Buenas tardes!

I can't believe how fast time is going by here! We only have 8 days of school this month. Next week we have Feria de Abril, then one more week of classes, and then finals week. It feels like it was just yesterday that I was just receiving my rooming assignment to stay here!

Last Monday we went over to Emily's intercambio's apartment for dinner with her other Spanish friends. We enjoyed paella (delicious) and hung out for a while, we were practicing our Spanish and they wanted to practice their English. One of them also knows French, and she taught me a few sentences in French, but she said it was difficult because she had to think of it in French, then translate it back into Spanish and English to teach it to me. Her friends were impressed that we were speaking French to each other!

This past weekend was pretty great! On Thursday night, I experienced my first real Spanish futbol game! It was Sevilla vs. Zaragoza, and we won 3-0! Before the game, 2 of our friends that live really close to us came over and met us at our house to get ready and met everyone else at the stadium for the game. The game was really fun, and it reminded me of being at an OSU game a little bit! Everyone was chanting and singing the whole time for Sevilla. It was great!

The next day ISA took us on our last excursion to Cordoba and Granada.  We walked through the little streets in a cute little part of town, visited the Great Mosque of Cordoba, and had tapas and icecream before heading out to Granada, where we spent the rest of the weekend. I LOVED Granada!! My first thought when I got there was that it reminded me of Sevilla a little bit, but there were a lot hills and mountains also.  It was quite a bit colder in Granada too, and after the first day it pretty much rained the whole time.

Cordoba

The first night, we went to see the "viewpoint," where you can see the Alhambra and the rest of the city on top of a mountain. After that, we went to a Flamenco show. We all sat around in a circle, which was great because we could all see the dancers in the middle of us. We saw about 6 of them, and they were all great to watch! We wandered around Granada for a little bit, got some Kebabs, which are really famous in Granada, and found some interesting things, like a bachelor party where everyone was dressed up in the streets like Romans doing different things, a girl dancing with fire, etc. Eventually it started raining and we went back to our hotel.

at the viewpoint

flamenco show

The next day we visited the palace and gardens of the Alhambra in Granada. It was raining pretty much the whole day, but we got lucky and found someone selling umbrella hats outside the entrance! I think they made for some great pictures. I wish we could have seen the gardens during the spring, in one of the pools you are supposed to be able to see a perfect reflection of the building inside, but since it was raining and cloudy, I didn't get to see that :(

Alhambra

Umbrella hats!!!

OSU girls at the alhambra

After the Alhambra, we went and got tapas. The great thing about Granada was they had free tapas if you order a drink! So you could order a drink and get a huge thing of noodles (chinese tapas..glorious) for only 2 euro! Perfect! We went to some little shops and explored, but decided to go back to the hotel and hang out because it was cold and rainy outside. We rested, hung out, had dinner, and went out for tapas at 1am, and then went out! The next day was rainy and cold again, but we ventured out for more chinese tapas, kebabs, and icecream (i'm on a diet). Luckily Sevilla was warm and dry! A lot of the trip I kept thinking how much I liked Granada and that I would like to visit it again, but then as soon as I got back to Sevilla, I changed my mind and decided I could stay there forever instead. Either one!  Here are just some pretty pics of Granada:

Semana Santa

Our first spring break has come and gone! Definitely was a fun week filled with many different things- for the fist part Emily and I went to Ibiza, then came back to Sevilla for a few days, and finished out the week in Isla Cristina with our familia espanola.

