My trip to Andalusia y muchas cosas

Ok, so it´s been a while since I put anything good up here, but that just means this post is gonna be that much cooler. Finally got myself established in terms of getting pictures posted. Opened a Flickr account finally: the link can be found to the right under my list of HoTT SiTeZ. It´s http://www.flickr.com/photos/sawbones84. I will be putting pictures up at least semi-regularly and it will give you folks a better idea of what I´m seeing with my own eyes. I might post less pictures in this blog than originally planned and just link to pictures over thar. At the time of posting this entry, I only have my Sevilla pics up, but plan on dumping the rest of my camera on there right after, assuming it´s not getting too close to dinner time. I´ve yet to take pics of Alicante, but they will come soon. Weekend after this one is Carnaval, which as best I understand it, is Halloween in February with lots more public drinking (botellón). I´ll try to bring my camera out for at least a little of that too.

One more thing regarding pictures and Flickr: I have a limit on how much I can upload to Flickr per month, so the pics are kind of small and of a lower resolution. If anybody wants higher res, larger copies of any of my pics just shoot me a message and I can get you the original in all it´s glory (usually 800kb to 1mb in size).

Okay, now that the salad is out of the way, on to the first first course...
Sevilla was simply incredible. Such an amazing city filled with tons of things to see and do. My pictures don´t really do it justice, but I think give a decent sample of some of the beauty that is to be experienced there. I pretty much spent the entire weekend with Anastasia, Lauren, and Jessica, some new friends I made on the bus ride up, so in terms of people, my pictures are dominated by them. I did hang out with others, but that was at night when I left my camera safe in the hotel.

So yea, the bus ride sucked pretty royally. 8 hours after all the breaks we took. The bus smelled like 40 or 50 something people in a poorly ventilated vehicle. Much fun. Smelled way worse on the ride back Sunday as most people were too hungover to get up early enough to shower. I guess we were just being more European or something.

We arrived in Sevilla around dinner time, so immediately got ready and went out into the night for (amazing) tapas and whatever else was to ensue. CIEE hooked us up with a few of their stash/horde of "Spanish Helpers." SH´s are Spanish students that are studying English that sacrifice their precious time dragging Americans around making them feel more at home. We happened to get a very cool batch this time around who had some very cool friends and after tapas they showed us where the cheap beer was at. 1.50 euros for 2 beers before midnight was certainly a good deal. By midnight, the street that our bar was on and all of the surrounding area was completely packed with people botellón-ing. All the bars sold 3 euro solo cup beers (or the Spanish equivalent to solo cups) and the entire place had an incrediblely chill yet lively feeling. People were talking, singing, hanging out in the streets all having a great time. I wish I had my camera so you could see what I´m talking about, but you can use your imagination. There wasn´t any fighting or excessive vomitting or anything of such an unpleasant nature.

Got back pretty late, but early compared to the local standard of 8am. Woke up around 11 feeling surprisingly fresh. The day before we received 25 dollars in what can almost literally be called food stamps. They were 5 dollar vouchers that are accepted by certain restaurants in the city. Caught Ana, Jess, and Lauren on their way out and tagged along with them looking for a place that took our food stamps. We decided to stay away from the organized tours our program was putting on, since organized tours are lame. We went to the cathedral which was filled with a huge organ and a bunch of other crap including the supposed casket of little Chrissy Columbus: Conqurer of People Tanner Than Us (no pic, came out too dark, no flash photos allowed inside). Next we climbed to the top of the tower and got a pretty decent view of the city.

Then we walked and walked and walked and saw lots of cool neighborhoods and ate lots of good food. You can see some of the pics over on the Flickr page.

Second night in Sevilla was much more low-key. As great as I felt that morning after laying it on pretty heavy the night before, I decided not to push myself too hard another night. I went out for a little but only had a beer and just talked to a bunch of people. Got back to the hotel and got a good night´s sleep... not that I needed it considering there was plenty of time to sleep on the ride home.

