Parque de Maria Luisa y Plaza de Espana

Buenas Noches,

Today was Sunday, so unfortunately all of Seville was closed all day. They force you to rest and relax here, and I am very very not used to that. The Spaniards close all shops and businesses each day between 2-5pm. How convenient-- just enough time for lunch and a siesta! It makes me crazy to take naps every day and stay inside but it is scorching hot so during the day Seville is kind of quiet. The sun is hottest here around 3-6pm, unlike home. Due to the intense heat, the Spaniards make more use of the night time and the city seems to "wake up" when it starts to get dark and cool off. Unfortunately, however, it doesn't make for very good pictures in the dark.

Here are some pictures of our neighboorhood..

Our building :)

Amelia took us to a beautiful park near the city that was given to the people of Seville as a gift from the queen. The Parque de Maria Luisa, (named after her), was built for the World's Fair in 1929 and is filled with many gorgeous flowers and trees, as well as monuments and fountains. One interesting thing about the park and the entire city, is that... there is NO grass. Just dirt or sand everywhere. Which is why we return to the house each night with Black feet! yuck!! But there is no way of avoiding it because sneakers are just too hot to wear during the day.

Besides the heat, we did get to see some of the historic areas of the city that I have learned about in school. Seville was originally named "Hispalis" by the Romans and was the second to last city to be taken over by the Moors, then renamed "Sevilla". Seville and other Spanish towns were then taken over by Ferdinand and Isabella during La Reconquista. Still today, there are many many historical buildings that were erected during the Muslim era of Seville. These buildings are known for having repeating decorative tiles, intricate archways, tiered vaults, and domed ceilings. You can see the traces of this style of architecture all over Seville.

La Plaza de Espana :)

After the park, we visited La Plaza de Espana. This is one of the most amazing things we've seen so far... and go figure, my camera died as soon as we got there. (pics from Natalie coming soon!) This monument was built to honor all the provinces of Spain and is a really good example of the Moorish-style architecture. All of the tiles and little columns are the balconies were hand-painted and are all different. The tiles on the floors and ceilings are intricately carved into beautiful patterns, each ceiling different from the other. In the middle of this monument, there is supposed to be a circular canal of water with an area of floor in the middle but this area is under construction. There are beautiful hand-painted bridges that connect the middle floor to the outside floor. The monument is designed in a half-circle and there is a mural to represent each province of Spain along the wall connecting the buildings. I was just running around touching everything on this building. The floors, the columns, the steps, the walls, etc. Everything was so detailed and must have taken forever to decorate by hand.

Mas tarde, Adios

First day of School :)

Today we went to UPO for placement test and orientation. The people there are very nice and showed us around campus but its still really confusing. Our tour guide, Carolina, took us through the library where kids are studying for finals right now. It was like we were in a parade and EVERYONE was staring at us. We also spent a little time at the cafe on campus and got to try real freshly squeezed natural orange juice. It is delicious and I like it so much more than regular orange juice! Here you can see the beautiful orange trees that are Everywhere in Seville!

These were on our school campus but they are along all the roads and in all the parks too. Apparently, you can also make gunpowder with oranges (we learned from our tour guide) and they used to use them back in the day.

When we returned from school, we went to Al Campo, which is a supermarket across the street. THANK GOD for Al Campo! It's basically like a Wal Mart with everything you could imagine, (except outlet converters). We bought some snacks to eat, namely cookies, which I was dying for.. :) I noticed that all the food there is sold in very small packages. You can't really buy a box of cookies or big box of pretzels, etc. They only have little snack-size packages of everything. Another thing they have in Al Campo are.... PIG LEGS! -- like the one sitting in our kitchen here in Mercedes' house! ahhhh!! walls and walls of hammmmm!!!!... and no these are not in wrappers or packaging.. pure open, rotting ham... lovely. You can find these hanging in almost all tapa bars and restaurants as well. The most common use of the ham is jamon serrano- in which they do not cook the meat, but just put a ton of salt on it and let it dry out.

I also liked seeing the things that we have in stores, but in Spanish version, like my favorite books, for instance :) Yay!!

At 7pm, we met our group from school (about 15 ppl) in the city for a tour of the city.. this turned into talking about places we could go, walking around aimlessly in the hot sun (115 degrees here) and then stopping for cold drinks at a little place near the river. We have been seeing so many dogs around the city. It seems like everyone has them and I can't imagine how hot they must be, having fur, when we are nearly dying in shorts and a tank top. And even though we think its so incredibly hot, most people are wearing jeans all day when its over 100 degrees... crazy!

Here is el Torre de Oro (tower of Gold) that is located right next to the Guadalquivir river

Natalie and I met some nice people from Wisconsin that are visiting/living here now. They invited us to come with them to the Plaza de San Salvatore to have drinks and then we left to explore the city more.

Unfortunately, we are always always always lost and cannot figure out the buses or the maps of this crazy city. The traffic does not make sense, and the placement of roads has no rhyme or reason. Hence, it took us TWO hours to get home from the city, even after taking a bus part of the way. Very frustrating.....

