competency, and then I write things (relevant vocab, classic expressions, proper sentence structure) on the board as they talk. 

Some of my top conversation class topics this year have been: 

• "How do we know what we know about [insert topic x]? What are your sources of information?" [vocab: the media, media filter/bias]

• "What is the right age for kids to leave home and become independent? Why? (What about legal drinking age; driving; voting?) [vocab: rights, privileges, stages of life]

• "Do you worry about privacy on social networks (i.e. Facebook)? Do we have a right to privacy, and if so, does that extend to celebrities and politicians?"

• "We are living faster, but are we living better?" [comparatives; opinion language; vocab: "pace of life", "waste of/spend time"]

• "What tips/advice would you give for slowing your life down and being positive?" [advice language; vocab: opportunistic versus optimistic, "appreciate the little things", "silver-lining"]

• A colleague came up with this good one: "If you could have any super power, what would it be?" [modal verbs of possibility and ability; second conditional; vocab: super powers]
• Discuss the concept of a culture within a culture (describe Jewish culture in America, popular use of Yiddish expressions, foods like bagels, etc.), and then ask: Can you think of similar examples of distinct cultural, ethnic communities within your country? (Cue discussion of gypsies in Spain, both a part of "Spanish" culture, and yet also distinct from it. Analogies: jazz is to African-Americans as flamenco is to Spanish gypsies?) [vocab: assimilation; first-generation v. second-generation, exodus, "Oy vey!"]

Ah, the first condition of first conditional,
"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong."

But for one conversation topic I prepared a bit more, to make it grammatically relevant to their language-learning needs. I gave them a quick re-introduction to the three types of conditional. I make a point about how all three types have a basic similar structure of condition clause —often with "if" and never with "will"— versus the consequent clause... and draw a chart on the board (like in the handout below), diagramming the three types, their similar structure, and when we use each. I then posed the following question to get them to practice the conditional tenses: "If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you travel?":

Click here to load a PDF guide to the Conditional Tenses.

I went around the class using three different questions to force them to apply the appropriate conditional tense. For first conditional, I got a lot of mileage out of talking about what is possibly my personal religion: Murphy's Law. In the handout I mention two songs that are great for 2nd and 3rd conditional: "Wouldn't it be nice" by the Beach Boys and "Top of the World" sung by the Dixie Chicks, respectively. (I also tend to find myself singing "If I were a rich man" from Fiddler on the Roof whenever I teach 2nd conditional. And of course snapping my fingers, arms raised in the air, dancing... an image that ensures they'll never forget the second conditional. It might even get them using third conditional: "If I had known how crazy my English teacher was...") 

My personal favorite song to share on 3rd conditional tense is the cover of "Top of the World" 

by the Dixie Chicks. The song is a nice example of how to use this tense to express regret, 

introduces slang forms ("I wished I'da"), and introduces that Texan institution, country music!

As the students got more comfortable with the tenses, I tried to get them to talk to each other, such as giving each other advice: "If I were you, I would do such and such while you are at your dream destination." And towards the end, I shifted gears and had the advanced students practice talking about regrets using the third conditional: "If I had known how rainy it would be in London, I would have packed an umbrella." To wrap up, I told them about the expression: "Would've, could've, should've" (usually pronounced "Woulda, coulda, shoulda!"). Useful both for how it is used to reprimand people for needless "hindsight is 20/20" regret, but also as a pneumonic for remembering the common forms of third conditional.

Digression: To all my non-English-speaking readers, if you are looking for an excellent reference for all slang words, I direct you to Urbandictionary.com. Trust me when I say that even us native speakers are regularly consulting it to catch the meaning of the latest new catch phrase or text message shorthand.

***Lesson 20: Speaking Test Tips – Test preparation***

I always say that there are three subjects with which you can have a conversation with anyone, anywhere on earth:

1) local politics (which is why I recommend everyone read the local newspaper),
2) sports (which is why I try to stay on top of the soccer leagues here), and
3) the weather (which is why you should always carry an umbrella).

