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.