Photo Highlights

Here are 3 highlight albums from the semester:

Scenery
People I
People II

Video Reflection

How I prefaced this at our goodbye reception:
"I think we can all agree that for each of us, this semester in Sevilla has been a unique experience that has touched our lives in distinct ways. But I know we can also say that our time here has been a shared experience for all of us. Each of us has had a hand in shaping each others' times here, and all of our experiences have been touched by others. This video tries to show just that. I originally was going to just make a slide show for my family and friends, with my reflections, but that wasn't what this semester was to me. You have all had a hand in making my experience here, and I wanted you all to share in the creation of this video, even if you didn't know it. While most of them are mine, many of the photos aren't mine, many of the videos aren't mine, and most of the words aren't mine. Yeah, if I told you that I had a friend back home working on an article, it was a lie; it was for this. But ok, I'm going to stop talking now--I hope you enjoy the video."

London, baby!

My London trip the weekend after Thanksgiving was a whirlwind of a trip. First off, the Thanksgiving dinner that CEA put on for us was better than we could have imagined. The turkey was really amazing, and the side dishes were pretty close to the real thing. We've all grown pretty tight, so it was some consolation for not being at home for the holiday.

But yeah, London. Fun city, could never live there. Josh, Stacy, ad I got into our hostel around 3 in the morning and were up by 8 the next day to meet Stacy's friend Debbie (from Leeds) at King's Cross. So we got to be tourists on the Tube and stuff. I like their Metro--it's clean and organized...pretty much DC metro with more lines in terms of efficiency and convenience. They even have a SmarTrip equivalent.

In terms of touristy things, we did a lot, but not everything. Day I we saw Big Ben and the Parliament buildings from the outside, went into Westminster Abbey (lots of famous people are buried there--it was surreal), saw the changing of the guard at Buckingham (interesting, though very strange when the Guard band played Michael Jackson and the Star Wars theme), then we had lunch, saw the Tower of London (but didn't pay the £14.50 to go in--next time), crossed part of Tower Bridge, saw London Bridge, then we went to the British Imperial War Museum (which was soo much bigger than I expected), and then Tate Modern (which has some really famous pieces: Picasso, Boccioni, Roy Lietchenstein, etc.) before getting some fish and chips and calling it a night. The next day we saw a little cathedral in Westminster before heading to Tate British, getting some lunch at a great restaurant, watching some soccer, and making our way to the airport.

Today begins my last week in Sevilla. I've had a lot of time to think of a concluding entry for this trip, and I think I'll post it before I get home. This week I have finals, our goodbye reception (where I've prepare a couple surprises for the CEA crew), checking out the Arab baths (on CEA's tab--it pays to be on the student committee), and maybe heading to Carboneria one last time.

Barcelona!

Ok, I'm pretty late in writing this entry, but here goes.

We met up really early on the 21st at Prado to catch the bus to the airport. Things went pretty smoothly, except our plane caught a tailwind during our approach, and we had to abruptly ascend and turn around to land against the wind. You could feel the plane getting jerked around by the wind. We landed in Reus, a little town about an hour outside of Barcelona (because that's what you get when you fly Ryanair. We hopped on a bus to the main city and checked into our hostel in el Barri Gótica. Gothic Point Hostel was really cool--vividly decorated walls, big rooms, and a lot of activities.

After a quick lunch, we spent the afternoon exploring the Gothic quarter of the city and just getting a feel for the place. We saw the Plaça Catalunya (ç se pronuncia como z...oh, that's "th" for you seseantes), which had some interesting artwork, and a lot of pigeons. Not as cool as Sevillano pigeons, however. After that we went to La Boquería, which is a famous market. It's one of the remaining throwbacks to history in such a modernized city. There were gigantic candy stands, fruit shops, meat and seafood venders...I had to remind myself that I had already eaten many a time haha.