A few weeks ago when we were trying to decide where to go for our Semana Santa break, we didn't really know where we wanted to go, and were looking into Italy, Germany, etc. for a while, but, on a spur of the moment decision we found a cheap flight to an island called Ibiza and decided to go there instead! We didn't really think about it being the off-season for Ibiza-not quite the prime time when you can't swim in the beaches or lay out, and the night before we left Sevilla for Ibiza, we had gone out with our Spanish friends and had a lot of fun, and were contemplating whether or not to even to to Ibiza anymore because we started to regret traveling so much and wanted to spend more time in Sevilla! We had only paid for our flight and hadn't even booked our hostels yet, but we decided that it would be worth it to go so we got online to book our hostel at 5am before we went to bed, and to our disappointment, the cheap hostel that we had looked into earlier that day suddenly became full! Luckily we found another one in the same general area and booked it instead with a hotel for the first night.  The next day we went to the airport and almost had a little problem-we were flying with Ryanair and they're very strict about the size of carry on luggage, and Emily almost had to pay extra to take my little rolly suitcase because you have to stuff your bag into a little basket, and if it doesn't fit you have to either pay, or take out everything and wear it so it gets smaller! We got to Ibiza at around 9ish and had to take the bus to our city where we were staying, and made friends with two other American girls that happened to be studying in Sevilla also, and turns out they were even staying in our same hostel 2 rooms down! What a coincidence! We ended up spending pretty much the whole trip together. The first night we met up and hung out in the hostel lobby and went to bed pretty early. Had a nice skype session with my dad too!

The next day we moved into our hostel and then went out to the beach to sunbathe! Luckily, it was definitely warm enough to lay out and we even got in the water, even though it was pretty freezing. Emily and I had breakfast at our hotel and made a sandwich there to take to the beach with us for lunch. For dinner we went to a really cool Tex Mex restaurant that was actually good! Each table had a telephone and we had fun calling different tables and talking to everyone!

The next day we went to a different beach that had more people and laid out all day. Everyday we went and had brunch at a little restaurant called Rita's, and even indulged a little bit and had fruit (ok lets be honest..chocolate) smoothies and tried some delicious sandwiches and such. The last day we tried Cafe Frappe, but it was a little disgusting. At night we went to a little bar that was really fun even though the everywhere was pretty empty! The next day we got up and randomly jet skiid a little bit, and walked around exploring Ibiza a little bit. We tried to find a bowling alley or movie theater but they were either closed or an expensive taxi ride away. One day for entertainment, we went to a little supermarket, got nail polish, and went a little place on the beach and just hung out and did our nails and ate a thousand sunflower seeds.  Emily and I were so glad we met Taylor and Julia-they definitely made our trip way more fun and exciting and we can't wait to hang out with them in Sevilla later! The last night we went to the beach at sunset to take pictures and had a nice little photoshoot, and then went to eat at a place near our hostel because it started to rain. Emily and I left the next day, but the other girls' flight wasn't until Friday so they spent the whole week there, but Emily and I were excited to come back to Sevilla for a couple days to watch Semana Santa, since Sevilla is famous for their processions!

2nd home in ibiza...rita's!

We arrived in Sevilla Tueday night at like 1 in the morning, and the next day went out to see the processions! My host brother Marcos showed me online the schedule for all the different processions lead by all the "hermandades" and where and when they passed through the streets, and showed me videos of passed Semana Santa processions, and in between each paso the procession has a band and Nararenes holding candles. The streets were SO packed, it was so hard to get through and the main street Avenida de Constitucion where many of the pasos went through was even blocked off with seats for people to pay and watch them all go by. A lot of our friends were out of town, so for the first part Emily and I were wandering around trying to make our way through the crowded streets to find another paso to see. We ended up meeting up with our friend Pedro that we met in Portugal a few weeks ago that lives in Sevilla. We met in Plaza Salvador and got really close to one of the pasos as it came by. Each hermandad has two pasos-one for Jesus and one for Virgin Mary, one at the front and one at the back. Whenever these two pasos came by, everyone in the crowd got silent-it was very respectful and beautiful to see all the processions! But the weird thing was that the Nazarenes all wore black hooded pointed cloaks..kinda KKK esque. Very strange,  and when I asked what it symbolized my family told me nothing...so there's that!

