Settling in

Since my last post, I have joined up with the CIEE group and started settling into my homestay and classes. Our group is great. The people seem very enthusiastic and so far everybody has been really nice. A major plus is that four of the kids were here last semester, so they have been showing us around and filling us in on the best places to get cellphones and churros.

My host family is the bomb. The parents are relaxed and welcoming, making me feel at home but also giving me space and letting me go out whenever. The kids are really cute and friendly: the little ones like to hug me and hold my hand and the older one likes to play Europoly (like Monopoly with Spanish properties and Euros) with me! I live across the river from el centro, in a family neighborhood (mostly residential with a few shops here and there). The walk to school takes me just under a half an hour, giving me a good amount of time to think, listen to my iPod, and enjoy my surroundings.

The Spanish classes are set up in a very relaxed way. We basically just talk for hours at a time and ask the teacher when we don't know what something means. Today we talked about fashion. Yesterday we talked about menage-a-trois (sp?) and where everybody was from. The great thing about this chill, conversational set-up is that I am learning a lot more colloquial Spanish than I ever did in high school. The teacher, Mercedes, doesn't seem to mind going off on tangents, as long as everybody is talking and doing so en español!

I've also learned a bit more about Sevilla. The oranges I mentioned before are apparently really bitter and no good to eat. Every spring they are picked and sent to England though, where they are turned into orange marmalade! When I heard this I laughed because orange marmalade is something I always have associated with little British school boys who are asking their Daddy for some toast. I've also learned that bicyclists make no effort to avoid pedestrians and travel at incredibly high speeds. Apparently four kids doing my program were hit last year! So that's something I'm going to have to be careful of. Other things I have learned are: people are late (my teacher didn't arrive at our 11:20 afternoon class until 11:35, so I guess I can take my time getting my café con leche during break), January-March is the season for rebajas--sales--and so all the shops are packed, and people live with their parents until their mid-twenties or early thirties.

That's all for now. I'm going to do my homework assignment and then get to bed early, because tomorrow is FUNKY NIGHT at a discoteca in town. I have to get some good rest or else I will be pretty cranky at school on Thursday.

Experiencing Sevilla as a tourist

Today my mom and I did a lot of touristy things around el centro, the center of Seville. First we walked to la Catedral de Sevilla. While taking some photos of the imposing, impressive outside architecture, we were approached by a woman carrying short fragrant branches. She gave us one each and started telling us our fortunes, which we knew she would charge us for, but it was fun so we let her take total advantage of our blatant status as confused extranjeros. She told me I would get married and that my mother would live a long life. My mother started to hand her a 2 euro coin but she insisted that we give her more. “Coins are bad luck. You must give me paper money.” But we needed the paper money, the larger denomination, to get into la Catedral. So we told her that we were giving her all we could. I’m pretty sure she cursed us. So I’m a little freaked out by that. My mom told me not to worry, but clearly she’s never had a gypsy curse placed on her before.

view of La Catedral and La Giralda. The dome covers the room with the Bishop's chair.

Anyway, slightly shaken up (but not shaken down), we entered the astonishingly large Catedral. It was so beautiful, but in a dark, intimidating way. My mom, an architect, was amused by the agglomerative styles. The building was originally constructed as a Mosque (1184-1198), its famous Giralda bell tower a minaret. The building’s Islamic roots are still visible--for example, in the mushroom-shaped Puerta del Perón--though not overwhelming like the Gothic elements (then again, I supposed Gothic elements were supposed to be overwhelming...) After the Mosque was consecrated as a Cathedral in 1248 (burn!) the space was renovated four additional times: in a Gothic style (1434-1517), during the Renaissance (1528-1601), during the Baroque period (1618-1758), and between 1825-1928, when the three main doors and the southwest corner were added. The interior is covered in ornate drips of gold and painstakingly carved wood and stone. The ceilings are vaulted and very high, reaching 37 m at the center of the transept. My mom, who is not only an architect but also an historian, commented that she hates seeing such lavishness within Catholic spaces--it reminds her of how corrupt Catholicism was centuries ago. “People were literally starving while this was being created” (referring to an especially gaudy gold crown). I did really enjoy the room with the Bishop’s chair--it was a brighter space with a pretty cupola.

After leaving la Catedral, we nourished ourselves with some café and walked to Real Alcázar, the royal palace about which I have heard much wonderful praise. This was such a peaceful experience, especially after my gloomy and heavy experience in la Catedral. I want to come back to Real Alcázar every day that I am here. Obviously that will not be possible, but hey, a girl can dream. I think the grey sky and slight drizzle made the bright walls brighter, the old tiles clearer, and the lush vegetation riper. Normally I prefer sunny weather, but today I was grateful for its absence. Islamic influences are far more apparent here: I noted many semi-circular arches and arabesques.

