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!