On Thursday Emily and I went to Plaza de Armas to get our bus ticket to Isla Cristina, where our family has a lake house! The rest of our family (Rita, Juan, Juanjo, Juanjito) had already gone, so we had to take the bus there. And we got a little angry at the buses because we arrived about 30 minutes early to get our ticket and make sure we knew where to go so we didn't miss the only time that the bus left for that day, but near the time our bus was supposed to leave, and nobody was getting on the bus, we got nervous and thought maybe we were in the wrong place.  So we got up and started asking around, but by the time we realized we were looking at the bus number instead of the platform number, and that we were at platform 1 instead of platform 13, we had missed it by 3 minutes. We tried to get a refund, but they said no but we could use our ticket for 8pm the next day instead. We started to walk home sad..in the rain..so crestfallen....had a little pity party..and then got home and Marcos said he could take us the next day in his car!!! Yay!


So the next day we left with Marcos, made a pit stop at his friends house, and got to Isla Cristina that night. We had a lot of fun-we went out that night with Marcos, Juanjo, his novia Fatima, our host sister that we got to meet that night Marta, and her friend Sofia. They took us out to eat tapas that all consisted of seafood - sooo much food! We had octopus, different types of calamares, different types of tuna, etc. They always ask me if I like the food, but I think its just a joke now because there has literally been no food that I don't like.  Marcos was even telling everybody how I finished a huge bowl of pasta before he did for lunch that day..yikes! I need to be mas tranquila with the food I think. Afterwards we went and talked at a little square outside for a while, and then to a little bar, and then we all went back to the house. Its kinda funny listening to how Spanish people speak English-instead of saying "You should be able to know this" Marcos would say "You should can know this." It took us a few minutes to get what he was trying to tell us! And today, one of the girls was asking how we say ketchup, and Marcos goes "I know this! Cap-chup!!!" It was pretty close. I'm sure we sound even worse in Spanish though! The next day Marcos, Juajo, Fatima, Marta and 2 of her friends, Emily, and I all went to the beach to watch one of Marcos's friends' band perform, they were funk/reggae but they spoke so fast it was difficult to understand what they were saying. We went out to breakfast twice with Mama Rita, Marta and friends, and on Sunday(today) we had a typical Spanish breakfast- pan tostada con aceite y tomate-and it was actually very niiice! They served the olive oil in cute little squeezable packages, que guay! The majority of the weekend was very fun and relaxing, except for lunch yesterday there was a little dramatic family fiasco- Juanjito, our 5 year old host nephew, was getting up from the back of the table and walked around to the front, but somehow stepped in one of the hot soup bowls and got scared and started crying/screaming, and Juanjo picked him up to go take care of them, but then Mama Rita almost had a heart attack at the other side of the table hearing it and stood up saying "AY AY MI HIJO MI HIJO" and then the dad got up too, and in this whole process Juajo tripped over the dad's chair and almost dropped Juanjito, and then Juanjo scraped his leg as Juanjito was falling and got mad at the chair and threw it at the ground....and then Emily and I looked at each other and wondered how we were suddenly the only ones still at the table and what in the world just happened. Gotta love family times!

desayuno con mama rita 

Wish you could see mama rita-the whole family before the lunch fiasco

Beach with host sister Marta

our little room at the lake house

Now we are back home and about to get ready for church. Had a great weekend! Felices Pascuas!

Lisbon, Portugal

just buying some strawberries in lisbon

So I've fallen behind on my blogging a little bit- I have't written about my trip to Portugal, which was the weekend before Barcelona, oops! I shouldn't wait so long to write in my blog hopefully its not too hard to remember everything!

welcome to lisboa

We took a bus to get to Lisbon, which took about 5 hours. It was strange that they didn't even check our passports when we got into Portugal! On the bus, our directors gave us a packet with Portuguese terms on it-thank you is obligada-but they told us to speak to them in English rather than Spanish, because even though they know Spanish, it is kind of an insult to them because they know our native tongue is English, and we weren't in Spain anymore.


We went to our hotel that had veryveryvery comfy beds and took a little siesta before heading out! We toured the city, got to see Castillo de San Jorge de Lisboa, and walked around Plaza del Comercio.  We may or may not have taken a jubilee of pictures on this trip. 

plaza del comercio

At the castle!

