Things are looking up.

I’ve decided that this whole studying abroad thing isn’t so bad.  I don’t think I want to live in Spain for the rest of my life, but it is pretty cool to be here for three months!  I am learning a lot, and I sleep really well because the whole city is my classroom and my life here is a Spanish lesson that never ends. (This is both a good and a bad thing).  Studying abroad takes a really confident, held together person.  You have to abandon everything you’ve learned: about how people act, manners, how to dress, and how to speak!  You never know what food you are eating, what people are saying to you on the street, or even what street you are on.  You feel annoying, always asking “what is this, how do you say this”, and it’s hard.  

Last week was a really difficult week for me.  We had final exams for our intensive period classes (three week refresher courses), and while they weren’t that big of a deal, I am a pro at inventing things to be stressed out about.  The stress about school, coupled with continued culture shock and not feeling very bonded with my host family left me wanting to go home to Michigan but refusing to because airplanes are terrifying.  I was also feeling guilty for not liking it here.  I have all the support in the world from my family and friends at home, and Spain isn’t thaaat crazy of a place.  Plus I’ve met some really great girls here and we’ve become friends already.  I kept telling myself that it could be worse: I could have a boyfriend at home that I miss terribly, I could break a leg and spend 4 hours each day walking to and from school, I could be one of the 5 boys in this program stuck with 90+ girls…the list went on and on.  But somehow, that didn’t put an end to my negative feelings last week.  Thank goodness for chocolate!

This week is turning out much better.  

Yesterday I met my second speaking partner (yes I am an overachiever!) and we got along really well, so I feel like we’ll be able to get together a lot to practice speaking (she’s practicing English) and explore the city!  

Today I switched host families, which I was really nervous about, but now I am so incredibly glad that I did.  I feel that now I am in an environment much more suited to my personality and to my learning style.  So I am going to learn a lot about the language and culture, and frankly, I can’t wait!  I want to be a sponge and soak it all in.  

My new host family consists of 75 year old Miguel and his 74 year old wife Pilar.  They have 9 grandchildren, a beautiful home, and great personalities.  Miguel is the most tech savy 75 year old that I have ever heard of and Pilar is one of the classiest women I’ve met in my life.  They seem to really care about me, and my experience here in Sevilla.  They asked me about my life, my family, and what I want to be when I’m all grown up.  Miguel made sure I had my iPad and computer hooked up to the wifi, gave me all of their phone numbers, showed me 3 different ways to get from the apartment to the center, and made sure that I knew to carry my purse across my shoulder so that no one would steal it.  When I asked Pilar if I could help her with anything after dinner, she said (in spanish) “The kitchen is my job.  Your job is to study.”  Then she asked me what I like for breakfast and laid out a bunch of stuff for me, saying it will be that way every morning and then showing me how to work the toaster.  

I feel very welcome in their home, and I’ve gotten to practice my Spanish a lot!  At lunch and dinner, we watched the news, and I learned quickly that I have to pay attention, because they quiz me about what is going on!  They are so patient with me, speaking slowly and repeating sentences using different vocabulary if I don’t understand.  If they say a word that I didn’t previously know, they wait for me to repeat it a few times before going on.  And Pilar knows English very well, so she can supply me with words if I ask, but she hasn’t yet said a full sentence in English, even though it would be faster if she did.  I appreciate their patience a lot, and I’m excited to see how much I’m going to learn!