So if your students want to learn how to communicate and socialize with people, those are the topics they should practice. On the other hand, most of my advanced students just want to know how to pass the First Certificate Speaking Test. For them, I've kept this list of tips and common challenges I've run across over the years:

Click here to load a PDF of tips and useful vocabulary for English Speaking Tests.

It's just a list, so for a more polished guide to the First Certificate Exam Speaking Section, I direct them to Slendid Speaking's webpage on it. The list comes from my speaking clinic with students. One thing I do with my advanced (adult) students at least once a year is give them a practice First Certificate style speaking test, and I record them. When they bring me a CD I burn a copy of it for them (and throw in a bunch of "goodies" like the TEFL ready-made lessons materials you're finding here). With this recording I can give them a clinic on their common speaking errors (pronunciation, use of "eh and "em" instead of the English "uh" and "um", forgetting third person singular, etc.). It does take a lot of one's time outside of class reviewing them, but my students are always very grateful. There is nothing like hearing your own voice on a recording to force you to pay attention to how you actually speak.

I ran across this great poem, which addresses the peculiar English-speaker's predilection for turning nouns
 into verb gerunds. For a larger font copy, you can find "The Verbing of America" poem here.
The best parody of this trend is the UK Fonejacker's Indian ISP call center guy, who ands "ings" to everything.

In recent years, as a kind of addendum to the more general schadenfreude fest everyone is having with speculating about why Spain's economy is going so poorly, there has been a discussion about Spain's lack of competitiveness in the world of English as a Second Language. Needless to say, English-speaking expats, many of whom teach English here, are regularly drawn into this discussion, and the question, why are Spaniards allegedly so bad at learning English? For an interesting blog post and exchange about this, I direct you to TEFL in Spain's entry, "5 Reasons Spanish are bad at English...". It is undeniable that much "English" used in Spanish is just patently unEnglish. See Kaley y mucho más's excellent blog post on such Spanglish in Spain. It doesn't help that one can get easily tripped up by these "false friends".

Being the disagreeable, devil's advocate that I am, I question the whole discussion. In my opinion, I'm not so sure Spaniards are any worse than anyone else at picking up a foreign language. (Whenever a Spaniard apologizes to me for not speaking English, I tell them that Spanish is more useful in Spain anyway.) I've sat in foreign language classes in the U.S. and UK, and trust me, there is much left to be desired there, too.

It is funny how the positive/negative valence of "bilingual education" 

can change dramatically here in Spain if you switch from talking about

Spanish-English "bilingualism" versus Spanish-Catalan bilingualism.

Still, what frustrates me with teaching English is how few of the students (in any country, not just Spain) want to learn it for cultural reasons. That is, most are taking the class for economic motives, and looking at the language through a utilitarian, functional lens. Sure, this is a legitimate motive to learn a language, but (in my opinion) it is the thinnest, dullest one. Once one of my students asked me why I was learning Catalan, given that Spanish was sufficient here in Valencia. My answer was simple: I want to be a member of the community. That language is a passport into local integration, not simply because it allowed me to communicate (which Spanish did fine), but because it was a part of locals' identity, and if I wanted to understand them, their way of life, etc., the language was a portal into that. (In fact, I think the most destructive thing Valencia could do is dismantle its natural, native bilingual Spanish-Catalan richness in the name of implementing an impoverish, improbable Spanish-English "bilingual" program.) The difficulty with teaching English, what with it's clear marketability, is conveying that sense and value of community, cultural identity, and belonging that language offers... and by extension the fact that one cannot learn a language without coming to know the speakers' culture, geography, politics, and so on...

I have a secret mission when I teach my classes. (Shh! Don't tell my students!) With these lessons, I'm trying to get the students to fall in love with the language – to woo her, not to reason with her. Because it is my sincere belief as an educator that it is only when a person feels a passion for a subject that they begin to truly start to learn it, internalize, and make it a part of them. Frankly, in my mind, I don't get paid to teach English. I get paid to sell curiosity and enthusiasm for it. My hope is that these lessons will help you to do so, too.

