It always puzzles me why people congregate around one fruit stand, one seafood stand, etc. To an untrained eye like mine, they all look pretty much the same.
Post market visit I wandered around town a little and stumbled on to Calle Ciego, which I’d read was named one of the most beautiful streets in the world. If you have 19€, you can see it too. Turns out it’s on the Tio Pepe property and you’re not supposed to just wander around there unless you’re part of a tour, which I didn’t know. But that made me slightly suspicious of the award status of that street. I looked it up further and found that the “beauty” assessment was determined by some artificial intelligence software. I also looked at the rest of the streets in the top 10 and one of them was Bourbon Street in New Orleans. I’ve been to Bourbon Street and I can tell you that people do gravitate there and look around a lot, but it’s not to appreciate the beauty of the street. And that one is free.
In all of these old Spanish cities, people take their dogs out to pee in the street, as I guess they have been doing for hundreds of years. Municipal staff wash them every day, but hundreds of years of this takes a toll. I realized today that the faint smell of old urine is actually kind of comforting to me because I associate it with all of these great trips to Spain. But it does pretty much obliterate the five-second rule.
I don’t think Trip Advisor has a concept of rating a whole city, but that won’t stop me from giving Jerez a solid three stars out of five unless you’re into dancing horses and sherry, in which case you should find a different reviewer. It’s a fine place to visit, but I wouldn’t plan a 7-day extravaganza in Jerez. All in all, it has history, the people are nice, the coffee is fresh and the sheets are clean.
And now, off to Barcelona – where the restaurants never close, the sun always shines and the streets smell faintly of dog urine.
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