“It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all…”

Hello devoted readers! I guess I’m getting the hang of this whole “living in Spain” thing, because I’m never at home.  I’M ALWAYS WALKING.  Now, if I can just train myself to not need sleep, I’ll fit in even more.  (No one sleeps here).  The following story comes from my walk to school yesterday…

Picture the scene:  It’s 60 degrees and sunny, so naturally all the Spaniards are bundled up in coats and scarves.  I’m wearing a cute long sleeve t-shirt like a normal person and my hair looks awesome.  I’m walking down the street, and casually do a hair flip (because my hair looks awesome, remember).  As I raise my head, I lock eyes with a tall, dark and handsome Spanish man.  This guy is basically out of a magazine: broad shoulders, nice hair, great clothes, and obviously not real because he’s paying attention to me.  It’s basically a scene out of a movie.  We’re several feet apart on the street, walking towards each other.  He’s staring deeply into my soul for at least six and a half seconds.  Just when I was making the finishing touches on the guest list for our wedding, he raised a perfectly toned arm.  Suddenly, a cigarette was at his lips.  Still staring at the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen (that’s ME), he took a long drag from the revolting object and I dramatically turned my face to the side, ending our whirlwind romance before things got too painful for the both of us to bear.

So, the moral of the story is a lot of people smoke here, and I’m probably not getting married to a Spanish man.

Plaza de España

Before I came to Sevilla, I googled the city. And, like any time preserving college student, I skipped the long articles and went right to the pictures. It seemed like every other photo was of this mysterious horseshoe-shaped monument full of arches. When I got here, I quickly discovered that it is less than a mile away from the house I am staying in, conveniently located on my way to and from school. I’ve asked a couple people here what this plaza is, and they explained it to me in Spanish or in English that still sounded like Spanish, so I decided to resort to google again. This time, I didn’t shy away from the results with lots of words.
Read on, it’s kind of interesting…
The Plaza de España is located in the beautiful Maria Luisa Park, which was constructed for the Ibero-American Exposition that took place in Spain in 1929. (This was a world’s fair including Portugal, the United States, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Ecuador with the goal in mind to improve relations between Spain and all of these countries). It wasn’t enough for Spain to just redesign the entire south end of the city into a park for their guests. They also felt it was necessary to build this grand plaza. I think that Spain just wanted to show off a bit. The plaza really is cool, with a lot of historical meaning hidden in its architecture. It’s a huge horse-shoe type shape complete with a moat and a fountain. The four bridges over the moat are a throwback to the four kingdoms of ancient Spain. Each individual province of Spain is acknowledged as well, with numerous tiled alcoves along the walls.
Nowadays, the plaza is an attraction for students like me, and also for visitors from other parts of Spain, who like to have photos taken next to the alcove that represents their home province. The building part of the plaza is home to government offices. The monument also has a claim to fame in that it was featured in the Star Wars Movies I and II.
Muy fancy!!

Please enjoy my super skilled photos:

^look at my pretty amigas!

Por favor

I grew up in Lake Orion, Michigan. While my high school was large–I graduated with 600 students–Lake Orion still isn’t a place that I feel confident classifying as a city. A suburb of Detroit founded as a vacation area (because of the lake), it was a pretty peaceful place to grow up. The common complaint during high school was that there is nothing to do there. Living in Lake Orion, I had a car at my disposal from my 16th birthday on, I knew at least half of the people who came into the grocery store where I worked, and I lived in a house on the lake, minutes away from all of my grandparents. For college, I moved an hour away to the small city of Ypsilanti. While more city-like than Lake Orion, its small size and friendly people ensured that it wasn’t too overwhelming for me.

All of this being said, living in a big city (and people keep reminding me that Sevilla isn’t that large) is really different for me. I miss houses (instead of apartment buildings). I miss my car–taxis kinda freak me out. I miss the 10 minute drive to get to the store or to church. Here, driving is only for the brave. Everyone else walks or rides a bike. School is about a 35 minute walk for me (uphill both ways 😉), which is a big change from the ten minute drive in high school or the three and a half minute walk at my University.

Out of all of this, perhaps the biggest, most jarring change for me is the people who ask me for money as I am walking down the street. My professor at school here says that the unemployment rate in Andalusia (where I am) is higher than the already high rate in the rest of Spain. And, from the number of people asking for spare change, I don’t find this too hard to believe. I, in my 19 year old brain, feel that another indicator of high rates of unemployment in the area is the prevalence of mentally ill and/or physically disabled people with seemingly nowhere to go. It seems to me that when times are tight, family members who would otherwise care for their disabled family just can’t do it, and then they end up on the street. It fills me with sadness and a little bit of shame when I am asked, multiple times a day, for food or money, and I say no.