Sunday morning was a little more touring of places we already checked out the day before including the park and the Plaza de España, so we split off on our own and explored more of the park, checking out the flora and fauna. Bus ride back was -as explained above- smelly, and to add insult to injury I had to sit through "i heart huckabees," a movie that makes me wish guns were a more prominent part of Spanish society. yuck

I´d love to get back to Sevilla, but with such a short amount of time here and so many places to see, I´m not sure it´s going to be on the agenda this time around. Definitely recommended for anybody who makes it over to Spain, though.

So that was the weekend, now the rest... the second course I suppose

Classes are a mixed bag at best. For my language class, we lost our very cool, very funny and friendly teacher -Mar- from the intensive course and unwillingly traded her for a bipolar psycho hose beast (to use a Wayne´s World term) who switches between bouncing off the wall, screaming at the top of her lungs to standing very still looking like she is about to burst into tears, whispering to us about the proper uses of the conditional tense. Needless to say, it´s a crappy hour and a half to endure every morning. Besides being generally wacky, she´s a poor teacher in general, not explaining things very well and often speaking either too quickly, loudly OR too softly to be understood easily. I´m going to count on handouts and the book to get everything I need out of the class.

Literature is a straight up dull drag. The teacher seems very cool and is down to earth, but suffers from whatever disease plagues professors who think the only way to teach is with a powerpoint presentaiton. Things can get pretty dry pretty quick as one might imagine. Hoping things will pick up a bit as the semester progresses, although I can´t say spirits are at their highest right now. As a consolation, it looks like it´ll be an easier course than I expected. It´s mostly centered around poetry, so I won´t have to be struggling through any 300 page Spanish novels. yikes.

Modern History is awesome. The teacher is amazing. Really funny and smart and knows how to keep the class moving and interesting. I never look at my watch in that class. Not much else to say, really, except that I´m psyched to be in that class. She´s trying to convince CIEE to take us out on all sorts of field trips too including a possible weekend trip to the Canaries, subsidized by the program. That´d be too sweet for words. The only bummer is a 12-15 pager that counts for 60 or 70 percent of my grade, but I´m doing it on Sevilla so it shouldn´t be too rough.

Speaking of classes, I had the first of three cooking instructionals I signed up for through the university. First course was tapas, and as I suspected earlier, Spanish people do not eat very healthy. Out of the 6 dishes we were taught to make, the lady had to have used a liter of olive oil and an entire jar of mayo. It was still very cool, and I´m glad I went. We learned to make Ensalada Rusa which is peas, carrots, potatos, hard-boiled eggs, and tuna in a large amount of mayonnaise. The version at the cooking class was a little lighter and tastier than my Spanish madre´s though, so that was something at least. We also learned to make croquetes jamón which can best be described as "pork and milk mcnuggets." Sounds gross, but they are freakin´ delicious. I´ll be cooking those up when I get back the states, only with jalapeños. There was also patatas con alioli, which is just boiled, sliced potatos mixed in with this really strong garlic mayonnaise. Ridiculously delicious as well. There was also a fried potato dish with grated garlicky tomatos... again, TASTY AS HELL. There was also this one that was basically sardine sized fish soaked in vinegar and then sprinkled with olive oil and parsley but they weren´t very good. The last was just bread with the garlickly tomato crush mix and a piece of jamón cerano (basicaly prosciutto but a little higher quality) layed out on top. Simple and delicious. I think we´re doing Spanish Tortillas next class, which excites me. I´ll be cookin´ Spanish come June when I get back to the States. Line up now.

Started making plans for Spring Break, which is turning out to be a pretty big pain. Eric and I are planning a rather ambitious journey that starts in Amsterdam, moves to Rotterdam, then to Belgium where we will try to rent a car and do a short countryside tour of as many abbeys and breweries as possible, then back to Brussels where we will catch our respective flights out. Eric will be off to Paris, while I´ll be going to visit Matt in England to do some Proper English Drinking with him and his friends at the tail end of their Spring Break. Then it´s back to Alicante where I´ll have class on Tuesday. Between travel and hostels, there is a whole lot to think about ahead of time, especially with our excursion into the Belgian countryside. Regardless, I´m already getting excited about our adventure even if it isn´t for another solid 2 months.

