¡Viviendo La Vida Loca!

Oh and how ironic is it that I had to hear about the earthquake in California and the mad cow issue in Washington from my host mother when I went over for lunch yesterday. That's what I get for ignoring the news. Perhaps I had better re-subscribe to CNN Online. And then again ...

I separated the Sevilla pictures into their own category, added some more and also added captions. Enjoy!

Navidad en Sevilla

My laziness extended on into Christmas. I took a nap when I got home Wednesday, finished I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and then went to dinner with Yasu at a Chinese place that was packed. When we got home, the door to the residence was open which freaked me out and gave me flashbacks. (My house was burglarized a couple weeks before I left the US.) But we looked around and nothing appeared to be missing and there didn't appear to be anyone there. I had been planning to go to midnight mass but it was 9.30 when we got back and I was feeling a little sick, tired and cold. So I went to bed. Very exciting. I woke up several times because the discoteca across the street was full of people and when they spilled into the street, it was rather noisy. Also there were fireworks going off all night, which was new to me. Do we set off fireworks Christmas Eve in the US? Christmas started out about as lazy as you can get. I slept in, missed morning church, read more of Harry Potter in Spanish and finally got out of bed around 2:00, resolved to do something with my day. First stop was an Italian restaurant where I had spaghetti for the first time since I left the US. Then I walked to the theatre to see if it was open but it wasn't. I walked down a stretch of the river (Guadalquivir) called Calle Betis where there are a bunch of restaurants, bars, and clubs ... most of which were also closed. And then crossed the river again and walked back up the other side. Very pretty, very peaceful. Then when I was walking back to the residence, Heather called me and I sat outside Haagen Dazs and talked to her for a while. Then I went home, and miracle of miracles, I did all my homework!!! Of course I was frozen by the time I finished it because I went down to the lounge to do it. Almost none of the buildings in Sevilla have central heating but most of them are warmer than the main area of the residence. Each of the rooms has a small space heater but the main area is completely open from the ground floor up to the roof which is covered with a very large skylight ... not the best for keeping in heat. And compounding that problem is that there is a door to the roof apartments and patio that won't stay closed, so it's always open, "airing out" the building. Anyway, I went back to my room to thaw, went to dinner at my favorite place around the corner which I had noticed was open when I was coming home. It too was packed but I lucked out and found a table just as a couple was leaving. I had fun people watching, tried a couple of new things on the menu, one which I like and one which I didn't, and went home and crawled in bed. About an hour later (at midnight), my family called to wish me a Merry Christmas. Amanda had just flown in from Philadelphia and they wanted to wait until everyone was there. So I pulled myself out of sleep and talked to mostly my sisters and a little to my mom, I guess the boys didn't want to talk to me. ,-) They were also trying to leave to go to my aunt's for the day. And in further miracles, I managed to keep my promise to myself to get up at 9 (er, 9ish) so that I could get a paper and do the laundry before class. I think today was a holiday for the free papers (20 minutos, El Metro) so I bought one of the others but all in all I was quite pleased.

And now I'm off to have lunch with Toñi ...

p.s. Muchos gracias a Matt for sending the HTML symbols!

I have officially become lazy here. After explicitly asking my teacher for lots of homework (because, really, what else have I got to do?), did I do it? No. And I would like to say that there's a really good story why not. But there's not. I went home after class, made lunch, took a three hour nap, talked to Yasu, the only other student still in my dorm, read more of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, went to dinner with Yasu and his friend Tosiku, read some more, went to sleep. Could I have done my homework? Definitely. I just didn't feel like it. And then there was this morning. I definitely could have done it before class. Class is at noon for heaven's sake. But no. I slept in until about 10, took a shower, and then spent about 30 minutes throwing together a couple of the assignments. You'd think I didn't want to learn Spanish. Oh well. Today will be better. Of course, it's now 3 and since class, I've managed to eat and do email. But I'm sure I'll get to it later. Uh huh. And I do have all day tomorrow (Christmas) without classes either so I really have no excuse if Friday rolls around and I haven't done my homework. We'll see.

¡Feliz Navidad mis amigos y mi familia!