Yesterday, I went on a trip to the historically precious city of Córdoba, famous for its ancient Mosque-turned-Cathedral and its Synagogue. In the beginning of the day, as we entered the Cathedral, an old woman sat on the stone steps of the building. It really is a shame, that with all of the trouble I’ve had understanding the different accents in this country, I was able to easily understand her harsh voice as she cried something along the lines of “Pretty girl, so beautiful, I need money please, please, I need to eat”. Her cries didn’t stop as I slowly filed by in line with the rest of the group. As we entered God’s house, I thought to myself about what I had (not) done. The Bible tells us to give the shirt off of our back if someone asks for it, and I know that at some point, I have looked into the eyes of someone who legitimately needed my help and I have passed them by, losing the opportunity that they present to share love and kindness and make a positive change on the world. But, as the voices of the adults who have tried to prepare me for this trip echo in my head, I firmly believe that I have more often looked into the eyes of someone who is trying to con the blond hair blue eyed Americana out of a little bit of money. But which is better: to give a bit of change to everyone who asks, opening myself up to the danger of theft, or to say no to everyone, shunning the person who really needs the help? I don’t know the answer.

There are other people that I have seen who evoke so much pity that I really hope with all of my heart that it is an act. Yesterday: a girl not much older than myself carrying an infant in her arms. Daily, on the road to school: a man with no legs slumped over in a wheel chair. At the cafe near my school: a man with a small puppy that he holds out for you to pet, then says they haven’t eaten in days. The murmured repetition of “por favor” has a way of following you down the street.

On one of my first days in Sevilla, there was an orientation presentation with the director of my program and she said something along the lines of “Studying abroad doesn’t have to be the best time of your life. There are going to be things you don’t like.” and then she went on to talk about how much we are going to learn here. I think I better understand what she was talking about now. I never would have gotten these experiences in Lake Orion or Ypsilanti, and I didn’t know that I was going to get those experiences here–they weren’t included in the pictures in the Study Abroad Catalog. All in all, I guess these are important things for me to see. I’m learning more and more about how the world works, and that was the point of this trip all along.

Dance class

Four months ago when my Spanish professor was encouraging me to study abroad, she told me about The Semana Santa (Holy Week) and the Feria de Sevilla (Seville Fair) that happen in Sevilla every year, saying over and over again how fun it is and how important it is to know the traditional dances. And I, being generally too trusting of authority figures, gave in and signed up for a Regional Folk Dance Class.

Fast forward to this afternoon, and you will find a flustered and confused Sam, standing in the corner of the Center’s patio, turning in the opposite direction of everyone else, and frantically trying to keep the correct arm flailing through the air in sync with the correct leg.

So my Spanish dance class is terrifying. It involves a lot of coordinated hand and leg movements, and I think at one moment my hands are supposed to look like a butterfly. As you can tell, I have no idea what is going on. Today, I had to be partners with the teacher because she could tell that I wasn’t catching on. She asked me what the problem was (in Spanish, mind you) and I mumbled something about not knowing the difference between left (izquierda) and right (derecha). So that was a bummer. I try to convince people that I’m perfect (secret is out!), and when they can see that I’m not, it freaks me out.

As you might be able to guess, being here in Sevilla is really shaking things up for me a lot. I feel like I’m hardly in control of anything. I have no idea what people are saying to me 75% of the time and even if I do understand them, I struggle to figure out how to formulate an answer. I feel like I never get to have meaningful conversations with people, unless I’m cheating and speaking in English. It’s just overwhelming me to see how much I don’t know yet, and I’m so tired of being corrected for saying things incorrectly.

