Sevilla goes green!

So now that things are following a more regular routine here, I'm going to write about some more general things I've noticed in my time here. I've been wanting to write about the public transportation here for awhile, but never got around to it. So here we go!

As I'm sure everyone knows, Europe in general has great public transportation. You don't need a car. In fact, a car is more of a pain than anything because you can never find parking. Now Sevilla is a big city, but it does not have an extensive Metro system like Madrid or Barcelona. There is a Metro line that runs east to west farther south in city, but I live up north so I have no need for the Metro. So instead of taking a subway, I take the bus.  The bus system here functions exactly like a subway system would - a huge extensive map with stops all over the place. There is a website online where you can check arrival times of the bus at certain stops. In the beginning I used this website a lot, but now I will normally just go straight to the stop and expect that a bus will be there within 10 minutes. A normal one-way trip on the bus is 1.20, but with my bus pass I only pay 0.60 for a trip. This is a picture of my bus pass. In addition to being reliable and relatively comfortable (as comfortable as public transportation can be, all of the buses run on either natural gas or bio-diesel. There are these large dumpster-like containers all over the city for people to discard used oil (and they go through a lot of oil here). You just save old oil in containers than recycle it to be made into bio-diesel...pretty cool!

In addition to the bus system, Sevilla has a bike rental system called SEVici (the Spanish word for bike is "bici"...so they are doing a little word play). There are two types of SEVici rentals, short term and long term. I applied for the long term rental card the second day I was in Sevilla and my card just arrived this weekend (yes, administrative tasks take a bit longer here). The long-duration card costs 13 euro for the whole year and it means I can ride the bikes pretty much whenever I want. There are stations all over the city and all you do is walk up, scan your card, put in your PIN, and take a bike. If you ride the bike for less than 30 minutes than it is free. If you go over 30 minutes its like 50 cents or a euro. This is particularly nice for getting home at night. Without the bike you can expect to spend 30-40 minutes walking home, or paying 5-10 euro for a taxi. But with SEVici, I feel comfortable going home alone at night and it takes MUCH less time. Plus riding bikes is just really fun. And they have really nice bike paths all over the city as well, making it really easy to get around.

Sevilla is just a very active city in general. There are always people out running, walking or biking, and it's really nice to see. I normally run on a path along the river and it's almost always full of people. And it's a good thing too, because with how much delicious Spanish food I eat, I need to be active :)