Week 4 in Sevilla
Entry 5
The Week
This week was classes as usual, but I also signed up for a "babysitting program" through the international department at UPO where they pair international students with local families that have kids who are trying to learn English. Babysitting is an odd name for the program because it's not about childcare at all; instead, I spend time with the kids speaking in English so that they can practice, expand their vocabulary, and become familiar with different accents. I was paired with a family of 3 kids (5, 7, and 9 years old) on Monday and scheduled to see them for 2 hours every Tuesday afternoon. Getting myself to their house ended up being quite the adventure as I had planned to walk since they only lived one suburb over but that ended up requiring me to cross the freeway and Google maps was convinced that I could cross in places only meant for cars. I had to reroute quite a bit, double back, and eventually still ended up on a long road with no sidewalk which I literally sprinted down because pedestrians were clearly not meant to be walking there, and a car honked at me.
A bit of a scary journey to get there but I have absolutely zero regrets about signing up for the program; I love my assigned family, and it was really cool to help the kids with their English while they also helped me with my Spanish. We also did a map of Spain puzzle together and they showed me the different regions in Spain which, funnily enough, helped me connect some dots from my history class as we have been discussing various regions which still exist under the same names today, but I had not been aware of where they lay within Spain.
The Weekend
On Friday, there was a free class trip to Italica that anyone was able to join so I tagged along with that because it had my favorite things: historic sites and free entry. One of the history professors from the school was leading our tour, which I really enjoyed because I think that I got a lot more out of the trip this way than if I had just gone alone in my free time. We had briefly mentioned Italica in my history class and the mother of my tutoring family had suggested I go, so I was pretty excited to go already, but as with every historical site: the more you learn about it, the more you can appreciate it and the cooler it becomes.
Italica was the first city that the Romans actually established and built on the Iberian Peninsula, instead of just inhabiting the preexisting towns, and that is pretty much all I knew going into the trip. As we walked through the ruins of Italica, the professor guiding us showed us images of what the ruins would have looked like during the height of Italica as well as what the different buildings were for or why certain architectural choices were made. He also talked about how society was structured at that time and the superior position that Romans held within the region, while the native population lived outside the city walls as second-class citizens and were taxed to conduct trade within the city. After Roman occupation came the period of Muslim occupation, at which point the city of Italica was unoccupied except for being stripped for valuable items like marble, taken from its amphitheater. I could write at least a page on all the bits of information that I acquired, but I'll save that for when my family visits in May and I turn into their personal tour guide, and I'll just share my favorite fact from the day:
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| this is the tilework from one of the houses and it pictures 7 gods, which correspond to 7 days of the week: there is Luna : lunes (Monday (luna means moon so moon day : Monday?)), Mars : martes (Tuesday), Mercury : miercoles (Wednesday), Jupiter/Jove : jueves (Thursday), Venus : viernes (Friday), Saturn : sabado (Saturday), domingo (Sunday) no longer sounds like the last god - Sol - but in English it does as sol means sun I think that the development of language is incredibly interesting and particularly how words can develop from places that you would not necessarily assume or consider after they have been changed and translated across generations, cultures, and languages.
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| Me! and friends in the amphitheater |
Friday night, we went to a little bar where they had a small flamenco show every half hour which was absolutely beautiful. I don't have any photos or videos from that because they ask you not to record but it was a great show, and we stayed and waited to watch it twice. There were no microphones or speakers, just a woman's voice and an acoustic guitar playing while a man danced the flamenco, so it was expected that the audience stayed quiet until the end of the performance and, for the most part, everyone was very thankfully respectful of that, so the performance had a very intimate feel. I really enjoyed seeing a small show where people are sitting on the walls and floor, huddled around the stage to see, as opposed to a large venue.
On Saturday I was supposed to go the Real Alcazar de Sevilla with a friend but they woke up sick and so I unintentionally did my first solo exploring. The Real Alcazar is a palace near the Cathedral and el centro that would technically be the lodging of King Felipe the sixth if he were to visit (Did you know that Spain has a monarch? I don't think most people do.) I did an unguided tour of the complex and just stopped at every plaque and I still feel like I learned a lot and really enjoyed my time there. I spent almost 4 hours inside and definitely could have kept wandering if they had not been closing. The details in the architecture were astounding, the layout was hilariously confusing at some parts, the gardens were gorgeous (and full of friendly peacocks), I got stuck in a hedge maze for 15 minutes, there were ducks using the hallways as shortcuts to and from the various ponds within the property, and I spent half an hour in the tile exhibit alone. I wandered the perimeter of the palace on my way back to the metro and found a Sevillana perfume shop where all of the scents have oranges as their base, which they get from the orange trees in the streets of Sevilla which is super neat.
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| Me! stuck in the hedge maze |
Food
This week I tried European flaming hot Cheetos: 0/10, a terrible disappointment, not at all like U.S. hot Cheetos. I had an ice cream bar, of course, I have to get my weekly ice cream: 10/10 but why do they only sell Haagen Dazs here? We bought snacks to watch the flamenco show on Friday night which was like a mini charcuterie board of sorts with cheese, bread chips, potato chips, and of course jamon but it was weirdly served on what felt like construction paper and as you might expect, that is very difficult to carry so everyone kept dropping food, odd delivery system.
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