Apartment living

So I didn’t think that living in an apartment building (which is really normal in Sevilla) would be very different than living in a residence hall at school, but now I am starting to believe that 18 year old kids may be better suited to living in close quarters than a family of five who happens to have three exchange students and a dog.

Now, I’m not trying to offer up the illusion that I come from a silent peaceful house, but hearing your own mom yell at you or your brother is way different than hearing someone else’s mom yell (in another language, I might add). For some reason, there seems to be a direct, positive correlation between volume and speed of yelling. And when my host parents start yelling, boy oh boy can they go. They have a sixteen year old son and a thirteen year old son, so for the most part I understand the necessity of yelling. The uncomfortable part is that most of the time, they are yelling so fast that I have no idea what they are saying. The other day, however, I did pick up “porqué yo soy tu madre” (because I’m your mother). It was just like being at home! At least we know that some things are universal.

I’m fortunate enough that I’ve never had to share a bedroom with a sibling, but my two host brothers share the room next to my room, and it doesn’t always sound like a pleasant experience over there. I sometimes hear them argue (which means yelling in Spanish). at night or in the morning.

There are just a lot of people living in really close quarters here, and this is coming from someone who has lived in a dorm room for a year and a half. They aren’t the most quiet people I’ve ever met, so sleep is sometimes interrupted. On one hand, at least I have a lot of auditory data to take in and be exposed to for learning the language. But on the other hand, I don’t understand very much of it, and they aren’t talking to me anyways.

When I was getting ready to study abroad, people kept reminding me that a sense of humor goes a long way, and to remember to put a positive spin on things, so here I go: at least I never feel lonely here!

In other news: today while I was in class, I caught myself daydreaming about going to Target. They don’t have Target here.

Attitudes

Hello all!

I would like to take a moment to point out to you all that Spanish men are different than American men in a very important way: they dress way better. While the boys I’m used to seeing at school have sagging pants and oversized sweatshirts, the boys here are like little business men in training and it’s AWESOME. Like, they actually put outfits together and have grown up shoes and jackets and the whole nine yards. Also, when a Spanish man introduces himself to a woman, he embraces her and kisses each cheek. This is a change that I have had no difficulty accepting. 😘 (Women do this as well, but I have yet to see two men do it). Overall, I feel more respected here than I thought I would. (Also, being called “guapa” on the street just has a nicer ring to it than “hey baby watchoo doin”).

Now, my next observations could be a little skewed because I’m not actually old enough to go to bars in the US, but I went to a couple this weekend with friends so now I am obviously an expert on all things Spanish-bar related. One of the first things I noticed is that men and women actually dance facing each other here! In addition, the men know how to dance like you are supposed to- you know, with all the fancy twirls and stuff (I told you I’m an expert-that’s real dance vocabulary there). And if you ask a nice group of Spanish men who are buying you drinks if they know what twerking is, they will nod, grinning, but add that no one does it here. (That same group of men also saw that my friends and I safely got a taxi at the end of the night). It’s an interesting change. And, in my opinion, it’s more fun to be in an environment where butts aren’t shaking the entire time. American boys: you could learn a lesson from Spanish men.

It’s just a different mentality over here. In the US, people “go out” around 10 or so. But here, it’s after midnight when people are just starting their night. I, one of the other students in my homestay, and my 16 year old host brother all went out on Saturday night and we all got back between 4:30 and 6:30am on Sunday morning. This is considered completely normal and not something that you hide from parents. In fact, my host parents were there to say goodbye to us as we went out the door after midnight and asked us how our nights went the next day. (I know this isn’t strictly a Spain thing, but it’s QUITE a change from living with my parents).

Alcohol is also viewed in an incredibly different manner here. It is freely and casually consumed by those over 18–and also by 15 year olds who stand in big enough groups on street corners at midnight (yes, that is a thing). Basically, no one makes a big deal out of it (except for me because I’m just tickled pink that I get to drink over here). Did you know that you can consume beer at McDonald’s?! I wouldn’t lie to you. And last week, there was a party with our speaking partners at school and we all got sangria. At school!

