It has been a very fun past few days. Rachel and I have a new roommate named Susana. She actually lives in the room adjacent to us, but we all share a bathroom. She is from Ireland but goes to school at Cornell and is here until June. She’s a basketball player on scholarship, but since tearing her ACL, she was allowed to go to Spain for the season. She really lucked out with this house, because there is an elevator right to our room, so she doesn’t have to walk up 4 flights of stairs every day. She’s very sweet and extroverted and it should be fun living with her.
On Thursday night we went out to a popular bar in the barrio Santa Cruz. There weren’t many people out in the city, but the people who were out were at this bar because it was packed. We finally had the night of Sevilliano-mingling we’d been anticipating. We got to practice our Spanish, and an older couple we befriended wrote down an entire page of recommendations for places to go for tapas, breakfast, clubs, etc. The people here are so friendly. Even though our Spanish wasn’t very polished, they were very engaged in conversation, and one woman even helped us out with our slang words. Since we’ve only studied Spanish out of textbooks, the exclamations we’ve learned are most similar to “Golly Gee Willickers!” or “Neat!” which aren’t necessarily very cool to say. So we learned some new phrases and now hopefully we’ll blend in more now.
Friday we woke up early and took a 2 hour bus ride to Ronda, which is a town in southern Andalucia. It is the spot that Hemmingway talks about in several of his works. I’m not really a sucker for pretty landscapes, but this was UNBELIEVABLE. It was stunningly beautiful. It was how I imagined Tuscany to be. Beautiful rolling hills and unbelievably green grass. We toured the Arab-constructed baths and also went into a bull fighting ring. They had a lot of cute shops and pastelerias (pastery shops) which we took advantage of. It was truly a great day. Rachel left for Morrocco from Ronda to meet up with some friends from Connecticut who were traveling in the area and she’ll be back today.
On Friday night for dinner we had fish. I am sure it was fish because the fish were whole. Head, eyes, tail, everything. Tiny little silver fish the size of my index finger. I was instructed to “snap off the head and feed it to the Chihuahua, snap of the tail and eat it. Removing “la espina” (the spine) was optional. I took my plate to the table in awe. I was brave and ate them, and they weren’t half bad. I expected to have a harder time eating them with the heads in a pile on the side of my plate anticipating consumption by the dog, but maybe all those dissections of pigs and rats in bio have made me numb to that sort of thing.
After finding and eating Nemo(s), I went to a discoteca with some friends, and it was a private party but somehow they let us in without the 40 Euro cover charge. It was a really fun place with cool interior decorations and 2 dancers dressed in crazy costumes on platforms. It was a long walk back, but my friends Nikki and Caitlin live 30 seconds away from me, so we all walked together.
On Saturday I woke up early to buy my ingredients for apple crisp. We were having a large dinner (5 kilos of pork) to be served to the whole family and the grandmother and great aunt. At the first supermarket, no one could help me find brown sugar. The showed me “azucar Moreno” which is literally sugar that is brown, like Sugar in the Raw. It was the same texture and consistency as regular sugar, which was not what I wanted. They probably thought I was loca because I was describing this product as something that had “una textura que tiene arena cuando se esta hacienda castillos de arena” which means the texture of sand when you are making sand castles. They thought I was a lunatic. After looking online, I found that brown sugar is not sold in spain. It simply does not exist. Apple crisp is not a recipe which permits substitution of brown sugar, so unfortunately the dessert was a no go. I now have lots of oatmeal, flour and 13 apples to eat. But sadly enough, I’m not even worried about eating the 13 apples myself. I will have no problem. They are so sweet. My mum was so disappointed about the apple crisp failure that she is sending me brown sugar, which the family was actually really excited about. Apparently they were very excited to try it. They have never had a dessert made of apples.
Last night it was one student’s birthday, so we went to a club called Buddah. We had a reserved table on the third floor, which we didn’t realize was the 35+ floor (not officially, but that was the crown there). But it was really fun even though the people dancing next to us were 40 years our senior. We listened to bad American remixes of rap songs and danced for hours. It was great.
I have also been teaching the 3 year old some English. She can count to ten in English and can say “You Win!” because that’s what her electronic game says when she accidentally has it on the English setting. We watch Dora la Exploradora (which actually DOES rhyme in Spanish, unlike in English) regularly. I also watched parts of Homeward Bound en espanolm which Julia did not find nearly as entertaining as I did.
Today I have some homework to do and then class in the morning.
Hasta luego!
Those pictures look stunning!
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