Week 2 in Sevilla

Entry 3

    This Week

Classes were good this week, except for Friday when we had online classes to make up for a holiday in May and my microphone would not work. I went to the Catedral de Sevilla (which is the largest gothic cathedral in the world!) on Wednesday after classes. You feel absolutely tiny inside with all the crazy high ceilings and just the grandness of everything. The Cathedral (pictured right) is of course gorgeous, and the details everywhere are honestly overwhelming, like you could spend days there and never notice everything. I adored the stained-glass windows, and the imagery captured in them, but my friend was most excited about the Tomb of Christoper Columbus which is lofted by several statues carrying it.

    This Weekend

On Friday afternoon, very shortly after my classes ended, I had to rush downtown to meet the girls for our first BlaBlaCar. BlaBlaCar is a service that pairs you with a driver that is going in the same direction as you, so it is much cheaper than trains or even uber, as you are only contributing to gas money and a little extra for the driver. Our first experience was very positive as we had a super sweet woman who was happy to let us practice our Spanish. She drove us to Ronda, which is where we stayed for the night and until 2pm on Saturday.

                    Ronda

Ronda was absolutely gorgeous and had so much history and architecture. It is home to Puente Nuevo, a bridge completed in the 1700s, across aqueducts that were built between the 12th and 13th century! We hiked down a bit to see the aqueducts and it was completely worth it even though the path was steep and slick, and I fell about ten steps in. My group asked the sweetest lady to take our picture and spoke with her and her husband for a while and they said they were kiwis (New Zealanders!) taking a vacation around Spain and the UK. The husband helped my friend adjust the setting on her camera for the sunlight and the wife gave us recommendations from the cities they have already visited, absolute sweetest people that I have met so far. We also explored a museum with some beautiful views and walked at least 3 miles trying to find the Arab Baths which were maybe a mile away, but oddly difficult to find if you use google maps (I guess that we should have trusted the local that tried to turn us the right direction, oops).

   

view from one side of Puente Nuevo

Me! on Puente Nuevo

                     

            the view from the other side of Puente
            Nuevo, the yellow dot marks where we
            walked down to for the next picture

the aqueducts! and where we were
 standing when we took the other pictures!

the ceiling of the Arab Baths

                    Malaga

Saturday afternoon we took another BlaBlaCar from Ronda to Malaga, although this time our driver was a young man going 120mph and I thought we were going to die a couple of times, but we made it! We stayed in a hotel in Ronda, so Malaga was my first time staying in a hostel and it was fortunately very nice, and my group had our own room. In Malaga, we went to the Museo Picasso Malaga (a museum of Picasso's works), the Alcazaba Fortress, the beach, and a bull ring. The museum was interesting and well laid out, but I honestly do not understand cubist art. The fortress was amazing, but we unfortunately did not have the time to walk all the way up to the highest point. Still, even from our lower vantage point, we were able to get amazing views of the city and the bull ring which we later walked the halls of but could not go inside the ring itself. We stopped by the beach Saturday night and on Sunday but did not stay long either time as it was a bit too chilly to sit by the water. Overall, if you were not actively at one of the historical sites, Malaga felt like any coastal city. It was also very touristy, so I heard as much English as I did Spanish and it was easy to forget that I was even in Spain, as it felt like LA. A pretty city but I definitely preferred Ronda.

a Picasso work of a man with ice cream

Alcazaba Fortress

a courtyard within the Alcazaba

steps to the higher part of the fortress

    Food

For dinner in Ronda, I tried patatas bravas which are supposed to be potatoes with a spicy sauce, but the sauce was not spicy and was mostly mayonnaise unfortunately. 4/10, loved the potatoes, hate mayonnaise. I had the patatas bravas with what was supposedly a chicken burger but certainly did not taste like chicken, nonetheless, pretty good: 6/10. Breakfast was included at our hotel, so we started Saturday with a tostada (just a large, long piece of toast) and topped it with butter and either jam or cheese, ham, and tomatoes. I actually really enjoyed this as a breakfast, and it somehow did not feel like a sandwich. I also bought an ice cream bar to eat while we were lost, looking for the Baths: 10/10 of course.

patatas bravas

In Malaga, I had a beef picante empanada and a chocobanana empanada: 8/10. I split a chicken salad with a yogurt sauce and a bacon cheeseburger called the Apple Boi, where the beef was marinated in apple compote (which we had to google before ordering) with a friend and that was also good: 8/10, I was worried about the yogurt sauce, but it was delicious. It's also possible that I was just missing vegetables as there had not been any served with my meals for most of that week. For meals at home, I tried Gazpacho this week, a traditional dish in Sevilla that is a cold soup, unfortunately I hated it. 

And that's my all for my first full week of classes and second full week in Spain!