Street People

Hola!

Okay, I promise, I’m working on a Morocco blog, but it’s really long and I’m still writing it and I want to throw out a little something about daily life here.

Let’s talk about street people. I mean, street performers and gypsies. Particularly gypsies. I like them less than just about anyone. Ever. (I should mention that I don’t like gypsies who are living gypsy lifestyles, as there are perfectly normal people gypsies who live happily among the Spaniards). Here’s why:

So, male gypsies are elusive. This is presumably because they want to look inconspicuous so that when they take your wallet, you’re standing in the middle of a street going “my goodness, these people are all too inconspicuous to be thieves, I don’t know who to blame!” And I’m not saying this based off of assumptions, we had a lengthy discussion in my phonetics class talking about how gypsies make money.

The men, while tricky in their robbing, bother me infinitely less than the women. Maybe because they have the decency not to shove things in my face. Here’s how you know someone is a gypsy woman: she’s usually quite corpulent and wearing very bright, very tight clothing. It’s as though the gypsy women have sucked all the conspicuousness from their husbands into themselves to stand out twice as much. They stand on the street thrusting their sprigs of weeds in my face and offering to read my palm, only to make me feel obligated to pay them or to pickpocket me while I’m distracted by my growing irritation. (Okay, so I always tell them "no" and walk fast so they don’t do this to me, but they try really hard and all the time and it’s annoying).

Aside from Gypsies we have an inexplicably large number of silver people. They’re the statue performers. There’s the flower woman who dresses in Victorian garb and holds roses, the guy who dresses as a cowboy and is frozen in a position of pulling a gun from a holster, and another man whose only shtick is being silver and standing still. I like the silver people because they’re interesting to look at and generally not confrontational. However, I do wonder why no one seems interested in any of the other metallic colors, like gold or bronze. I mean, gold is the color of victory and silver is the color of kind of winning. If I were a metallic statue street performer, I'd want to be gold.

I also enjoy the accordion woman. Purely for her comedic value. She always sits in the same spot with her dog that wears the same little blue shirt and she always plays the same song. Every time. We know it by now and drone along as we walk past.

Competing with redundant accordion woman to be my favorite street performer are the fake Indians. They get all dolled up in their very clichéd Native American garb and play songs from “The Last of the Mohicans.”  They obstruct the path and play super loud and are thus very obvious. I can’t figure out their target audience though. The Spaniards who live there are unfazed by their playing and I can’t decide what tourist would go “Oh, look, honey! A Native American musical group selling CDs in Spain. Let’s patronize them!” It seems as though their success rate should be low.

So that’s a taste of the people I walk past on a pretty regular basis in Sevilla. I hope you enjoyed my little rundown of the local characters and I hope you’re all having adventures of your own.

Love,

Natalie

P.S. I'd have pictures but street people don't like when you take pictures and don't pay them. It makes them mad and I'm the one who has to walk by them every day and feel their spiteful gaze.