At night, we decided to stay in our hotels and have a movie/pizza night because we were all tired from the traveling and exploring. The next day, we saw the Monastery of Los Jeronimos and the Belem Tower, which had one little tiny staircase that wound up the whole tower which was kind of inconvenient because people were trying to walk down while we were walking up and I almost fell/stepped on people's feet about 50 times but it was a good site to see! We took a whisper tour of the Monastery with a guide and earphones, and then got to frolic around the outside of it and again took some crazy pictures with our friends.

trying to be rapunzel at the monastery

at the top of the tower

We went to a famous place in Lisbon called "The brazilian girl" and had coffee and pastries, and let me tell  you...it was worth it!! I got a quiche and coffee and we enjoyed the atmosphere of the cute little cafe. Afterwards, we had some free time and explored the city, went to some shops, found some funny shirts, and took more pics! Lisbon was definitely a lot bigger than Sevilla -definitely had more of a city feel! 

Brazilian girl cafe

For dinner, we walked a little bit past our hotel and found a relatively cheap place to eat. I forgot to mention how good the food was in Portugal! They have really good fish, and coffee-they are famous for it! Emily and I split a dish with salmon and ......something else and it was oh so delicious!Yum! Afterward, we headed out to Barrio Alto, which is a popular place with cafes/bars/clubs etc, and we ended up meeting our friends at the end and even somebody that was from Sevilla, and we actually met up with him again yesterday for Semana Santa. It was SO crowded-it reminded me of Cadiz!  

craziness of barrio alto

Overall, I really enjoyed Portugal, and was happy that we got to see such beautiful places, but I was of course homesick for Sevilla and excited to get back! I still think Sevilla is my favorite place that I've visited so far, and I like the feel of Sevilla much better than the larger cities like Lisbon and Barcelona. We made it back just in time for church at home at 8pm on Sunday! Definitely a good trip:)

Barcelona

just some deliciousness first..

After a week of 4 midterms, I was so ready to go on the first trip that Emily and I actually planned ourselves instead of an ISA trip. We packed our bags beforehand and took them to class with us. At any other school it would probably be weird taking a suitcase into class, but here its completely normal! We got out at 6 pm, and began our weekend of public transportation by walking over to the tram in Plaza Nueva, which took us to the bus stop near Plaza Espana, and then took the bus to the airport. We made it to our flight in time, but found out our flight had been delayed 2 hours, so we didn't end up leaving Sevilla until 10 pm, and got to Barcelona around midnight. We took a bus to our hostel, which took 30 minutes.  We checked in and went to our room, which we shared with 10 other people. People were sleeping in there so we could only turn on a small light to find unempty beds, lock up our luggage, and get ready to go out.

We were so happy that our friends from OSU, Madi and Chelsea, had called our hostel to tell us which club they were at because otherwise we had no way to call each other, since they don't have Spain phones.  We got ready, went upstairs to the lounge while the hostel called us a cab.  We got to the discoteca Shoko at 1:30-2 ish, not knowing if they would be there or not, but we walked in and we found them almost instantly! It was so crazy getting to see people we knew from back home, I almost forgot I was in Spain for a little bit! We had so much fun and got home around 4:30.

The next day we woke up at 8:30 to go to breakfast that the hostel served, and met 2 guys from Ireland that were traveling and were planning on running on a marathon on Sunday. After breakfast then went on a walking tour of Barrio Gotico at 10. It was nice getting to know the city and we met other people that were traveling/studying in Europe. We got to see churches, a cathedral, monuments, art, where Picasso studied, etc.  After that, Emily and I went to the hotel where Madi and Chelsea were staying at, which was about 10000 times nicer than our humble hostel, and they generously let us shower there and get ready! We went to eat at a place that was recommended to us during our tour in the morning, and it was pretty delicious! We walked around the ports, las ramblas, and explored a little bit. After that, we hung out in their hotel and rested.  We went to dinner with them and some other people from their program from OSU. It was their last night in Barcelona, so they all met up on the terrace after and hung out, talking about their trip.  It was weird hearing them all talk about how it was over and how they would be going back home the next day when I still have a long time here! I was so glad that we got to meet up, even for the short amount of time.  After the terrace, we went to a bar that had crazy trick shots! They lit them on fire, roasted marshmallows on them, one had pringles and hot sauce, some had whipped cream and chocolate, etc-there were hundreds to choose from! They had flights in the morning so we didn't stay out too late, and when we were leaving we met some other Americans that were in Spain teaching English, but we decided to call it a night and headed back to our hostel.

