Snapshots of My Life: Week 3

It's hard to believe that I have only been in Sevilla for 3ish weeks, it feels like so much longer. So many things have changed in such a short amount of time - adjusting to life in a foreign place is exhausting, but exciting.

I'm still trying to adjust to speaking Spanish all of the time. I'm much more comfortable speaking with my host family, we use lots of hand gestures and pull out the spanish/english dictionary on a daily basis but communication is getting much easier and developing beyond the "good morning, how are you?" type of conversations.

My host sister María is a lot of fun. She is usually fairly quiet, listens to music a lot and spends all of her time on 'tuenti' which is the Spanish version of Facebook. But when she starts talking about something, usually having to do with her boyfriend Nacho, she is a very funny and animated speaker. The apartment we live in is small, so the four of us hang out in the living room watching tv or just talking. My señora loves to watch game shows (Spanish wheel of fortune and a text-twist-like game are particularly popular. Also, there is an Andalusian Cash Cab driving around that my roommate and I are determined to find), and every week day María and María del Mar watch a telenovela during dinner. I've never watched soap operas in my life, but I have to admit that I'm getting hooked. It's exciting to kind of be able to follow a plot line and understand what the characters are saying. Good practice, right? It's still a little bit awkward to be living in someone else's house, but slowly this apartment is starting to feel like my Spanish home rather than just the place I sleep and shower.

My first class started last week, an intensive grammar class that meets for 3 hours every day for 2 weeks. Three solid hours of grammar is about as fun as it sounds, but I like the people in my class a lot so it's really not so bad. We also get to do lots of fun excursions and explore the city. So far we have had to visit the Universidad de Sevilla where we will be taking classes when the regular session starts next Monday and strike up conversations with random Spanish students about some differences between university here and in the United States. This was a little bit intimidating at first, but after talking to the first few students it got much easier and I got to practice my Spanish with some really nice people.

Sevilla has a plethora of interesting and beautiful museums - so far I have visited 2: El Museo de Bellas Artes and El Museo del Flamenco. The art museum was unbelievable - it is an enormous, intricately decorated building hiding in the middle of 'el centro' (the part of the city I live in). As in all Spanish buildings there are many open-roofed courtyards with gardens and orange trees inside the museum. I'm not even sure how many rooms there are, the building is sort of like a maze, but each one is filled with amazing works of art. I could spend an entire day there. And maybe I will, there is no enterance fee and it's a 10 minute walk from my house.

The flamenco museum was very cool, and not at all what I expected. It was very interactive, lots of audio and video of different types of flamenco dancing, exhibits about famous flamenco dancers, authentic flamenco costumes, etc. I never knew that flamenco dancing had such a diverse history before - it evolved over time and various aspects of the dance come from different cultures from around the world (ex. hand motions from Indian dance, hip and shoulder movement from Cuba, foot stomping from France, castinettes from Crete...)

Other than class and home, things here are wonderful. I'm getting to know people better and starting to get into a groove. I still haven't gotten used to the eating schedule but the churro shop on the corner is doing a great job at making sure I never go hungry. Life is good.