Week 1 in Sevilla

Entry 2

    1st Week of Classes

I had my first week of classes last week, though only a half week. Monday was a Spanish writing quiz and "tour" that was grievously shortened because of rain while Tuesday was the actual orientation where I was given my schedule and a welcome presentation. After the presentation, there was a tapas and sangria mingling event for the international students to meet each other and yet I met 2 more people from NAU and a couple of girls from New Mexico. The program mostly consists of Americans and Germans, and then smaller groups or individuals from various other countries. I may be too short for the German students to see me. The tapas event was fun, but it feels so weird to drink at school and it never stops being a little funny to me that it is completely normal here and you can buy a drink in the cafeteria. 

I had my first classes on Wednesday and Thursday, so it was a short week. Wednesday ended up being my two classes in English, a Spanish history class and a U.S.-European international relations class, which was a nice way to ease in. I have two Spanish language classes and one cultural class, taught in Spanish, on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

history tangent!

From my first day of history class I learned that Spain is actually younger than the U.S.! Despite pretty much every google search telling you differently, Spain did not exist as a unified country under that name until the nineteenth century. Prior to this it was loosely called Hispana (coined by the Romans) but existed as individual kingdoms. It did not have a national flag until the nineteenth century. This means that the common belief that Christopher Columbus was sailing under the Spanish flag is completely inaccurate! I also learned that in the Spanish version of Gladiator, Maximus is called the Hispano and not the Spaniard because that term would not have even existed in the timeframe of the movie.

    Schedule

I have classes 12-3pm on Mondays/Wednesdays and 9am-3pm on Tuesdays/Thursdays which is really nice because everyone has siesta and lunch sometime between 2-4pm so I can go home for siesta, and I do not have to go back to campus after. The school is not too far from my host home but is not walkable, so I walk about 15 minutes to the nearest metro stop and then I stay on the metro for 10 minutes to get to the university campus. It is becoming a habit to think of 'school' as 'university' since learning that 'school', here, means elementary school.

When I am going to and from my apartment every day, I walk through a beautiful park that is a building away from mine. There are always tons of dogs in the park and it's one of the best parts of every day! The dogs are also very well behaved here and having them off leash is completely normal and more common than having them on a leash.

    The Weekend

I know a handful of the girls in the program that I am in because we all came from NAU together and on Friday I went to Las Setas with a couple of them. Las Setas are an odd wooden structure that were built in 2011 over Sevilla's original city center, and they light up each night. You can go up on top of the structure and see the city.

the view from the top of Las Setas and the Cathedral lit up in the background

Me! on top of Las Setas

On Saturday night, with 5 girls from NAU (3 of which I did not know until Spain!) as well as my friend's Italian roommate, we went to a club called Koko. Koko is actually underneath Las Setas! Going out in Spain is very different than the U.S. because you do not go to the clubs until 12am at the earliest and then you stay out until maybe 5am. That was a little much for us, so we went to the club around 12:30 and left by 3:30 but then getting home is an adventure because the metro stops running at 2am. We walked a couple of miles to where some of the girls lived (because we are cheap and did not want to pay for an uber), and then I had to take an uber from my friend's neighborhood because I live in the suburbs of Sevilla, about another hour of walking from where my friends live. After all of that plus stopping to get a drunk Spanish girl safely into a car home (not an easy task when you don't speak a lot of Spanish and she's slurring her words and crying!), I finally got home just after 5am. The club was fine but not worth the hassle and cost of getting home, in my opinion, and played a disappointing amount of English music as I was looking forward to learning more Spanish songs. I'll probably stick more to exploring than partying, but I tried out the odd times!

    Food

On Monday, after the very short school tour, I went to Nervión with a couple of the other girls from NAU and we stopped at a little cafe/pastry shop where I bought an oreo croissant. It was a regular croissant with oreo ice cream inside, chocolate syrup, crushed oreos pieces, and garnished with two tiny oreos. 10/10! Highly recommend and I will probably go back for another.

I also had a panini in el centro (the downtown area) after we saw Las Setas, and that was good. I have had ice cream pretty much every time that I have been in el centro and that is obviously good because it's ice cream. Most of my meals have been with my host family, a mother and 9-year-old daughter, and been odd mixes of food but not bad. They eat eggs often here but not as a breakfast food and serve almost everything with either some kind of bread or potato chips. We eat quite a bit of tortillas patatas which is like a thick omelet that is eggs and potatoes and very common to the area. They have 'dessert' after almost every lunch and most dinners but dessert here is either fruit or occasionally a yogurt cup, so I have been eating a lot of bananas and grapes.