Hmm, yeah. I suppose that's what I get for saying Friday was good. I got violently ill Saturday and spent the entire weekend in bed with a couple short stints on the couch Sunday. Ergh. Oh well. I read all 766 pages of the Harry Potter, The Order of the Phoenix, as well as finishing off the last several hundred pages or so of Gone with the Wind. I hate being sick alone but being sick alone in a foreign country where you can barely speak the language was an entirely different, and yes, worse experience. But I survived ... and it makes for a good story I suppose.

I started my private classes today and as I understand it, will be finishing another entire workbook during the next two weeks. Granted we had already started some of the topics, but just hadn't gotten the book yet. It should be interesting to see where they place me after the break as I currently have a lot more grammar understanding than I do vocabulary, which makes it hard for me to talk to people who have the same level of grammar. We'll see how it goes.

Now I'm off to enjoy the gorgeous day we're having here ... (and the fact that I'm not sick.)

All of my pictures are up now. I may try to organize them and annotate over the break but at least they're all there. In the meantime, feel free to make up fun stories about what's going on.

Today has been a good day. One, I have a profesor who will give me lessons during the break so that I can continue to work on my Spanish. And two, I got a message from my credit card company that they're refunding both the late fee and the finance charge that were incurred due to my not receiving my e-bill because the card number changed after the other was stolen. That's $70 -- which should cover last night's dinner. :-) Sonny and I went to a restaurant that was recommended in his TimeOut guide which was very good but a bit pricy in comparison to the other places we've been. Except the restaurant with the Michelin star. It's interesting being in school again. Since most of the other students are actually students, fine dining is neither interesting nor feasible. And I have my additional excuse that I need the cash. :-)

I now have six verb tenses at my disposal which makes it easier to convey ideas but more difficult to actually talk since I have to first think of which tense I need to use, then how to conjugate it in the appopriate person. Ugh. Debo mucho practicas. Or something like that. I keep making up Spanish words from the English ones I know. For instance, traffic becomes "trafico". (That actually is correct.) The scary thing is that it works about 50% of the time. 40% of the time it's just wrong and gets confused looks. The other 10% is bad. Embarazada is not embarrassed, it's pregnant. Huevas are not chicken eggs, they're fish eggs. Exitada is not excited in your usual sense of the word.

Sevilla is gorgeous right now. Christmas lights and nativity scenes everywhere. Supposedly there are some with live animals but I have yet to see one of those. And the number of people out on the streets at every hour of the day is phenomenal. It'll be 10.00 at night and there will be entire families out strolling. By 12.00, it's mostly adults going from dinner to the pre-club bar. And then around 2.00, the jovenes (young people) head for the clubs. I'll be very curious to see how much of this continues once all of the international people leave. It's hard for me to tell how many people are native Sevillanos and how many are foreigners but it should be pretty clear next week. In the residence building, there will only be me and a Japanese student. I imagine it will feel rather empty. Especially since he lives on the roof in a quasi-private apartment. Whereas my room and the others inside all open onto an open area in the center of the building.

I had lunch with Toni, her daughters and Jenica yesterday. (Toni is my host mother and Jenica was also living there until today when she returned to California.) It was nice and I was able to make it through most of the meal solely in Spanish. I did have to get a couple translations from Jenica. Next week and going forward, it'll be all Spanish though.

Okay ... off to lunch.

Hasta manana!

p.s. If anyone knows the HTML code for the n with a tilde, please let me know. That and the code for euro would be useful. Sometimes they translate correctly, sometimes not. No se porque.

BTW, I have been posting new pictures as I get time ... the link to the pictures is on the left.

The last several days have been crazy as I switched classes on Monday and was put in a class with people who were two weeks ahead of me. I had to take home exercises to learn the hardest verb tense so far on my own and every class has been exhausting. But I would still rather be in a harder class than the one I was in. Only me and one other guy could speak Spanish at all decently. The other people in our class had left because they only had two weeks of vacation and so we were merged with another class that moved much slower. So now we definitely have our work cut out for us. My last few days have consisted of class, studying, napping and eating ... that´s it. Oh, and I met my intercambio (person who wants to practice English, so we take turns speaking in our native languages). She´s pretty cool although she´s in the middle of breaking up with her boyfriend of two and a half years so her life is a little stressful. She also has no job and is studying to be a travel agent, so she lives with her older sister.