We made our way to the port of Barcelona, where we took pictures with the lions in a traffic circle before hanging out on the docks. There's a sense of purity about the lack of supervision around the water that the US with its obsession with safety and liability just seems to lack. It was great to just dangle our feet over the edge and see the fish and birds. We had wanted to see the sunset, but it set over a mountain and a castle, which was pretty cool regardless. Later, Blake, Allison and I walked to a little park and saw a Gaudí fountain by night and also the Arc de Triunfo. We went to bed around midnight because we were going to get an early start the next day.

8:00 our alarms started going off. Grr. But it was exciting because we were off to see some important sights. First stop was the Sagrada Familia cathedral. The construction was started in 1882 and is still ongoing. It was originally designed by Gaudí, who at one point, when someone asked him about why the construction was taking so long, replied "My client is not in a hurry," referring to God. What's already been built is extremely impressive, nothing like anything I'd ever seen before. It's scheduled to be done in 2026, meaning at some point after that I'm going to have to journey back to Catalunya. We paid a couple euros to take an elevator up to the top of the tower where we got an amazing view of Barcelona (the first of many).

Next stop was Parque Güell, which is a massive park that contains a lot of famous Gaudí architecture. Nobody warned us that after you get out of the Metro (which was great by the way, DC-esque in simplicity), you have to climb almost a kilometer of hills and take about 3 esclators to the park, and then climb up more hills. But when we finally made it there and it was all worth it. It was great--you have to check the pictures on my Facebook albums to get a feel for it.

We stopped to get a couple tapas for lunch (we found a place that actually didn't charge 4 euros for a tapa...a rarity in Barça. We stopped in our hostel for a bit to drop off some stuff before heading to the beach. It was really relaxing to be out there. We hung out on a pier for a while before walking down the shore. After that we returned to the park from the night before to see it all by daylight.

Later that night we went to Barcelona's Plaça de Espanya, where every Friday and Saturday night there's a fountain light show. Again, check out the Facebook pictures (too lazy to post them on this). After that, we went to Chupitos for some chupitos. They had all these crazy shots--one was called the Boy Scout, where the bartender lit a fire and we roasted a marshmellow as a chaser.

We also had Pecha Zeta, which involved Pop Rocks and jumping around. El Punto J and an Orgasmo de Monjas were also had. At the end, we were all given a free one by the bartender (probably because between the 5 of us we spent almost 35 euros). Then we went home, well, Blake and Allison went by the Med for like 10 minutes, because on the way home Blake decided he needed to use the bathroom. Katie and I wanted to call people back home...and you all know how that went haha. In any case, we were in bed by 1:30ish.

The next day, we "slept in" until 9 before checking out of the hostel. There weren't many stops on our to-do list. We went to the Olympic stadium (which was a lot smaller than you would imagine), and saw the rest of the Olympic grounds. During our exploring, we came across a dirt track where people were racing remote control cars...really durable, really fast remote controlled cars. It was really cool. After that, we made our way up the mountain (we were with Allison, obviously) to see the fortress. Let me start by saying that I was developing a cold, so it was not exactly a pleasant walk. But the view was worth it. We stared out across the Med from one direction, and the city from the other.

We caught an early bus back to Reus and toured the town for a while, stopping for coffee and aceitunas...and ice cream. It was a nice little place. We met up with some other CEA Students in the airport and made it home smoothly.

Reflections: Barcelona is pretty much exactly as I expected it. Great for a visit, could never live there, and I'm glad I studied in Sevilla. It's too big of a city for my tastes, and the Catalan would definitely make it difficult to learn Spanish the way I've learned it here. But it's full of life and culture and I definitely think I'll be back to see the finished Sagrada Familia one day.

I got back from London yesterday, so expect an entry about that by the weekend. I can't believe I'm going home in just 11 days!

Sevilla es mi cante...

"La tierra se abrió ayer en Sevilla y se tragó un quiosco de prensa. Literalmente." The earth opened up yesterday in Sevilla and swallowed a news kiosk. Literally.

