A Year of Hookey: 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!