Anyway, I am headed off to almuerza with my old host family. I am going to go once a week I think ... if I explained myself correctly and understood her response. This is good because she speaks no English so I have to speak Spanish and she also has a very heavy Sevillano accent so it helps in understanding the people here.

Hopefully will have more time for Interneting when school finishes tomorrow ...

**THE GREAT CASH CRUNCH**

One of the more challenging aspects of this adventure is that a friendly ATM machine in Ribeauville, France took my ATM card several weeks ago and refused to give it back. The screen went red and said something about not working and although we waited for 10 or 15 minutes, there was nothing to do but get on our bus for Colmar to catch our train to Beaune. In Beaune, I pulled €600 with my extra card and then canceled it. This probably would have been okay if we hadn´t had the brilliant idea to spend my cash with the plan to pull cash from Heather´s card in Paris before she left. Unfortunately, when we tried to pull cash the night before she left, none of the five machines we tried worked. I got up at 5:00am to try three more machines the next morning, all to no avail. So I convinced the reception guy at our hotel to let me use his computer to look up the international number for Wells Fargo and we called Wells Fargo to figure out why Heather´s card wasn´t working. After about a half hour, we worked out that it was because there was an absurdly low daily limit ... so I went and pulled €200, gave €60 to Heather for the taxi and proceeded to start investigating decent ways to get money without pulling from credit card which is ridiculously expensive. So far, so good. This is thanks to Dominic in Paris who pulled €300 for me and I paid him via Paypal, and to my friends here in Sevilla who let me pay for dinner with my credit card and give me cash. The card has now arrived in Austin but my current dilemma is how to get it here safely. I´m thinking now that Sam is coming in a few weeks, that probably is the best way but that means another few weeks on the cash available here. We´ll see. Don´t worry, in an emergency, I will pull from my credit card so I won´t starve or anything. I just have an extreme aversion to giving credit card companies a single red cent of mine.

I should have a nice long post here as I finally figured out how to upload photos and it's telling me it will be about 50 minutes ... or maybe I'll go back and add details on the earliler part of the trip in France ... we'll see.

It's been a fun and eventful weekend. On Friday, my phone rang as I was about to get ready to go out and it was my Australian friends from the Paris hostel. They had arrived in Sevilla that afternoon and wanted to go out. So they met up with me and a group of people from school at a bodega where we had drinks and tapas. Then while I was waiting for people at the bodega, my friend Sam called from the US to see what I thought about her visiting for New Years. Hmm, let me think for a minute, umm, absofreakinlutely! We went back to the international hip hop club (Catedral) after bar hopping a little and I left early at 3am because I was meeting Melika, another friend from school, at the Alcazar at 10am. The Alcazar is the palace used by the Spanish royal family when they are in Spain and was originally built in the 13th or 14th century (I think). It was built for a Christian king by Arabs in the Arabic style so apparently all the scripting on the walls is from the Bible, even though it's written in Arabic script. The gardens are enormous and beautiful and if the weather stays nice, I think I will go back there to study. Melika left after that to return to Holland ... sniff, sniff. Then I went to lunch with my Australian friends, who had also gone to the Alcazar with us.

The next item on the weekend agenda was a very exciting move!!! Yay, I now have my own space and schedule. I am living in the schools residencia which is basically a dorm in a normal, house-looking building. It has a shared kitchen, shared terrace on the roof, and shared bathrooms on every floor. But my room is my own and has a desk, and wonder of wonders, a heater! (Granted it's just a space heater. Nowhere in Sevilla seems to have central heating.) I went to the grocery store, bought some yogurt, bread and cheese and had a very nice medienda (5/6:00 snack). I am so excited to be able to eat what I want, when I want to and as much as I want to. (Toñi believed in *very* large portions which I never felt comfortable not eating all of.) Then I had to go shopping as what passed as pajamas in a private house was not going to work in a dorm ... this search ended up being rather funny. For some reason, most of the pajamas here are polyester which I really didn't want. So I ended up with the choice between white pajamas with teddy bears, grey pajamas with teddy bears, or navy pajamas with teddy bears. I went for the navy. I'm not sure I've ever had pajamas with teddy bears in my life. Certainly not in my adult life. Oh well.