The Hemingway Paradigm Is... Hispanomanía (100th entry!)

So every 25 entries or so I take a moment to pause from generating new content for the blog and reflect on why I started it, that is, to do my part to help rupture the "Hemingway paradigm". This is my 100th entry (yay!), so I thought I would focus on a subject a Valencia twitter acquaintance of mine once posed to me, what is it with foreigners (especially Anglophones) and their particular obsession vision of Spain. It's an obsession that a Spanish-British author, Tom Burns Marañón, brilliantly named "Hispanomanía".

Obviously Ernest Hemingway, our blog patron saint, was one notable example of it: an American who came to Spain with a particular kind of Romantic vision of the country, its "authenticity", its "charm". In my 50th entry I traced it back to older roots, with Richard Ford. At some point I also hope to write an entry on "Not Washington Irving's Granada", since his book Tales from the Alhambra is a laugh for all of its vivid, fanciful stereotypes of Spaniards... doubly funny for how many of those stereotypes seem to persevere today. (Just check out my 75th entry on the "impertinente curiouso", for some present-day examples.) If you want to explore the full gamut of literary examples of this Hispanomanía, I recommend you visit the "Books on Spain" blog, Kirsty Hooper's scholarly study of the subject.

Or you can simply run a Google Image search on "Spanish culture":

Grrrr!!! Why does the paella here have red peppers!!!

For comparison (sorry, vanity couldn't resist), try running a Google Image search on "Not Hemingway's Spain":

The main difference seems to be more subdued colors and less bull shit imagery.

One of the things this Valencian twitter friend said to me, which I'm inclined to agree with, is that Burns Marañon's description of Hispanomanía tends to focus too narrowly on the North-South interior axis (Pamplona-Madrid-Andalucía), but ignores the equally important, more contemporary East coast axis (Barcelona-Alicante-Málaga... an axis that somehow skips over Valencia!). Today, it is not just Hemingway/Lorca thrill-seekers who come to Spain, looking for that exotic, mysterious Romantic past, but also the beach bums and hedonists wanting their fun-in-the-sun and that "laid back" culture they associate with the Spanish Mediterranean way of life.

I'm still convinced that one of the best visual documentations of what is "profoundly Spanish",
albeit in a Romanticized, nostalgic vein, was the early 20th-century painting expedition
by (Valencian) painter Joaquín Sorolla, sponsored by the Hispanic Society of America.

Some of Sorolla's most beloved works, at least with Valencian locals,
are his pictures of people (particularly kids) on the seaside beach.

Sorolla's contemporary, the American painter John Singer Sargent, captured perhaps
the best rendition of Hispanophiles' quintessential image of Romantic Spain, the flamenco dancer.

At one point I sat down and started to brainstorm a list of what exactly would Hispanomanía look like in Hemingway's time versus what it would look like today:

Then:  

Bulls, red bandanas, castanets, flamenco dancing, gypsies, frill dresses, dark eyes, dark hair, thick lisp, blood, roast pig, Iberian ham, bullfights, matadors, Pamplona, "Olé", siesta, fiesta, hot-tempered, machista, sherry, red wine, picaresque, the Spanish Civil War, Don Quixote, Cervantes, Madrid, Sevilla, Andalucía, Granada, Ronda, castles, warm weather, sunny, arid landscapes, conquistadors, windmills, the Spanish Inquisition, Catholicism, cathedrals, 1492, civil strife…

Now: 

Beaches, warm weather, Málaga, Ibiza, the "Costas", sangría, nightclubs, economic crisis, corruption, PIGS, soccer, Barcelona, Gaudí, Dalí, Almodóvar, Lorca, Camino de Santiago, the Mediterranean diet, paella, gazpacho, cava, tortilla de patatas, the running of the bulls, Hemingway, la Tomatina, Hispanidad, Semana Santa, study abroad, TEFL, Feria de Abril, German tourists, British tourists…

Some things haven't changed, and would make the list both then and now. Though I think what was once seen to be deeply rooted and deeply "Spanish" (Catholicism, "las dos Españas") has been transformed, with the rise of the consumer(ist) society, and is now consumed (by foreigners and locals alike) in a lighter, more fanciful form (Semana Santa festivals, "el clásico" football rivalries).

