life

Since I've been here in Spain for almost 2 weeks now, I guess its about time to start a blog! We arrived in Madrid on January 30 at 9 am Spain time (2 am Oklahoma time).  Emily and I met a few people that were going to our school in Sevilla at the airport so it was nice to meet other ISA students before we even got to Spain!

Once we arrived, we went to meet the rest of the students in the Madrid airport.  At 11 we took buses to our hotel, NH Nacional. I definitely felt like a tourist carrying my 3 suitcases and backpack through the busy city trying to get to my hotel.  Once we got there, Emily and I got our room assignment and went up to our room, and we had our first crazy international problem!!! The lights. How do they work? We tried to flip the switches but nothing happened. Turns out you have to put your hotel key inside the switch. Que raro. After this struggle, we decided it was about time to experience our first siesta in Spain,  and with the Persian blinds and 7 hour time change, it was perfect!

The next morning the hotel served quite possibly the best breakfast I had ever seen. So many different types of meat, cheese, yogurt, cereal, fruit, juice, bread, pastries, granola, etc. We went to visit Palacio Real and Museo del Prado, which were both beautiful and we had guided tours of both of them. 

On February 1st we left for Toledo, which was a smaller, beautiful city.  We took a bus tour around the city and visited the cathedral there. 

We finally got to meet our host family on Thursday, the moment we had all been waiting for.  Our buses took us to a street in Sevilla and dropped us off on a street filled with about 30 host moms-the funniest sight ever! We met our mom, Rita, and took a cab back to our new house!  We have a great new family, Rita and Juan are our new parents, Juanjo and Marcos are our new brothers, and Juanito is our cute new nephew that we got to meet yesterday! 

Sometimes I feel like my day revolves around coming back home to eat.  I have a small breakfast at 8 am and  then I come back from class and we have the biggest.and.best.lunches.ever. at 2:30 ish every day. Another reason I enjoy mealtime: el calentador.  The rest of the house is generally freezing, but when we eat there is a little space heater under the table, and under the tablecloth is a heavy blanket that we get to keep warm with! Rita feeds us with a huge lunch everyday, always with muchooo pan-we have french baguettes at every meal. Then we have dinner again at 9:30 pm, and it is usually just as good at lunch but we told Rita we wanted to go on a diet so the meals have been getting a little smaller.  Rita showed us her favorite treat one day - crackers and nutella, so our indulgent eating of our dessert might not actually be good for our diet.  

On the other hand, we do walk everywhere we go.  School is a 30 minute walk from our house, and we make that walk at least 4 times a day.  Lately Emily and I have also started running across the river, and it might be the most beautiful place to run! We run from the bridge near our house to the other bridge and back, and the best time to run is at night when the sun is setting because all the lights from the city illuminate the river.

The past few days have been so much fun, yesterday we woke up to go to visit the Alcazar house, but we were five minutes late and didn't get to go. Instead, Emily and I went with some other people that were late to explore Sevilla. We went to visit the "seta" which is a huge wooden structure with graves surprisingly underneath it. Tomorrow we are going to mass at the cathedral that we pass on the way to class and then to see the Alcazar house since we missed it. 

I have loved everything about Sevilla so far, I've made lots of great friends, live in a beautiful city, have great classes, love my host family, and I'm learning new things everyday.  Even getting lost isn't bad because I wind up finding another great part of this historical city. Life is great! Might not come home.