So, I told you earlier that in many parts of Spain, homes don’t have central heat or air conditioning. It’s because apparently, electricity is freaky expensive here. The mentality here just seems to be that when it’s cold outside, you simply wear lots of clothes. (I guess the layering trend must have started here). It’s really common to walk into dark rooms at the Center where I take my classes, and the parents in my host family follow their children around turning off the lights. On one hand, I feel like it’s a developed country, and my host family has well paying jobs: it sure would be nice if they had heat in their home or lots of lights on at once. But on the other hand, it’s really not a bad thing to be conscious of the energy you are using every day. In the short time that I’ve been here, I’ve caught myself thinking about the lights, along the lines of “oh there are people with the lights on in the living room, I’ll go in there to read”, or “maybe my host parents won’t like it if I’m in the living room with the lights on until 2am doing homework”. People definitely have a different attitude about how much electricity they are entitled to here in Spain.

As conscious as Spaniards seem to be about electricity, in my limited time here I have failed to notice a significant amount of recycling going on. Being from Michigan, I’m used to returning my cans for my 10 cents at the grocery store, but my host family doesn’t seem to do that. I also haven’t noticed paper recycling at the center where I take my classes, but hey, I’ve only been here a week and a half. These are just preliminary findings.

Also, growing up in the USA, I’ve always thought that other countries hated us, thinking we use too many resources and are adept at packing both guns and boxes of donuts beneath our clothing. However, I haven’t run into anybody who has treated me negatively for being American. In fact, it’s been quite the opposite. Waiters and waitresses bear with me as I slowly order in restaurants, my speaking partner signed up for someone to practice English with, and the guys we met in the bar made us feel really welcome to be in Sevilla. The people I’ve met so far are eager to hear me speak Spanish, to share their English with me, and tell me how lucky I am to have the opportunity to come to such a great city.

I’ve written before about how hectic walking is in the city, and I’ll say it again: NO ONE FOLLOWS THE “STAY TO THE RIGHT” RULE. This might actually be a change that I can’t handle. It’s pretty much impossible to walk at a busy time of the day without running into somebody or having them run into you. It’s also seen as completely acceptable for adults to stop in the middle of a sidewalk or an aisle in a store, and no one appears to be mad about it. No one moves out of the way, and no one walks in a straight line. Since it has been raining every day, I can also tell you that this problem is grossly magnified by the presence of umbrellas.

That’s all for know, I’ll post more soon!

Siestas, familias, y más

Hi friends!  I’m slowly adjusting to life in Seville, but there is still a lot to get used to…

From 2 -5 every day, Seville basically shuts down so everyone can take a nap.  You read that right, the whole city (actually, I’m fairly certain that all of Spain does this) takes a coordinated nap together.  Stores close, kids are out of school, and traditionally the señora of the household serves a big lunch.  (In my homestay, it is actually the señor of the house who cooks most days) When I first heard about this tradition a couple months ago, I thought it was really cool.  I can definitely coordinate my schedule to accommodate a daily nap.  However, after five days of participating in siesta, I can’t really say that I have overly positive feelings about it.  It takes a while to get used to the fact that at 3:30 in the afternoon, you can’t buy anything because everything is closed.  Don’t get me wrong, I do like getting a quick nap in, but on the other hand, you begin to feel entitled to your daily siesta and feel slighted in the worst way when you have something to accomplish during that time.  For example, I have a class at 4:00 on Tuesday and Thursdays.  The class just started yesterday, and I was mildly filled with rage that I had to get up and walk back to the center after lunch, when it seemed like everyone else was crawling into their beds.  In addition, college students can’t be trusted to participate in siesta.  This afternoon I was so frustrated because I had talked to several people in the morning about going shopping/exploring after siesta ended and the stores reopened.  However, when 5:00 rolled around, no one was answering their phones.  You see, college students seem to like to participate in extended siestas (myself included), and then I had no one to go and do things with after I dragged myself out of bed in the middle of the afternoon!  (This occurred with 5 people today, so it is a verifiable phenomenon, ok).  Life is hard.  During the few days that I’ve been here, I just feel like my days are very long, yet I get nothing accomplished.  Preliminary results show that this could be due to the combination of siesta and walking everywhere.