This was the first line of an article in an Andalucían newspaper today. I know I haven't written about my Barcelona trip yet, but this week in Sevilla has been tan busy and interesting enough to warrant an entry today. But yeah, the Metro that they've been building here in Sevilla for the past few years has been delayed over and over again (it was supposed to be done 2 years ago...Dec 20 is the current opening date for Line 1), and this surely doesn't help. Apparently the owner of the kiosk (that I pass every day on the way to class) and his family noticed that the ground was rumbling and got out of the kiosk only minutes before it fell through the ground into where the metro station is being built. Yeah.

Speaking of Sevilliano construction, I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but for the past 3 months, they have been working on the water pipes on my side of the river. My street is at the end of 6 different streets, and they have been making their way street by street over the course of the semester. They are now on the second to last one. Based on how many people we see working, and how many smoke breaks they take, we've guessed that in America, the project would have been done two months ago. Instead, now and then I get to wake up to jackhammers in the morning, or the house shaking because they're working on pipes under us. Yeah.

Also, remember my post about the big protest about No a Bolonia? Yeah, the students have been continuing to cause problems for the university. At one point they started sleeping in the university, so now the city decided to block off the courtyard doors so no one can get in. This means that we pretty much have to walk around the whole building to get to a classroom that used to take us 30 seconds to get to. Then today there were protests by the students again, this time against the closing of the doors. ::shrug::

Last night we went to a play put on by some of the people in our program. It was funny, and they've all gotten definitely better at their Spanish (though some people still have horrid accents). After that we all got tapas (well, I got a full meal), before going to La Carbonería. This time I was there for the whole show. We got there and the performer thanked us for being there. "Que frio hace esta noche...pero el flamenco es caliente: calenta el corazón, calenta el alma, y el cuerpo..." It was a great show, felt so much more authentic than the Patio Sevillano show we saw earlier. At one point, they decided to play Sevillanas (variation of flamenco), and got a man and a woman from the crowd to come up and dance (they were very good).

The songs were beautiful and surprisingly easy to understand (even Spaniards have trouble hearing the words a veces). The lyrics were pretty--"Sevilla es mi cante, Sevilla es me flor, Sevilla es mi baile, Sevilla es mi amor..." We left around 12:20. Hopefully I'll have the chance to go one or two more times before I leave.

Tonight we're having a Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant. ¡Que tengáis un gran Dia de Acción de Gracias!

Great weekend so far...

Haven't done anything really worth blogging, but this has been one of my favorite weekends in Seville so far.

Wednesday
--Irish pub with Matt, Blake, and Kevin
--Orange toss
--Random spanish bar

Thursday
--"so indie"
--Alfalfa
--wandering the city

Friday
--toast and coffee
--guy with dancing puppets
--guitar session by the river
--Parque de Maria Luisa/Pigeons at Plaza de Americas
--tapas
--Alfalfa with Brenna, Sarah Catley, and some CEA Barcelona people

Saturday
--waking up at 1pm and having Filli make fun of me
--the fried ham and cheese and tortellini with Spanish cream sauce for lunch
--getting stuck in a procession in Triana for 30 minutes
--Italian buffet and Scottish pub with Stacy and Sevillanos

Sooo tired...

Granada!

This weekend was our last CEA-sponsored excursion: Granada. Located about 3 hours west of Sevilla, Granada is famous for its Islamic heritage. Most notably, Granada has La Alhambra, a Moorish citadel that houses three palaces, and a pueblo called Albaicin that contains a lot of Muslim architecture and overlooks the main city and Alhambra.

view from Albaicin

We started in Albaicin, where we spent a lot of time taking pictures. It was a great spot—we could clearly see the Alhambra on top of a small mountain and the city to the right of it. There was a lot concentrated in this little scenic spot. There were street vendors selling everything from puppies (they let us hold them, and I think Shelby actually asked Aranoa if she could buy one—as a joke of course), to jewelry to drawings. Also, this group of men were sitting and playing and singing flamenco. They were really good—a lot of us gave them money when they took a break. There were a lot of student age people enjoying the view and the music. It was a nice place.