I've never heard an Hispanophile go on and on about the Aragón "jota" dance
the way they do about flamenco.

I remember seeing this Sorolla depiction of Valencian life, in the Hispanic Society of America exhibit,
and thinking: "even in paintings the light in Valencia just look brighter than everywhere else".

Perhaps in my 125th or 150th entry I'll list the things about Spain that never seem to make the shortlist but should...

advanced telecommunications engineering, Spain's "brain drain", the Erasmus generation, alternative energy technologies (i.e. wind energy), Moneo, the new Spanish cuisine (Adrià, Arzak...), its nature, nature, nature, high-speed trains, Fallas, Mudéjar ceramics, Valencia, Sorolla, Calatrava, Kukuxumusu, the Democratic transition, the Pyrenees, skiing, immigration, tennis, basketball, almonds, Álex de la Iglesia, graphic arts innovators... etc.

The future image of Hispanomanía?

Azulejomanía: Images of Sevilla Through Tile Art

I visited Sevilla on the eve of Semana Santa,
the subject of this tile display at the Plaza de España

On my recent trip to Sevilla, I was trying to think of what I might share with my readers about Spain's fourth largest city, which hasn't already been shared by dozens, upon dozens of other expat bloggers who live there. (I swear, you could throw a stone and end up hitting an expat there. Why are there disproportionately so many fewer bloggers here in Valencia?!?) The answer is, probably not much. Chic Soufflé beat me to the punch on the excellent tapeo opportunities, and our blogger friend Delikat Essences has more than provided the be-all, end-all visitor's guide (in Spanish): part 1 and part 2. (She was an excellent local guide. Many thanks!) So instead I thought I would share my experience of the city through one of my personal obsessions passions: tiles ("azulejos").

I first got interested in tile art because Valencia has a tradition of it. But, in truth, many places in Europe have this tradition. Sevilla, however, is interesting and distinctive because it has really embraced it. Tiles are everywhere! As you wander through the city and its famous tourist sights, it seems like every feature of life and culture there has, at some point, in some way, been refracted through a depiction that was burnt or painted onto a tile. Much like my obsession with pomegranate iconography in Granada, I pretty quickly caught a bad case of azulejomanía.

Here, in honor of Sevilla's "Feria de Abril" which commences tonight, I share with you some images of the city, as seen through its tiles...

• Real Alcázar:

The presence and importance of the Real Alcázar, a magnificent fort built during the Moorish occupation of the city (712-1248), is clearly what inspires the long, sustained local tradition and interest in tile art. So it's a good starting point for our tile tour.

Much like the Alhambra in Granada or the Mezquita in Córdoba, a defining
feature of the Real Alcázar was its distinctive Moorish, in this case Mudéjar style.

These green tiles were clearly the signature pattern for the Alcázar.

Okay, it's not tiles, but the ceiling of the Hall of Ambassadors is beautiful!

I particularly liked this blue tiled staircase!

The gardens were pretty magnificent...

... and had more tiles!

"Plus Ultra", Latin for "further beyond", motto of Rey Carlos V and of Spain today.

Digression, a fun game: One of the photos above isn't actually from Sevilla, but was instead taken during my recent visit to Istanbul. Can you guess which one? It was really interesting to compare the fusion of East meets West in Sevilla (and Córdoba) with that of Istanbul was Constantinople, been a long time gone… Maybe I'll write an entry on that later.

• Virgin Tile Iconography:

So did you know that Spain is a Catholic country? No? Well, let me tell you… Okay, I'm clearly being facetious here, but it was pretty overwhelming striking to see the frequency of religious tile displays all over the city. (Yeah, Valencia has them, too, but not nearly so much.) One can see that the church and its signature local festival, Semana Santa, has a greater visibility here than other places in Spain. Even if you're not especially into the religious iconography, it is difficult to not appreciate the detail, beauty, and variety of these many Virgin and Catholic tile displays.