The next day we got up for breakfast and talked to the Irish guys again, and also met other people from Chile and Argentina, and we made plans to meet up with them later to hang out that night.  After breakfast, we went to a place that Madi had recommended, Tibidabo, which required a lot of public transportation, but luckily they gave us a card for the next 2 days that we could use pretty much anything free. We took the metro to a bus and then cable-carred up to the top of a mountain, which had a Cathedral at the top as well as restaurants and an amusement park. We took lots of pictures and enjoyed the view of Barcelona! After that we took the metro to Sagrada Familia, which is a building designed by the architect Gaudi that had been under construction for 100 years and still wasn't finished. We had lunch/dinner at a pizza place right next to it called Pizza Emporio, and it was crazzzzzzzzy good! Today some new people were moving into our room, and we met people from Holland.  It was crazy at one point in our room people were speaking English, Spanish, Dutch, and maybe Portuguese....so strange. Later we ended up finding our new friend from breakfast and hung out at the street really close to our hostel. Beatriz was from Chile and she wanted to practice her English, so she spoke to me in English while I was talking in Spanish.  She taught me some phrases that were really popular in Chile. Cuatico = amazing, cachai = you know, and bakan = buenismo!! Ok now I need to share some Spanish expressions: Vale = Ok. Killo= a name for a friend (in sevilla only). que te cagas!!! = its the shiz!!! Que fuerte! = wow! and you can say it for a lot of things.
We got back to our hostel around the same time other people were getting home, so I didn't feel as bad being loud and waking people up.

Sunday morning we had to check out, so we got ready and left our luggage in a locked room in the hostel, and set out for the day with Josh, who was staying in our room and had been traveling through Europe since last fall. We walked around the city, saw a marathon, and went back over to Sagrada Familia to try to see if we could go inside, but the line to get in was way too long so we just decided to hang out outside and then went to lunch a couple blocks away.  We had to take the metro to get to Sagrada Familia, and something very bad almost happened! We had been warned multiple times about pickpocketing in Barcelona, so I all weekend I had been very conscious to protect my purse and even had a dream one night that someone had stolen my purse. When we were getting on the metro, usually people get off, but for some reason at this stop nearly everybody stayed on and it was incredibly full.  We didn't know if we could fit in at our door so we ran over to another one and cram our way in really fast because the doors were about to close. My purse had swung behind me and immediately I could feel someone grabbing for my purse. I turn around as soon as I could and the lady behind me already had my purse unzipped and my wallet in her hands, but I caught her just in time and grabbed it back and thankfully everything was still in there. I was so happy to get out of the metro and glad that she didn't actually take my wallet.

We had lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant a few streets away from Sagrada Familia, and then it was time to go back to our hostel and get our luggage to go home. We took the train to the airport and then a bus up to the terminal, and made it with plenty of time to spare. We rewarded ourselves with a McFlurry because it took tremendous exercise walking to the terminal!!!! Or so we thought.  We landed in Sevilla at 7 and took a bus back to Plaza Espana and walked back to our house, and by that time it was time to turn around and go to church.  Then we got back home and rested. Finally. We had dinner around 10, and had Paella with conejos...rabbit! And mama Rita shared with us some good news for next week (Semana Santa, spring break #1). Emily and I are going to Ibiza from Friday - Tuesday, and then our family is going to take us to their lake house with them from Wednesday - Sunday with the whole family! We will finally get to meet our host sister Marta! We were so excited and decided that since we are going to the beach we need to start a diet to lose 5 pounds in a week, but that pretty much was an epic fail when we got the chocolate out a minute later and chowed down. Oh well. Later I found out that my real family wants to take a trip to Boston when I am done in May yay!! Our lunch should be ready in an hourish so I'm gonna take a nap or read the Hunger Games that Madi lent to me! Hasta luego!