KG and puppyStreet Entertainment

Afterwards, we made our way down to the main city (walking). Granada was a very interesting place. It’s a much smaller city than Sevilla, but to me, it felt more “city,” which is interesting because when I told Allison I still liked Sevilla more (because a lot of people said that they loved Grenada so much they could have studied there instead of Sevilla), she said it was because I liked big cities. ::shrug:: It reminded me a lot of American cities, with the neo-classical architecture on tall, modern buildings, the artsy street lights and flowered medians.

We checked into our hotel and had lunch courtesy of CEA. It was identical to most CEA meals we’ve had: bread, followed by salad, followed by chicken and vegetables, followed by ice cream. I was very satisfied. Afterwards, we had some free time. A bunch of us checked out the Romanesque cathedral, which was very impressive. I love how you could track the history of art through the side chapels—starting with the proto-Renaissance and ending with the high Renaissance. It was also enormous. Gothic cathedrals may be fancier, but this one was magnificent in its own right. It was very well lit (very strategically placed fluorescent lights accentuated the natural light reflection off the white stone), and overall one of the favorite churches I’ve even been in.

Main Sacristy of the Cathedral

After that, we spent some time wandering around the city. Translation: I was the only guy, and the girls wanted to go shopping for boots. It was still very interesting—there is this one section of Grenada that is very similar to a Moroccan market street: narrow roads, cheap goods in small shops, salesmen sitting on chairs just outside the doors, ready to pounce. It brought back some good memories.

Oh, right, I should share this. Grenada is situated at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, which means it was very cold. I ended up buying a pair of gloves.

Anyway, it was eventually dinnertime, which I had been really excited about since I knew we were going to Grenada. In Granada, tapas come with drinks. We stopped at this one place and got drinks and the free tapas, and then we each ordered another one (I ordered 2). 4.80 Euros for a drink and 3 small sandwiches. Then we went to Bella y la Bestia, which had been recommended to me before the trip. This place was amazing. I ordered 8 drinks for the group, and with our drinks we were given ham and cheese bagels, French fries (with ketchup and RANCH DRESSING), and pasta salad, all for 2 Euros each.

Enjoying our Tapas

The Venue

After that, we got dessert as a pastelería (dessert store) before heading back to the hotel. I ended up going with some people to rendezvous with some CEA Granada guys. They took us to this bar that was really far away and very crowded, but the drinks were good and cheap. I only had one because I only wanted to be out for a little bit, and around 12:20 (very early by Spanish standards), Robyn, Matt, and I caught a cab back to the hotel….at which point we ran into Kevin, Ruth, and Katie (in her pajamas). Apparently it was mojito night at a nearby bar. Matt continued to the hotel, and Robyn and I joined the group. We got our mojitos in plastic cups para llevar (Kevin just took his glass back haha) and hung out in the hotel for a while before going to bed.

I set my alarm for 8:20 and was showered and eating breakfast downstairs by 9:05. I was (eventually) joined by James, Allison, and Aranoa. It was some good food—little did I know it would be my most substantial meal for the next 11 hours.

Allison and I took to the streets around 10:00. We walked through the city central before she decided to show me the river/canal area. It was really cool—unlike Seville, Granada actually experiences fall. The leaves do change color. So we just followed the river until we ran out of sidewalk. At this point we walked up into the residential area, thinking that all we had to do was go back around and make a loop (because doubling back is boring). We climbed up a lot of stairs and walked up some roads…I don’t know why we thought there’d be an easy way down, but we did.

All of Granada

At one point, we were reaching what seemed to me the highest part of the road we were on. It was in fact the highest part of the road, but it was also the end of the road. Looking down off this particular edge of the mountainside, we saw a road that looked like it would take us toward the city central. Here we had a choice: either we double back on the road we had just spent the last 15 minutes on, or climb down the hill. We chose to make our way down the hill. It didn’t look too steep from where we were. I also decided that worst-case scenario was that we call the emergency number and have the group pick us up on the way to La Alhambra.