Today when I didn’t have anyone to shop with, I was cold and bored so I decided to go out and wander a little bit.  It was actually pretty fun: this was what I had pictured myself doing when I got to Spain.  I’m really proud of myself too, because I brought my map with me but I never took it out of my bag.  Instead, I just kept an eye on where the towers of the Plaza De España were.  This monument is close to where my homestay is, and you can see the tops of the towers from really far away so I knew I could wander as long as I could see them, because if I could find the Plaza, I could find my apartment.  My strategy worked fairly well, until my view was blocked by some very tall apartment buildings and the sun started to set.  However, I still knew the direction that I had to go, and I ended up back on my street with no problem! (I did arrive on the complete opposite end of the street than I thought I would arrive on, but I still made it home so it still counts, right?)

It was really nice to get out and take a walk, because I’ve been getting easily frustrated.  I don’t like not knowing what people are saying to me, and I’m embarrassed when they can’t understand what I am trying to say to them.  Things are really different here.  My host family is really nice, but just showing up and living in someone’s house with them and their children is weird.  (There is no way you can change my mind about this, it’s weird!)  The houses (well, apartments) are also really different than I am used to.  I don’t know if you know this or not, but homes in southern Spain don’t have central heat or air (because energy prices are really high), so it’s cold.  Please take a moment to soak up the fact that I live in Michigan and am usually too airheaded to remember to bring a hat and gloves with me.  Now, you will appreciate my next statement more: It is really cold here.  My host mother was talking about it (in Spanish, of course, so I didn’t catch it all), and I think that she was trying to tell me that the humidity makes it feel colder than it really is.  Blah.  I have no idea.  All I know is that 50 degrees here feels like a lot less than it does at home.  Anyways, the houses are pretty cold.  In addition to putting on more clothes and having extra blankets on the beds, there are other really neat things to help stay warm.  For example, the dining room table is FANCY.  It looks like a normal table, except that the tablecloth looks thicker than a normal tablecloth.  This is because there is a heater under the table.  So when you sit down to eat dinner, you wrap a heated blanket around your legs, and your feet are right next to a heater.  It’s pretty much the coolest thing that I’ve seen in Spain so far.

Also, where in the United States we have Tupperware containers and Brita water filters in our refrigerators, they use glass here.  There are literally fancy glass vases/jars in the door of the refrigerator that we take out for every meal and fill up and replace after the meal is finished.  It’s just different.

The change that is rattling me the most however, is perhaps the smallest.  Are you ready for it?  The paper is different here and I can’t handle it.  In the United States, normal paper is 8.5×11, and you never have to think about it.  It just always is.  But here, the paper is a little bit taller: it’s probably less than half an inch longer than I am used to but it sticks out of the top of my folder (that I brought from the United States) and it’s driving me LOCA.

Also (this was quite a revelation I had while walking the other day), our celebrities in the United States are, like, REALLY famous.  So are our TV shows.  For some reason, I thought that Spain had their own version of Hollywood, but from what I’ve seen so far, they don’t.  American celebrities are a big deal here.  So is Modern Family and Criminal Minds.  Walking down the streets, you can see mini vans (heavy on the mini, cars are really small here) with Toy Story decals on the windows.  This is just something that I never gave a thought to before, and it’s really interesting to me!  The same goes for the music: I was in una farmacia the other day, and Usher was on the radio.  Crazy.

Despite my wrinkled papers, my only other problems are that my feet hurt from walking and I’m still really awkward with my host family.  However, I signed up for a bike rental card yesterday, I’ve been talking a little more each day with my host family, and I’ve discovered Sangria, so it looks like the wrinkled papers are the only problems that are going to stick around.