Natalie and I have since started making a list of Spanish vocab that we are continuously forgetting and keep having to look up. Thank god that we ask a lot of questions because more than half of the placement exam we took included questions containing vocab that we have asked about in the last week! We are also trying very hard to pick up the thick Andalucian accent that Sevillanos have. In this region of Spain, they never finish their words and they all run together so it is hard to pick out words that you know when they speak. Any word that has an "s", the "s" is omitted, especially from the ends of words. Example: hasta ahora (means: see you later) sounds like "atauda"--- = Very confusing. They also eliminate d's from words that end in -ado, like cerrado (closed) - sounds like.. cerrao. Basically, the Sevillanos don't rush to get anywhere or do anything, but they make up for it when they talk.

Hola! Yesterday we met our new house mother, Mercedes, and got settled into our actual room for the next six weeks. The view from her balcony is so nice! Her home, like amelia's apartment is very very small, but its nice. She fed us lunch when we arrived, which was chicken and mashed potatoes. The food so far has not been very exotic, just Very very salty, and everything has ham in it. Mercedes has a daughter who just got married ten days ago. However, I think that being our house mother is her primary and only job. She loves watching tv and wakes up normally around 9-10am each day.

The view from our balcony!

The living room... and yes, that beautiful bride on the wall is Mercedes!
Our room...very tiny,... and bright yellow!

Mercedes is friends with another house mother of girls in our same program at the University Pablo de Olavide. They are from Texas and are pretty much just here to party instead of learning spanish.

Here we are with Avery and Nicki, who go to Ole Miss University

We went out with them last night to la Calle Betiz, which is basically a bunch of Americanized spanish bars. We went to a little cafe first to have wine. And in Spain, if they want to close the restaurant or bar, they turn out the light and then everyone yells...no! no! a little longer!! and then they turn them back on. But when they get to three times, they are closed for good. Here, no one takes shots in bars, so only these kind of bars have euro shots and more American-like traditions. It was kind of annoying to be there because everyone was speaking english, but Natalie and I found the few people that were Spaniards and talked to them so we could practice more.

Spanish friends :)

Here is a view of some of the river.. we couldnt get that close because this restaurant was closed..

One other crazy thing, was that we were sitting outside at the cafe, and out of no where, I saw a girl I had spanish class with my freshman year at PSU! She has apparently been studying here through ciee all spring semester, but has decided to extend her stay by doing an internship here for the summer! I hope I like it that much when I leave.. Also, she told us a lot of good places to go and how to do weekend trips, etc. I am kind of wishing we did ciee because of all the organized trips bc we are car-less and it is hard to organize it yourself.

We took a taxi back to our house at around 4:30am and then finally went to sleep. It seems like we waste the whole day here because we wake up at like 12pm or later, but then we don't waste the night. It is 90 degrees here right now so we really don't even want to be outside. Just taking a walk through the town to buy bus passes was almost unbearable. I just wished someone would just come along and throw water on me. Where is the pool here!?!? And no AC!! ahh!! We were going to go running today so we got all dressed and then went outside and almost dropped dead from the scorching heat. So much for that..

We have plans to go out later with Amelia when it cools down.. that's all for now.. Adios!

Upon entering Amelia's apartment and her bedroom, I noticed that she had an American flag hanging over her bed, which I found kind of funny and also sort of strange at the same time. But- she also has a penn state pom pom.. :) yay! and a map of the juniata campus..haha. She lives with four gay guys, who we met and couldn't understand at all. I think it's easier to understand higher-pitched voices maybe. Here are some pics of her apartment:

this is the view out an "inside" window. This is the little area between everyones' apartments in the building. They hang-dry all the laundry because they don't use dryers here. I would definitely be afraid to hang up my clothes when they could drop that far down!

This is the dining room/living room..

And here is the view from her balcony

Some things I learned from Amelia so far are:

Word for cool: guay pronounced.. (why)

... phrase.. just go away- ve a la cama con siete mantas... (go to bed with seven blankets) ???

So today, after waking up at 2:30pm, we had lunch and then went out to the mall for some shopping! Some of the stores we visited were: mango, ZARA, Bershka, and pull and bear.

Here is the mall.. it is a circular building with two floors for some stores. They have that cover over the middle, which is outside because of how hot it gets in the summertime.

One of the things I noticed immediately was that I was constantly saying.. oh! sorry! lo siento! perdone me! when I would bump into someone.. aka- every five seconds. But Amelia told us that if you bump someone slightly, there is absolutely no need to say excuse me, or sorry because they don't care. Also, when a shirt from one of the clothes racks fell off the hanger, I bent down to pick it up and Amelia said, no, just throw it on the floor or wherever. You don't need to hang it back up, just leave it. What?? Who does that? lol I was still going around the store picking things up and putting them on hangers though.