The Situation

Most of it wasn’t that steep. The main problem was that the ground wasn’t very sturdy—the rocks kept failing to support us. Some times I just sat completely down and slid. Luckily, attached to that tree in the bottom right of the picture was a thin rope. Unluckily, taking the rope only got us to the steepest part of the way down, where we were confronted by our next impediment: cacti. There was a rock wall that we could use for support, and my jeans absorbed the brunt of the cacti and (what looked like but probably weren’t) aloe plants. I made it down. Allison wasn’t so lucky. First of all, she’s a girl and was carrying a purse. So she threw it and her jacket down to me. Then, every time she tried to use the rock wall for support, the rock wouldn’t be steady and would just go flying down at me. My knee is still a little sore from a particularly large rock. Also, at one point, she fell on a cactus. Allison decided she wasn’t going to be able to make it down the same way I did, so she found another way down that involved shimmying down a wooden pole. We made it all in one piece…albeit with rocks in our shoes, and in Allison’s case, her purse and pants.

The Solution

So then we took the road towards the general direction of the city center. If we were smart, we again would have just doubled back and walked very quickly, but we pressed on. To our dismay, the road continued UP the mountain, toward the Alhambra. At this point I seriously considered just walking to the Alhambra and telling someone to get our bags. But we still had about an hour and a half to get back. We ran into a painter at a scenic spot who told us a way down. We ended up walking through a quaint pueblo blanco and made it to the city centro with about 45 minutes to spare. We treated ourselves to ice cream.

Great views of the city...too bad it meant we were going the wrong way.

So recap: Allison and I went off the map, walked part of the way up the mountain, climbed a steep hill down the mountain, accidentally went even further up the mountain, came within probably 100 meters of the Alhambra, then walked through a village back to the centro so we could take the group bus back up the same road to the Alhambra. It wasn’t the smartest decision we could have done. (And today my butt is sore.)

Dogs on the way back down

Then we took the bus up to the Alhambra. Allison and I kept pointing out the places we had been that morning—it was fun and ridiculous to relive our little excursion.

We started off in the gardens outside La Alhambra. These gardens surrounded the summer house of some dead rich guy. Then we went into the house. Inside (and in the Alhambra too) were all these little floor fountains. After all these years (the Moors first arrived in 711), the water still comes down from the mountain, and the fountain is still powered by gravity and pressure. The architecture was really ornate. The walls were covered with stucco molds of Arabic script, and a lot of the mosaics really reminded me of Morocco (which makes sense because it was the same Berbers).

pretty

Our guide told us to hurry because our tickets to the palace expired at 3:30 p.m., and it was currently 3:25. We arrived at the gate at 3:29, and they almost didn’t let us in. “Os voy a matar. Os voy a matar,” repeated the lady who scanned our tickets (I hope she was referring to our guides.). When we got inside, our guide told us she wasn’t allowed to stop and talk because they don’t want groups blocking certain rooms in the palace.

palm tree columns

The palaces were very impressive inside. Our guide explained that unlike Europeans (and Americans) who place their gardens and their fountains outside—“Our roses smell for our neighbors”—the Moors put all their beautiful reflecting pools, fountains, trees, bushes and flowers inside so the people who lived in the house could enjoy them. Smart idea, methinks. Also there was this one room where all the men would hang out and chat, and the fountains actually served a purpose—the sound of the water was meant to be louder than someone quietly talking, so people could be discreet. Also, all the women would stay in rooms upstairs and could watch what was going on. However, the windows were screened so the men couldn’t see the women watching them. “Jealously windows,” they were called.

gravity powered fountain in back center, jealousy windows up top

All in all, we were very impressed with Granada. When I read that the tour of La Alhambra was 3 hours, I thought, “How could they possibly fill 3 hours of time?” It was a lot of walking, but totally worth it.

Next week I’m staying in Seville (I think…might go to Madrid for a day.), and then it’s Barcelona, London, and home! I also have my first two exams this week. It’s funny, Alina’s taking finals this week, and I’m taking my midterms.