SpainBlog

I’m walking the ancient streets of Sevilla… I guess it sounds cooler when you put it like that. Mostly though, I’m just walking to and from school, focused on not tripping on the cobblestones or smashing my computer against things in my rolling bookbag. I’m mostly successful at both of those. Anyways, my mom was bugging me that I haven’t blogged nearly enough, and I guess she’s right. Here are my excuses: it’s been too hot, I’ve been too busy, I don’t have internet in my home, and blahblahblah. Wimpy, but there they are.

So! It did finally cool down here. I spent one blazing hot Saturday on the beach, and couldn’t believe the cool clouds that covered the sky on Sunday. By Monday, it was a full 20 degrees cooler than it had been on Saturday, and even though I didn’t trust it to stay, it seems that it’s now officially fall here. Fall is much more agreeable. It’s just so hard to do touristy things when you can’t make it 2 blocks without having to turn around to buy another bottled water! Now I feel like my roommate and I are starting to make it out to see more stuff. I still haven’t been in the cathedral, the visiting hours are difficult, and I didn’t go to the bullfight with everyone else. I felt a little bit of regret that I didn’t go, so I went instead on a very long walk in a district I had previously neglected. I saw again the beautiful Plaza de Armas, a gorgeous shopping mall sized thing. I don’t know what to call it, some kind of cross between a palace and a train station. It was missing the water from the encircling moat (construction, just my luck), but it was still hard to take it all in anyways. The details in the building, and actually most of the buildings here, are, well, numerous. A lot of surfaces are covered in or include ornately painted tiles. You can see Goya everywhere if you are looking. I giggled when I saw, behind the ancient lanterns, electric floodlights disguised as part of the original light. And apparently I made the right choice about the bullfight- most people didn’t enjoy it, one girl cried, and my roommate couldn’t watch the last fight because of the gore. AND walking didn’t cost me anything :) The bull is a popular symbol in the tourist shops here. There’s a proud looking bull outline on half of the t-shirts, and it does look really cool and impressive and nostalgic. I would get one for myself, but I still just can’t buy into the violence. Ugh.

The food…actually does take some getting used to. Of course my senora is a magnificent cook, and very accommodating. But the Spanish are on a completely different schedule when it comes to meals. In the morning, a large breakfast would consist of some white toast, a coffee or tea, and a piece of fruit. I usually just eat a yogurt. The problem is that normal Spaniards would then go off to work or school and not eat again until lunch at 2 or 3. I’m used to having a normal sized meal by 1 at the very latest! Well, we get out of school at 1:30 and usually make our way back home by 2:30ish. We eat lunch then before 3. And boy, do we get lunch. In spain, the largest meal is lunch. Our senora serves us with the idea generally being that we eat ourselves into a catatonic state and then make our way to our rooms to sleep it off for half an hour (or for the remaining 2 hours of siesta, your choice). I have 2 major problems with this situation: 1. That Spaniards do not eat cold food. No cold food for lunch, ever, never, ever. If it is not fresh and steaming hot, it’s not lunch! So pretty much every day for the last 3ish weeks, we’ve had large platefuls of something very hot for lunch. Every day. I call it all stew, because lunch always has stew-like qualities, even if it’s not stew per se. I don’t really think I want to eat stew-food every single day for another 3 months…… 2. Cold milk does not exist in Spain. I’m beginning to wonder if they even have cows at all except bulls, because they don’t really eat beef either. Beef I can do without, but I am DYING for a glass of cold skim milk!! They do have something like milk, but it’s not the real thing. It comes off the shelf in a box. It comes in skim and non skim options, but I can’t find anything about being pasteurized, and it’s WARM and it TASTES FUNNY. I NO LIKE.

So, aside from eating stew and suffering from lack of calcium, everything else is fine. To sum it up, our Senora does a combination of spoiling/pampering/coddling us, and OH YEAH I FORGOT.

DOG PEE.

These ancient cobblestone streets are covered in dog pee. Like, if you think about it, I bet there is not one square inch of our residential streets that have not at some point been covered with dog pee. Or human pee (men, cough), if you want to go there. It is a city after all. Someone needs to potty train these animals. There is literally nowhere to take your animal of choice to do it’s business, unless you want to walk probably quite a ways to one of the major parks, and even then that’s just rude to do so in a park. And since people insist on keeping pets (and men), that is the reason I am looking down when I walk. Sorry for the wisecracks. Dog poo is another issue, and it’s insaaaane that it is so. I’m 100% positive that if I walked away from my dog’s poop on a sidewalk somewhere in Chicago, people would be in an instant uproar, someone would get out of hand, and there could be a poop problem. But no, not in Sevilla. I’ve only seen two ladies clean up after their dogs, and I did just yesterday see a free-standing doggy bag thingy, kind of like where you would go get a free newspaper. (Only it didn’t look like that at all). So, that’s the end of that rant.

It’s proving too difficult to post pictures in a massive quantity to this site, so I’m just going to post you the link to my facebook albums. You shouldn’t need an account to view them if you just follow the link.

Take care, and think about me the next time you get to enjoy a nice cold glass of milk :/

Let me tell you, travelling into the future is rough. I left Chicago at 5pm, travelled for 9 hours, and arrived at my Sevillian home at about 11am Seville time. My Señora, Isabel Sanchez Martinez, welcomed us three students with air kisses to each cheek. She's 70 years old and could pull suitcases up the stairs faster than us! The first day, my roommate and I focused mainly on staying awake (epic fail), figuring out where we were and how to get places, and putting away our things.

The food. is. awesome.

Sometimes, I wonder if she secretly bought our dinners and just put it on plates before serving it to us. She makes these home made french fries that are BETTER than real fries! And then this delicious ham & cheese crunchy dinner wrap thing that was like a hot pocket only 100,000 times better. And hot chocolate for breakfast. Sorry for rambling, the food is good :)

The next few days were spent making short trips out into Seville. It's unbelievably hot, and regardless of what my insane classments say, it is too hot to be traipsing around town during most daylight hours. It's the kind of hot where you move to any tiny bit of shade so that your skin stops cooking. The kind where you sweat profusely in the shade, the kind of heat where you linger in air conditioned doorways and wonder if you could wear your bathing suit around town. We have to walk across a very long, shadeless bridge to get to school, and every day there are always people jumping into and swimming in the river. One of these days, someone is going to lose it and jump in with them, it looks so inviting! At this moment, it's 11:20 am and the temp is 32C, or 90F.

It's hot.

SpainBlog

Monday, September 21, 2009

PICTURE LINK-O

Week 3

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I'm here!

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