And some more general random stuff... the dessert?

I´m starting to realize how spoiled I am by a life of total convenience in the States. Even in a modern country like Spain, I find myself getting frustrated from time to time when I can´t immediately get something I need from some big store any time of day. An example is chapstick. I lost my little tube I brought from home and needed a new one. No problem, right? Go to the nearest 24 hour store and pick one of the 500 brands to choose from. WRONG. You´d never notice until you think about it, but it´s incredible how may places don´t sell the stuff. Maybe it´s because Spaniards don´t use it that much, but my precious little pouters get chapped in the dry climate and I need relief. Corte Íngles sells it, but for like €5.00 or something ridiculous (I really need to devote a large section of a post about how much I hate El Corte Íngles. This will come soon), and most of the free time I´ve had this week has come during comida hours when everything closes and Alicante dies for a while (2:00-5:00, every day). With the exception of a few mega-chains like El Corte Íngles, there are very very few "super-stores" here (Carrefour is the only other that comes to mind, but that´s mostly groceries anyway). Beyond that, it seems like there are some unwritten rules about what certain stores do and don´t sell. For instance, you can buy a padlock with a key at a Feretería (hardware store), but not one with a combo lock. You need to go to a sports store to get one with a combo lock. And there doesn´t seem to be any other kind of store that sells padlocks at all. It´s the same story with so many things you´d never even think about. There seems to be a specific store for everything, and however these things are categorized is sometimes completely beyond me. It has been a minor source of frustration, but nothing too terrible to handle.

Language-wise, I´m feeling really good lately, being able to communicate much more smoothly in lots of sitatuations. My comprehension abilities have risen sharply since I´ve started classes, and my lexicon is widening so I can usually carry on a rough conversation about general topics for a good period of time. It takes longer to become bored by Spanish TV as I can generally follow plots more easily now, and I get a lot more from the news.

It´s been weird, cause we were told right off the bat that we would definitely experience culture shock - a period of deep depression where everything is terrible - but I haven´t come close to feeling anything of the sort. Mostly, it´s just gotten better and better as I´ve been here. My language keeps improving and I feel more comfortable every day in general. I do get pretty pissed of at the U.S. when it comes up in the news because there´s a non-stop stream of negative shit pouring out of it. Regardless of how objective I feel I can handle the way the U.S. handles itself on the international scale with the help of the Internet and a relatively sharp set of media-analyzing tools, it has still been a shock to see how preposterous we look from the other side of the ocean. I´m mostly talking politics here, because culturally Spain and the U.S. are frigtheningly similar at times. I´m not going to go into any real detail because my eyes are tired and I could fill an entire post talking about this stuff, but our administration really does look a whole lot more evil from over here, especially after having followed Spanish politics for a bit. At least here there is still somewhat of a sense that the leaders are working for the people, whereas in the U.S. everything is a blatant grab for personal interests. It seems so preposterous that all of this prisoner abuse crap keeps happening while Americans have no real sense of consequences. Over here, everything is so much closer and it´s easy to feel cultural rifts when the people you the people you are gravely offending are your neighbors. It makes our entire system of politics look ridiculous and terrifyingly destructive. Talk about a bad taste in your mouth.

Not to say Europe should be let off the hook. It definitely has it´s fare share of bad politics and xenophobia, but at least here the voices of reason can be heard as loudly as the voices of hypocrisy, if not more clearly.

Enough. This has to be my longest post since I´ve started this thing and my eyeballs want to fall out of my head right now. So much for uploading the rest of my pictures tonight. Time to go home and study. Thanks for following along!


P.S. I want a cat. The random mangy, scarred up strays that are hungry enough to come up to me and let me pet them aren´t doing it for me anymore. I wonder what my host family would say if I brought home a kitten one night...