We actually had a sit down dinner with another couple awesome bottles of Rioja (Spanish red wine) which were ... €10 in the restaurant. Wine is cheaper than water and juice here. When I go out to lunch with people who don't drink, my wine will be €.50-.90 while orange juice is generally around €1.50-2.00. Now that's what I call proper priorities.

My stamina is definitely flagging because I actually fell asleep at the club this time. It was 2am and the dance floors will still pretty empty so my friends and I sat down on some very comfy couches. Bad idea. Very bad idea. I snoozed for about 30 minutes and then it took another 30 minutes to find someone who was also ready to go so I got home around 3. Next time no sitting down.

Today I slept in to about 10, ate breakfast and did my homework, then took another nap, woke up around 1, unpacked, tidied my room and went to lunch around 3 at a tapas bar down the block which was yummy. Lunch was spinach with garbonzo beans (very Sevillan), sausage, cheese and bread. Then I went out on my terrace because it's about 70 degrees here today and studied and read about 2 pages of Harry Potter in Spanish for a few hours.

And now, here I am at the Internet cafe, and it turns out Saddam has been captured. That definitely counts as big news. I can't believe I almost missed it.

I take it back. I have not adjusted. I stayed out until 5 am and I can´t remember the last time I was this tired. Then I tried to drink coffee and that just screwed me up even more. No more going out on school nights for me. I could barely stay awake in class and I´m going to have to go over everything we learned today several times just to catch up. But I did have fun. And I had some of the best food I´ve had here ... and an awesome €9 in-the-restaurant bottle of wine.

Well, it´s 9.40 and I´m on my way out to dinner and clubbing for the night. Sevilla-time is completely opposite what used to be MWP-time. Oh well. I´m adjusting fairly well.

Food here is interesting. For instance, Spaniards are much less squeamish about the identity of their food. Fried fish comes whole (I did actually eat several, head and all), shrimp comes whole, and even serrano ham is stored in the restaurant (for shaving off slices) with the pig foot still on. Very odd for me. And going to the market is a whole different experience. Name a part of a cow and you can find it at the market. That includes solidified/gellified blood (sangre, in case you´re curious). Apparently, it mixes quite nicely into sauces and provides a base for several typical dishes. Mmm, yumm.

Well, my €15 boots broke Saturday but since they still function, it was okay. Basically the heel partially separated from the body of the boot.

This weekend was crazy. I would never have believed I could have partied so much. I stayed out until 7 Friday night (Saturday morning), 6 Saturday night, and only until 2 Sunday night because I wanted to get back on a semi-normal schedule for school. We had a three day weekend because of the anniversary of the constitution and also Sunday night was the celebration of the Immaculate Conception which is a huge deal here. There were thousands of people thronging the streets from 12-2 or 3am, singing hymns to Mary. Very impressive, although I got a little claustrophobic in the crouds. My days were spent sleeping and that pretty much summarizes my weekend. The discotheques here don´t even really get going until about 1ish and it´s unheard of to get to a club before 12. For instance, Saturday we met up at the theatre at 7.30 but had just missed the movie so we went to an early dinner and came back for the 10.00 showing of Master and Commander (with Spanish subtitles), then we went to a smallish bar for pre-clubbing until 1.30, and then went to a club which had house music downstairs and salsa upstairs. Very cool, although it was still pretty empty when we got there ... it didn´t really get going until 2ish. Oh, and an interesting discovery: in Spanish clubs, it is common for the baños to be BYOP (bring your own paper). Fortunately for me, a very nice Spanish girl gave me some of hers. Live and learn.

More about Sevillana weekends later ...

Whew. I just finished my first week of classes in Spain. I am definitively at the back of the class but I figure I would rather be at the back of the advanced class than at the front of the regular class and bored. I think a lot of it is because this is only my third language. Everyone else in my class speaks at least three languages already and for one girl, this is her seventh. I think each additional one gets easier. It´s a little confusing because you try to use the wrong words but still, I think it helps more than it hurts.

We have a three day weekend because Monday is the 25th anniversary of the Spanish constitution (aka when Franco died). It´s funny because one of our assignments was to write the dates of when various historical things happened and the difficult part for me was not so much writing the numbers but selecting which thing happened when. When did the Moors invade Spain? No se. When did Spain lose Gibraltar? No se.

