Senses of Seville

A month into my exchange in Seville, Spain, I was still woefully unaware of the local culture. At least, until my two Dominican friends dragged me to a flamenco bar one evening.
Constantly tripping over cobble stones on the winding streets of the Jewish quarter in the city, we finally managed to discover our destination: a hidden flamenco bar by the name of La Carbonería. It truly was a place you’d only find if you had been given a detailed manual of directions and a compass, so undisturbed was its location.
We entered the bar, nervously ordered some beers and found a seat on the heavy wooden beams used as benches. A withered old man was singing when we entered, sitting alone on a chair, eyes closed and hands clapping in the typical flamenco style. No orchestra backed him up, the only music in the room was the frail yet elastic voice of the shrunken man.
The three of us sat speechless, our beers turning warm in our hands.
After a few songs, the man abandoned the stage, and made way for an elderly woman, draped in a shawl with long swinging tassels. The woman’s red lipstick was about three shades too bright and her blue eyeshadow reached the arch of her eyebrows, but her mischievous smile made these elements irrelevant.
As soon as she opened her mouth, and the guitar joined her, the atmosphere rose like warm air to the ceiling. Suddenly, the entire audience began clapping with her, to a rhythm I could in no way identify or follow. A man sitting next to us shouted in drunken Spanish that we should be clapping along with the music, that obvious was our tourist status in the bar. My Dominican friends picked it up quickly, skipping the beats necessary and knowing when to clap harder for emphasis. My own Danish hands transformed into untrained lumps of meat, seeming to always be at least two beats behind everyone else. I decided to devote time to my beer instead.
The jovial flamenco songs soon ignited some couples in the bar to begin dancing Sevillanas, a brand of flamenco from Seville, where a man and a woman dance opposite one another, twisting their hands gracefully while circling their partner. These couples, who had before only seemed like average people, morphed into dancers before my very eyes. I wept within for my scandalously non-rhythmical upbringing, silently cursing the Northern European blood in my veins.
A few months later, La Carbonería had been shut down for reasons unknown. Hopefully it wasn’t for letting in incompetent tourists like myself.