• La Cartuja & Plaza de España:

Two other important stops on our tile tour are La Cartuja, which was at one point in time actually a ceramics factory, though today acts as a contemporary art exhibit space, and the renowned Plaza de España, a faux, decorative square built in 1928 for the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929.

The only tiles you'll see at La Cartuja are in this unused entryway,
a beautiful vestige of the factory's earlier days.

These oven towers were mammoth and impressive,
and a nice industrial backdrop for a contemporary art museum.

Panoramic of the Plaza de España, which is much larger
than I had remembered it from my previous visit

Nice bridges with ceramic adornments!

Scattered throughout the regional displays were special displays
on the cultural highlights of Sevilla.

Even tile maps of (1928) Sevilla's landmarks and neighborhoods.

But the true touristy brilliance of Plaza de España are the opportunities it
provides visitors to snap a photo with the display for their home city...
like the one for my beloved Valencia!!!

• Casa de Pilatos:

This beautiful 15th-16th century palace is like a temple to the tile gods. By this point in the journey I was completely taken by azulejomanía, and took hundreds of photos of the tiles. I'll spare you that longer photo journey and only post a select six here. Let's just say it's worth a visit!

Tile heaven!

• "Azahar" and the "other" orange city:

When I was considering possible quirky touristy photo games for Sevilla, one idea was to look for references to "azahar" that are all over the city. Azahar is the Spanish name for orange blossoms, and I quickly realized that Sevilla is as much an orange city as Valencia. There were orange trees everywhere, and the azahar was just starting to bloom. In the end I decided it didn't quite have the same catch as Granada's pomegranate iconography, but it was interesting how Sevilla really seemed to sell the azahar, whereas Valencia sells the orange fruit imagery.

Budding orange blossoms.

• Tiled oddities, to categorize under "Miscellaneous":

And then there were all the other tile discoveries I found, some odd, some interesting, all dutifully documented by this clearly obsessive compulsive photographer.

This joint had some cool tile decoration, but I was really drooling
over its incredible collection of coffee pots!

This tile display clearly belonged to a church whose patron saint was Grouch Marx...

Being the food market junky, I couldn't pass on a visit to the Mercado de Triana.

Nice tiled dome at the Castillo de San Jorge!

I stumbled upon this bizarre, awesome tile ad throwback, which,
thanks to Delikat Essences, I now know has an interesting back history.

"Aquí vive gente de Triana", I can just hear this said with a proud
Sevillano accent by some Flamenco dancer!

I especially liked the wild tiles at El Rinconcillo, the oldest restaurant in Sevilla.

• Street art, pre-Semana Santa "pasos", and, okay, other art not really at all about tiles:

Okay, so I wasn't only looking at tiles. There were plenty of other interesting eye candy and artistic mediums of expression throughout Sevilla. Here are some other things that caught my eye...

Speaking of eye candy, how adorable are these Semana Santa candy figurines!?!

Amazing street art mural including, yes, an orange tree.

This very cool shadow-like mural is apparently for a bar, Bar Antojo.
Thanks loubylou79 for letting me know!

I don't know if this was street art or an ad, but I loved it!
What a great play on the Giralda and Bull!

One of the coolest street art discoveries was learning that the Sevilla trash company
sponsors a contest for decorating the recycling containers.
The "TODOTUYO" project by cleaning company LIPASAM... Brilliant!
Again, thank you Delikat Essences for tipping me off about it.

As I said, I arrived to Sevilla on Semana Santa Eve, and much like how the weeks leading up to Fallas one can get a sneak preview of the falla displays, this meant that I could catch a preview of the amazing religious alters that would be paraded around during the religious Easter festivities the following week.

Mounting and polishing these altars was no small achievement.

So I'll add my voice to the chorus of calls hailing Sevilla as a beautiful destination to visit. We had an amazing time there and I definitely recommend it, not only for the tiles!

¡Feliz Feria de Abril!