Solitary traveling

Dining solo is considered sad. Watching a movie solo is deemed suspicious. Traveling solo is downright dangerous.

And I have done all three.

I don't mind being alone. But rather than a sign that there might be something wrong with me, I regard my enjoyment of solo activities a badge of mental health: I like me enough to spend time with myself. 


I love watching a movie by myself. I started doing this in college, when no one I knew was interested in watching the movies I wanted to see. This grew into a habit during medical school, when I lived right beside a shopping mall. Some nights, the words on my textbook would begin to slide across the page toward the edges and spine and the only way to cope was to catch the last full show at the mall and get my head together. 

I love traveling solo. No one to criticize my chronic inability to pack light. No one (else) messes up the toilet or hogs the safe. 

There is so much stigma attached to doing stuff by yourself it is absolutely stifling. If a person may only be out in public if and only if accompanied by another, we'd be spending way to much time at home being, drumroll please, alone.

La Giralda/The Seville Communion

I so thoroughly enjoyed my Alhambra∕The Constant Princess mashup that I decided to do one on Seville and Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Seville Communion. 

Seville is many things to many people. Fans of history would enjoy the fact that this city was founded sometime in 700 CE. It has an Old Town of only four square kilometers and yet it is home to no less than four UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Filipinos like me would probably appreciate how Ferdinand Magellan's voyage to circumnavigate the world was launched from Seville on the 10th of August 1519. Coincidentally, Sevillanos also finished building the Cathedral of St Mary, one of the city's main sites, that same year. For those with more modern inclinations, walking around the city would probably elicit squeals of delight from fans of Dr. Who and those who can bear to watch Episode II: Attack of the Clones.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte is one of Spain's popular fiction writers. Although he has a limited fan base among readers in English due to his resistance to being translated, Johnny Depp fans will probably know him as the novelist whose work was the basis for The Ninth Gate, in which Johnny Depp plays a antique book dealer who drinks and chain smokes while examining rare old books—in and of itself, terrifying; nevermind the devil. In The Seville Communion, the reader gets to follow a sexy priest, an ex-nun, a fake lawyer, a gypsy singer, an ex-boxer, and an heiress as the first tries to solve the mysteries of a hacker breaching the Vatican's security and mysterious deaths in a church about to be torn down.

The Archbishop's Palace and a portion of the La Encarnación on the right.

Quart came out of the Doña Maria Hotel, but instead of walking the thirty metres or so to the archbishop's palace, he wandered over to the Plaza Virgen de los Reyes and looked around. He was standing at the crossroads of three religions: the old Jewish quarter behind him, the white walls of the convent of La Encarnacion on one side, the archbishop's palace on the other, at the far end, adjoining the wall of the old Arab mosque, the minaret that had become a bell-tower for the Catholic cathedral, La Giralda. There were horse-drawn carriages, postcard vendors, begging Gypsy women carrying babies, and tourists looking up in awe as they queued to get in to see the tower.

[S]miling, he looked up at La Giralda, at the weather vane that gave the tower its name. Spain, the south, the ancient culture of Mediterranean Europe, could be sensed only in places such as that. In Seville different histories were superimposed and interdependent. A rosary stringing together time, blood, and prayers in different languages, beneath a blue sky and wise sun that levelled everything over the centuries. Stone survivors that could still be heard. 

Do consider visiting Sevilla at least once in your life. If you need a bit more nudge, do read Pérez-Reverte's book and maybe just maybe you'd book that ticket.