Our school had an excursion to see flamenco last night which was pretty cool. It was only €9 and I think we got what we paid for, although I think that now I would like to see the more professional flamenco which costs about €30.

The Great Cash Crunch continues, although my ATM card is now at my apartment and I just need to figure out the best way to get it here. My school has a mail service but the mailboxes are general "T-Z on this shelf" type and that´s not where I want my ATM card sitting. So we´ll see. I´m still working on it.

Shopping here is pretty fun. The clothes are all a little different and fairly cheap. I bought a really cheap pair of knee high boots Wednesday for €15. Okay, so they´re not leather and they may not last that long but for €15, that´s kind of okay. My boots in the States cost over $100 so I could afford to replace these a couple times for that price. And wine is muy, muy cheap. My glasses last night were €.50 each. Woo hoo! Granted that was house wine, but even the good Rioja was only €2/glass. Not bad.

I still don´t know what I´m going to do about the living situation. I really don´t like having to decide my schedule ahead of time, the food is not that great, the barely warm showers are awful, and I´ve resorted to wearing ear plugs to bed because of the noise. On the flip side, they´re really nice and patient and it does force me to speak Spanish, whereas at school, almost everyone else speaks English and we frequently lapse back into it because it´s easier and we don´t know the words we need. We´ll see. It´s also a 30 minute walk to school so it´s an hour round trip and if I want to go out at night, I end up walking it twice. Which starts to explain how my days have just been slipping away, given that I walk for two hours, go to class for four, email/pay bills/surf for 30-60, eat for 3 or 4, and then throw in some homework, shopping, extra classes, actividades, and that´s pretty much the whole day.

Oh, and I haven´t been able to upload pictures yet. I´m hoping to figure it out soon.

This is as draining as everyone told me it would be. It´s so frustrating too. The good news is that I´m learning very quickly. I know this because a) I can have pseudo-conversations in Spanish now and b) my family and teacher say so. :-) I got put in the advanced beginner class. I can feel my head swelling.

The living situation is interesting. I really want to move out except that part of me feels like I need to stick it out as a learning experience (useful but not enjoyable) and also, I´m afraid if I move, I´ll spend my time with English speakers, whereas at my host family´s, I have no choice but to struggle through the Spanish. So I don´t know what I´m going to do. The other big drawback to staying is that I have to let my host mother know a day in advance if I´m not going to be home for cena (@ 21:00, = dinner) -- which means I can´t decide to go out for tapas and drinks on the spur of the moment. It´s a 20 minute walk from the apartment to school, which is in the center of town, so it´s easier to stay here during the day. Class is from 9:15-13:00, then I do email or shop, meet classmates for almuerza (@15:00, = lunch but it´s the biggest meal of the day), wander around some more and go home between 19:00 and 21:00.

Well, I´m a bit behind in my posting but I´m going to have to go back and fill in as I have time.

I am now in Sevilla and had my first class this morning. It is so frustrating knowing what I want to say and not knowing what the words are. In some cases, I can come up with the French words but that is about as useful as it sounds. The experience does make me understand the temper tantrums of 2 and 3 year olds better -- if it would help, I might try a temper tantrum or two. But somehow it seems unlikely to help.

My living quarters are also a bit of an adjustment. I chose the host family option to get more of the cultural experience. My snobby perspective is that I live in the barrio. It´s not quite that bad but it´s in a neighborhood with block after block of cheap, dingy apartment buildings with laundry hanging out the window. And my bed is the worst bed I´ve ever slept in (except the one Amanda and I shared in Paris, it´s about equivalent to that). I´m not kidding. It´s worse even than any of the hostel beds I stayed on during all of my trips. The walls are paper thin too. Everything that happens in the apartment sounds like it´s in my room and everything that happens next door sounds like it´s in the apartment (i.e. I can hear the guy´s tv but not precisely what it´s say) But the senora is nice, although she speaks less English than I speak Spanish and that´s not saying much. I get two meals a day and it was a five minute conversation to determine whether I was going to have lunch or dinner. But now I know two more word "almuerza" and "ciena" ... but in Spain, "c" is pronounced "th" ... so that took a while to sort out as well. Oh well. C´est la vie. (French for that´s life.)

Off to study ...