It seems that, in the United States, people are so concerned with being nice. But here, Amelia told us that they are just like, okay, come on, hurry up! For example, there are no greeters in the store, there are no employees floating around asking: are you finding everything okay? do you need help? And when you pay for your purchases the cashiers tell you the price and you pay and they walk away. There is no... have a nice day, happy holidays, nothing. Another thing that is different is that they scan your bag or purse before entering the dressing room in some stores. I didn't know this so I probably seemed like an idiot when the girl said.. okay you have to scan the bag.. and it just looks like a little black box plugged into an outlet near the floor. So I didn't understand her and I thought she said... you can't take in your other shopping bag. So I hung my little bag on the scanner because I thought she wanted me to leave it there. haha Luckily, Amelia was there to help me out. :)

Even though euros are worth more than dollars, it still kind of evened out because things are less expensive than they would be at home. At least, in the stores we were in. Another interesting thing is that no one wears shorts here, only pants or dresses/skirts. Plus, everyone thinks it's cool here at night, but it's actually about 75 degrees. So.. go figure, they wear jeans to go out to the bars, etc, which is great, considering we only brought two pairs of jeans each since we knew it would be so hot here.

Unfortunately, there is no superstore where we can buy everything we could ever want. All the shops along the streets are so small and basically carry something specific. Like, where is WalMart? lol

I have already experienced the outlet problem because Natalie's hairdryer exploded in about the first five minutes we were here. And oddly, a converter is not common to buy here. good thing i already have one that works! (thanks mrs. A!) We went to like 3 different electric stores and they had no clue what we wanted or didn't carry it.

We ran into another, huge problem, at the phone store. Natalie needed a phone that works in all of Europe since she is traveling abroad next year in the UK and Sweden. I just needed a phone for Spain but apparently that is more complicated than it sounds. Somehow, we ended up buying phone cards for five euros... Why did we need that? We didn't. And all we needed was a little chip for the phone and a phone number to call. However, it took us about an hour to tell Amelia to tell the lady in the phone store what we wanted. It was sooooooo incredibly frustrating because Amelia could understand our English but she really didn't know what we meant and we were getting ripped off but couldn't do anything about it. I even tried to ask the lady my question but in Seville, when people know you are a foreigner, they don't want to bother trying to understand your broken Spanish. This could be a problem since everywhere I go, they tell us that Natalie could pass for a Spanish person but I look like a foreigner for sure bc of my light hair and blue eyes.. greatttt.

After the craziness at the mall, we went to Starbucks <3>

How disgusting does that sound? They literally taste like a piece of ham and they are everywhere in stores. Everyone asks, have you tried the ham from Seville? They love it and they are proud of their ham. haha :)

Some other things that I noticed were different here are the cars. When people are driving here they think, okay: if you are going slow, ill go a different way and go around you. It doesnt seem like there are many rules about where you can drive if there is more than one lane on your side. Also, all the cars are very small and they park extremely close together and sometimes just park wherever and park other people in downtown!

That's all for now.. bed time! (5am) :) Buenas noches!

Hola todos! I'm officially in Sevilla, Spain and having an amazing time already! We arrived in Seville at around 4:30pm their time (around 10:30am). Regardless of what people say, there actually aren't that many people here that speak english, even in the airports and getting a taxi was kind of difficult. So, somehow we found Amelia's house and finally had someone that could understand us. However, instead of going to bed after being sleep-deprived for 48 hours, we went out to the bars! :) We went out to dinner and had bocadillos (little sandwiches) and met some of Amelia's friends. --Never forget the "kiss..kiss" to say hello because if you don't do it, it's just awkward. After dinner, we went to a club called "Rebotika" and talked to as many people as possible. :)

bocadillos!

Here is Rebotika and on the walls are foreign comics... all of which are obscene.

The bars and restaurants here are also very small and barely have any seating. Any fast food restaurant at home has more space and places to sit than here. This bar was practically like a closet, smaller than my room at home! And everyone just stands around drinking and talking and they just squeeze through the crowd to walk around.

Here's what was happening last night at apprx 12-3am in the street Seville. People just having a huge block party in the streets. Apparently, this was a small one, and they happen every Wednesday-Sunday. Oh... Spaniards.. :) Even young kids don't go to bed until around 11-12pm here and everyone can just drink outside in the streets and there are no police patrolling around for underage drinkers and marijuana. So much less stressful and yet also, so strange. Also, the clubs are open at 10pm but no one is in them until 12am and they close at 8am! When do these people sleep???

So, thursday also happens to be a holy day, and so some people dress up in traditional flamenco style dresses. Here are some of them that we took a picture with when we passed them in the street!

So... my first night in Seville was very eventful but we were EXHAUSTED!! Hence, we woke up at 2:30 in the afternoon the next day! So far, Spain is fun but also a little stressful since no one speaks english and not many people want to wait for you to try and speak spanish.. (just like in the US with foreigners). Seville also doesn't look like I expected. It looks pretty much like a regular city so far, with lots of apartment buildings and businesses/shops, instead of beautiful ornate historical buildings. Here is one though, the cathedral downtown. It is incredible with detail and is enormous. The only problem is that the streets are so tiny and the buildings are so close together that you can't really get a good picture of the whole thing at once.

That's all for now.. more tomorrow because I must go to sleep! Adios!