Hasta luego!

Muchos Cambios

¡Hola a todos!
^see there? I’m learning Spanish already!
I’ve been in Spain for almost three whole days now, so of course I’m an expert (not). On Saturday (my first day), I was incredibly overwhelmed. 24 hours of traveling with no sleep, coupled with all my nervousness meant that I basically just spent the whole day trying (and sometimes failing) not to cry. But now, I’ve been able to wrap my mind around some stuff and it’s not so scary. I’m just going to start with describing a few of the things that I’ve noticed so far:

-You can’t expect taxi drivers to be nice.
The program that I am studying with arranged for each of us to be picked up from the airport by taxis. My taxi driver was a very angry gentleman who was prone to road rage…so we’ll just say that this was definitely not my favorite experience of the day. The cherry on top was that he entered my address in his GPS wrong, and didn’t listen to me try to tell him this in my broken Spanish. I just want to say again that he was GRUMPY. So one of my first experiences in Spain was wandering down a street alone with all of my luggage. But I did learn two valuable lessons: 1. Don’t assume that people know what they are doing, and 2. Sevillanos are very friendly, and many of them know enough English that you can ask them for directions. Fortunately, where the taxi dropped me off, I only had to go down one street and around a corner, so I lucked out a little, but I still don’t think I’ll be taking another taxi any time soon.

-There are not obese people in Spain.
I mean it! I have yet to see one. But I guess this makes sense, my homestay is a mile and a half away from the Center where I take my classes, and this is considered a really normal distance to walk twice a day. Yesterday, I think I walked six miles!

-A lot of people smoke here. Like, a lot. And I don’t know what they are smoking, but it doesn’t smell as bad as the cigarettes in the US. Maybe it’s because of all of the good smelling orange trees. Did you know that a lot of the trees in Seville are lined with orange trees? Well now you do.

-Small children walk here.
I have memories of being five or six years old and riding in a stroller at Disney World with my younger brother. But here, there are four year olds walking everywhere and keeping up with their parents. I’m impressed!

-Dogs don’t go on leashes, and they are very well trained. Heck, they do a better job of staying out of the street than people!

-Walking around here is a contact sport if you aren’t careful.
Nobody is in a hurry, but some are rushing, and others are just wandering. So this makes for a few minor collisions, but the crazy thing is, no one seems angry about it. It’s just accepted. I do have hopes that the “stay to the right if we are both about to run into each other” rule catches on here, but I don’t have high hopes for it. Also, throughout the streets of Sevilla, there is a train that glides around silently, making frequent stops at different places. It’s really convenient, but it goes through the streets (the track are set right in the ground) so you can walk on the train tracks of a silent, sneaky train. Do you see where I’m going with this? It seems like a hazard to me, considering the amount of horses, bicycles, dogs, small children, and texting pedestrians, but no one else seems to be concerned about the lack of safety rails. They must not be as sue-happy here. Regardless, I’ve made a mental note not to walk around with headphones in.

-Somehow, I had told myself that the classes here were going to be really hard and scary and that I was gong to have a lot of homework, but today was the first day of classes and it wasn’t that scary after all! Whew! I really am a dork, guys. I was literally losing sleep thinking about the difficulty level of my classes. But after the first day, I feel like the professors don’t want to give too much homework: they want us to have time to explore the city.

-I’m still getting used to the food here. Nothing so far has been so weird that I can’t try it, (although today in class, my professor said that snails are a normal food here..ah!) but it’s just really different than what I am used to. I’m usually not a big fan of meat, but it looks like I’m going to have to get used to eating it a lot. Ham is in almost everything! Also, (one of the best things so far), people eat bread with almost every meal. The bread is similar to a baguette, I guess, and they don’t keep day old bread so it is always so fresh! ¡Me gusta!

I have much more to say, but now I’m about to go out and a explore a little with mi compañera de cuarto (roommate). Wish me luck!