Crazy Cadiz

Here are my pictures from the past couple weeks:

Cathedral
Alcazar
Triana
Jerez and Cadiz
Alameda
Granada

Last week was much less stressful than the previous week - pretty much just went to class and hung out in the afternoons. My classes are going well and are basically no work, which is awesome. Although I have already had a 15 minute presentation for my European Union class, but luckily it was about Spain and we coincidentally have spent the past month learning about Spain. Each person is responsible for presenting 2 of the countries in the EU, and I was lucky enough to get Spain! But besides that, I have basically had not much work to do - one poem to read but the professor told us that if we didn't understand it, we shouldn't worry about it. It's probably good though, because I have been focused on trying to find summer jobs in the past couple weeks, emailing and writing essays. Fun. We'll see what happens with that.

Besides school, a bunch of us have been taking a weekly dance class on Tuesday nights where we are learning the 4 Sevillian dances that we will need to know for the Feria. The first one was pretty tough, since it is very different from anything we have ever done before, but we are finally catching on and it's really fun. I haven't taken a dance class since I was 10, I think. The two hardest things about Sevillian dancing is that they start with the left foot instead of the right and that the music barely goes with the steps. Hopefully we'll catch on before the end of April. Other than the dance class, I decided to volunteer at a school in a class of 9-year-olds. I went for the first time on Thursday afternoon and it was really fun, but hard because unlike adults, kids don't slow down their speech for you and speak with a lot of abbreviations and colloquial phrases. I think I'll catch on soon and that it will really help me improve my Spanish. I pointed to Connecticut on a world map and they couldn't believe I live there, since it is so far away from here. Crazy. Besides the school volunteering, I am hoping to be able to teach English a couple times a week, and I am taking a free workshop this week to learn a little bit about it. And I think I also want to be matched up with an intercambio so I will be able to speak once a week with someone my age, hopefully a student at the University. Basically I'm doing anything and everything to learn as much Spanish as I can while I'm here.

This weekend was really fun, especially since I didn't even realize until late Friday afternoon that it was only Friday and not Saturday. I guess when I only have class M-Th and my Thursday class is from 9-11, it seems impossible for the weekend to be so long. I'm definitely going to go through some sort of shock when I go back to Brown, haha. On Friday afternoon I went with my friend Hilary on a self-guided tour of the Centro part of the city. We saw the Ayuntamiento (Town Hall), a bank that is in a building that was part of the Spanish Inquisition, and the palace of a Countess who basically stole all of her decorations from the nearby ancient Roman city called Italica, where we went a couple weeks ago with our program. Seriously, this woman had every floor covered with a mosaic from Italica and hundreds of Roman objects on the walls and in cases. It's no wonder there's not really anything left in Italica besides the remains of the buildings! It was fun to wander around the Centro, especially because I walk through it every day on the way home and now I have a better idea of what everything is. Friday night I went to see Slumdog Millionaire with a couple friends, and it was great. And in English, with Spanish subtitles. They don't really watch Spanish films here - basically for every 4 English movies there is maybe 1 Spanish movie. Most of the movies are dubbed over in Spanish, but there are a few theaters around that play the original versions in English with Spanish subtitles. Same thing with TV, it's really strange to me. I would think that they would get sick of the really annoying voices and the fact that the words never match how the mouths are moving. But I guess not, they are just used to it. I didn't feel bad for watching a movie in English - I tried to watch the Spanish subtitles as much as I could.

Saturday I spent with some friends planning our trips, and then Saturday night we went to a Carnival in Cadiz, which is about a 2 hour train ride from Seville. Apparently there is a month-long carnival in Cadiz and there are thousands of young people there at night just partying and hanging out, but in costume. Since they don't have Halloween here, this is their chance to dress up and there were huge groups of people dressed up as chickens and bullfighters etc. The strangest part was that their were people dressed up as Black people and Chinese people - something I can't even imagine ever happening in the US. I guess it's just because they don't really have cultural diversity here, but I don't know, I was creeped out by it. So everyone was dressed up on the train and we had to sit on the floor on the way there. Halfway through the train ride the security got off or moved to a different car and everyone started smoking! I couldn't believe it, I don't think I've every been on public transportation where anyone has smoked around me. Everyone was also drinking out of plastic kitchen cups with ice and had open bottles of alcohol, it was crazy. When we got there we were immediately surrounded by thousands of people and we basically just wandered around the city for a couple hours. It was really fun, although around 3 am we were ready to leave. We walked over to the train station and waited in line for it to open at 4:13am, which made no sense to me - why not just 4? So we rushed into the train station and set up our return tickets and ran to the train so we could get seats. We sat there for almost an hour before the train left, got into Seville at 7, took the bus home, and got there around 8am, only to go right back to sleep and wake up this afternoon at 3:15pm. Lunch was waiting when we woke up. Oh how I love Spain, and my Senora.

This week should be pretty relaxed too - I'm going to get my homework done after this and then probably do a little more planning tonight. And this week I'm also going to start running outside I think, especially since it's between 60 and 70 degrees every day. I finally feel like I've really settled into my life here and can accomplish the thing I want to do every day and it's great.

Oh, and my computer's back! Skype me!