Bienvenidos a Sevilla

When I last left you, I had just arrived in Sevilla. Now, it has been exactly one week that I have been living here and I haven't had the energy to blog, but I'm trying to force myself to blog more often and write about things when they actually happen so that I don't build up a bible's worth of information for you to read.

We have taken a few tours around the city so far, which has been great because this first week has been dedicated to getting to know the city, the host family, and settle in before school starts. Luckily, school doesn't start until this coming Monday, the 9th, and I have certainly enjoyed this freedom.

On Friday we toured around the campus, but we are going to tour around again tomorrow (Friday) for our orientation, and I don't remember where anything was anyway, so that will be good. Interestingly, the University of Seville used to be a Tobacco factory, and there are still signs on the buildings that refer to that. It is a beautiful campus, and when I can take a better picture of it, I will post that (now that I know how to post pictures).

I didn't do much else this past weekend, especially Sunday because we experienced some thunder storms, or T-showers as I for some reason like to call them. It was crazyyy I haven't been in a thunder-storm for a really long time. I guess that's what happens when you live in the Valley and it barely even rains. So the whole day I was upstairs at the kitchen table with my roommate Jessica and María, reading, going online, and figuring out how to blog. I've found that there's a traditional custom here in the houses of Andalucían families which includes having your dinner table in the family room next to the TV and the couch, and what's even better is that there's a heater underneath the table so when you're eating and relaxing, you're warm too. So we just hung out on the couch with the heater as it was thundering and torrentially downpouring on Sunday and I did not leave the house. I know they say that you need to go out and explore the city and should not spend so much time online, but I know that the weather is going to get much better here, so if there are a couple extremely heavy rainfalls right now, I do not mind staying in to secure my health and not get soaked.

I was really worried that night because we had a scheduled bike tour of the city on Monday, and I feared that if it were raining, then I would definitely not want to go. Fortunately for us it did not rain on the whole 2-hour bike ride we went on. It was a really good idea and I'm so glad I went, but because it has been probably 8-10 years since I've been on a bike, I was very distracted. I couldn't concentrate on where we were or what we were exploring because I was so worried that I was going to run into someone or fall off or get hit by a car. It was a stressful first thirty minutes. And I'm not embarrassed at all to say this little anecdote. I was feeling really uncomfortable on the ride in the beginning, just where the breaks were and everything that I was trying to get used to, but something really seemed odd about the breaks. Finally we came to a stop and my front wheel basically turned around on its own and I realized that I had been riding the bike almost backwards!! I don't know how that happened, why I didn't notice, or how I continued to ride for as long as I did. Regardless, I laughed a lot about that and everything was fine after. I told you I haven't been on a bike for a long time!!


So, from there we started our grammar review class. It was pretty pointless because we talked about very basic grammar for 2.5 hours. We've had a class everyday this week and today will be my last class. I guess it's a good review, but it doesn't actually help me because I know most of the rules pretty well. If you give me a paper with fill in the blank verbs with different tenses, I can pretty much get it--it's like a math problem or something. But when it comes to speaking, all the rules leave my head and I can't get anything out. I guess it's just a different part of my brain that manages these functions.

Tuesday we visited the Cathedral and Tower of Giralda in Sevilla. It's right in the heart of the city and it's from the late 12th/13th century, originally built by the Arabs as a Mosque, but later turned into a church like almost everything in Spain. The Cathedral is one of the biggest in the world, I forgot if it was the 2nd or the 3rd, and in it resides one of the many tombs of Christopher Columbus, who apparently has his body scattered in a few different places. Next to the Cathedral is the Tower of Giralda, which is spectacular as well. There are no stairs in this tower to actually get to the top, so you walk up and around all of these ramps, about 40 of them I believe, just to get to the top. I took some pictures, but the weather wasn't that great so hopefully I'll go back again to get better pictures for you.


This is the Tower of Giralda


From the Tower of Giralda looking onto the courtyard of the cathedral.

From the Tower of Giralda looking onto the cathedral.

Finally, yesterday we went to the Old Alcázar, which means Fortress. I had already been walking around the city center for a couple days, and hadn't even noticed that this place was right in the middle of it all--although to my credit it is surrounded completely by walls and maybe I just thought it was a park). People don't live in it anymore, but it used to be a residing place for spanish royalty when they made it down to Sevilla. Still today the royals use it when they want to--someone's daughter in the family even had her wedding reception there recently. Anyway, it was beautiful and everything was made out of marble and tiles because as I will find out eventually, it gets SUPER hot here and by having materials like marble, it's a good way to try to cool things down. Everything I've seen so far, especially this building has prominent influences of all three cultures, and it's really exciting to see them present together. They were pretty excited there because there were some Californian Palm Trees--haha. And if I heard her correctly, they even met and planned in one of the rooms we went in about Magellan's famous expedition. Also, there was this awesome labyrinth--I think it was for the children, it was pretty small, but I've always wanted to go into one like that and we had a good time. Of course we were waiting to see Pan and be taken into a magical world, but we made it out of there alive and well.





El laberinto.

Anyway, later that day (yesterday, Wednesday the 4th), it started getting pretty windy-which again is something unusual here. So I went home for lunch and then it started to pour again. I decided not to go to the grammar review class and I am so glad I didn't go because we had even more T-showers yesterday. It's been pretty horrible weather, but I think next week it's going to get better.

Briefly, onto the food, for any of you who have known me for all of my life know that I have had the tendency to be quite the picky eater. Up until college I wouldn't really eat anything that wasn't pasta or chicken--aka, not much. Then, as most of you know, I became a vegetarian, but I purposefully started eating meat for this trip so that I wouldn't be limited with my food choices (and man I probably would have nothing to eat if I still was vegetarian) and then I would experience more of the culture. I told you already about the ham, but the other night, for the first time since either the early 2000s, I ate a hot dog, or salchichas here. I swore those things off way before I even became vegetarian. I had stopped eating them on my own, but one day in carpool in high school, Ken Winters shared a story with me that reasserted my vow to never eat a hotdog again. However, I knew it was coming because Jessica (my roommate) had warned me about that kind of meal. My house mom seemed a little frustrated when I told her I used to be vegetarian because she said I already don't eat eggs so there would be nothing for me to eat, so I knew I had to suck it up and eat this hot dog. It tasted exactly the same as I remembered it, and I covered it in the mashed potatoes she had also prepared. And now, Jessica and I only hope that we have to eat those salchichas only a few more times before the semester's over.

I will leave you with a final comment--something that I've found interesting. The four of us have usually been eating dinner together every night so far (lunch has been different because I have had to eat earlier than them to get to my grammar class) but we will all sit down at that couch table together and eat different things. Jessica and I eat one thing and Elisa and María eat something else. At first I thought that was a little weird, but I justified it through something in my head that I can't fully explain. But now I have found out that they end up eating our left overs a few nights after we eat that exact thing. This is something I do not understand yet, and I am going to try to figure it out.

Besos,
Haley