Major highlights were

• El Estanque de Mercurio (Mercury’s Pool), which, if I remember correctly, was originally part of some plumbing that was turned into a decorative pool in the 16th century. Don’t quote me on that, though.
• Los Baños de (the baths of) Doña María de Padillas, a long originally uncovered pool that was enclosed in a vaulted space after an earthquake.
• El Cenador del León (The Lion Bower), a pavilion named for the lion statue in the fountain opposite the bower.
• Cuarto del Almirante (The Admiral’s Room), in which important cosmographic discoveries of the Americas, and the first trip around the world, were organized.

looking up at El Estanque de Mercurio from a sunken terrace

Expect more on Real Alcázar. A lot more, I hope! Everybody should get to see this place. Time for dinner! Even though the real Sevillanos won’t be sitting down to dine for another two hours...

Getting here (Sevilla)

I am afraid of flying.

Correction: flying makes me nervous, but I am downright terrified of airports. They are really confusing and busy, and I am awful at navigating. I can barely find the post office from my house in Boston, and the post office is like 4 blocks away. So getting from Boston to Madrid and from Madrid to Seville was a little daunting for me. Happily, my father gave my mother a trip to Europe (doesn't that sound much more classy than "Eurotrip?") which she decided to use now in Seville. Flying over with her eased my fears a lot/made it so that I didn't have to figure anything out on my own. Plus, now I am here early and handling all the communication with natives. So I am getting a chance to flex my Spanish muscles, which are kind of atrophied, before classes begin. Bonus!I'm glad I didn't have to get here alone, because transit was kind of nuts. Flying from Boston to Madrid was a piece of cake, but there was an unusually heavy snow in Madrid (my friend Teresa, who lives there, told me all schools and universities were closed), so our flight to Seville was delayed from 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. I don't mind delays at all-they offer a chance to snooze, read, and listen to music. But get ready for some wild stuff. A lot of flights were

entirely cancelled. There were 4 lines to the Iberia (a Spanish airline) desk, each with about 200-250 people waiting to figure out what to do about their cancelled flights. Understandably, people were frustrated that they were stuck in Barajas and that they had to wait so long, so obviously they STARTED A MINI-RIOT. Logical. The people in the line started chanting really loudly and standing up on tables and whistling and getting in the faces of the Iberia people, so THE AIRPORT CALLED IN SOME SOLDIERS WHO WERE CARRYING AROUND RIFLES. The rioters also woke me up from my nap. Anyway, we eventually got on our plane after hanging out with this cool Canadian lady for a while and we arrived here, in Seville. We did kind of take a rogue taxi, who, because he wasn't official (which we didn't know when we got in) couldn't drive on a lot of the inner streets of the city. So he dropped us 10 blocks away from the hotel with awful directions and we got a little lost and it took us an hour to find the hotel, but it was an

adventure, and we got to see a lot of pretty façades/interesting shops.

Interesting Things So Far:

- the architecture--there are a lot of beautifully painted façades (oranges, deep reds, pinks, bright yellows) with balconies protected by black iron fences. They are muy bonitas!

- there is a hilarious surplus of bridal shops

- there are orange trees EVERYWHERE. I think in the rain a lot of the oranges fell off so they are littering the streets. They look very pretty and yummy.

- NO8DO. I was seeing this written and on signs and banners everywhere I walked, so I looked it up on wikipedia (what a great tool). If wikipedia was telling me the truth, the 8 represents a madeja (a skein of yarn). When read as "no/madeja/do" it sounds a little like "no me ha dejado," which means "[Sevilla] has not abandoned me." I thought this was a really nice motto-it made me think that people here must feel a real kinship with their city, something I look forward to witnessing and hopefully experiencing myself!

That's all for now. It's time to get ready for dinner! (8:15 is still a little early for dinner here, but hey, I'm still adjusting).

Blail (blog fail)

Ok, I'm a blogging failure. I've tried to write a post many times, but to tell you the truth, it's a good thing that I didn't because it would have been boring. Since my last post, on November 4th, I have worked many more hours at the toy store (including holiday hours which were nightmarish), gone salsa dancing again a few times, spent time with old friends home from college for the holidays, packed for Spain (I'M LEAVING THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW) and gone through NBC withdrawal because of its month-long comedy hiatus.

So aren't you glad that I have neglected these gap year chronicles? Get ready for some real entries soon though. I will be in Seville, Spain from January 10th to May 15th, with a week-long pause somewhere in the middle there for my cousin's wedding.

Let me tell you right now what I am excited about and what I am nervous about.

EXCITED ABOUT:

- seeing/being a part of a beautiful city

- becoming fluent in Spanish

- eating (here's hoping that they like jamón serrano as much in Sevilla as they did in Madrid. This cured meat is so incredibly delicious!)

- being warmer than I am right now

- making new friends, both American and Spanish

- developing a relationship with my host family

- riding a camel on the trip to Morocco

NERVOUS ABOUT:

- failing to become fluent in Spanish

- eating fish, which doesn't agree with me but which I understand is a staple in southern Spain

- being placed with a host family with whom I do not get along

- falling off a camel on the trip to Morocco

Also, my brother Zander keeps telling me that I'm going to get sold into sex slavery. I was doing an okay job ignoring this horrible prophecy of his until I watched that movie Taken with Liam Neeson. Fun movie. Stupid brother.