Jewish Quarter in Seville

Ken's Ninth Day at Work
May 24th, 2012

Email from work:

In answers to your questions, I asked a few folks here at work and this is what they report to me:


Questions:

1) Where can you purchase such a thing as a barbecue or similar for outdoor grilling?
Barbeques are not used in Seville as people live in apartments and any cooking on the balconies or patios (the smells of food and smoke from barbeques) are not permitted.
     
2) Why is milk at the store on the shelf and not refrigerated?
In Spain they have developed a better way than pasteurization of milk.  This process is healthier and the milk will keep for 2 months or so.  It is put in cartons so they an be stored on the shelf since refrigerators in Spain are very small.  Nothing like the large ones in Canada or the US.  There is nothing like ice makers in refrigerators either.
  
3) Why are eggs on the shelf not refrigerated and why all brown eggs and no white ones?
The same thing for eggs as for milk.  The special cleaning process and soaking the eggs in special fluid makes them keep fresher and do not need refrigeration.  The other thing is that eggs are used greatly in Spain and people shop often - sometimes daily - for their groceries.  Because apartments are small there is not lots of room to store food.  We do not have any white eggs because of the type of chickens we have.  They only lay brown eggs.


Our evening visit to the Jewish Quarter in the Old Historic part of Seville for Tapas with Ricardo, Ken's colleague at work.

Note the narrow passage way between the two buildings - no roads, only passage way for people to walk - sometimes enough room for a long row of small round tables with two chairs on one side of the street and you walk down the other side.  All streets are rough cobblestone.

The red building is the Archbishop's House.

Open shutters of the window looking in at the kitchen.
 Iberian cured ham hangs for several months at a time.

Tomorrow is Ken's last day of work here for this short trip.  At 2 pm his staff here are taking him out for a traditional Spanish lunch which consists of 5 courses.  This is generally the main meal of the day and it can take up to 3 hours to complete since everything is served separately, you eat slow and visit.