Chupito

Sevilla reminds me so much of Vietnam. The way the signs are kind of beat up. The streets are filled with honking taxis. There are always people walking around on the streets. The buildings all have shops on the bottom floors and above those stores are apartments. The airport. The car dealerships. (Oddly,) the smells. Even the billboards look similar. It's such an odd mix of Westernized, modern people submerged in older, Spanish colonial buildings.

Vietnam

Same same but different

Stayed in Hotel Alcázar the first day - supre nice. Best thing about the hotel: bidet. Never felt cleaner.

We went to dinner at a hole in the wall kind of place with all the higher-ups of the program. Open air kinda place. In Sevilla, there’s insane mazes of alleyways that have pubs and bars and restaurants that still manage to draw people.

After dinner, we went to a bar named Flaherty’s. Sounds Irish, huh? It was filled with a mix of Spainards and foreigners. Heard a good bit of English being thrown around. Turns out, we need to step our Spanish futból game up – there’s like 15 different chants we need to learn (Spain won thank goodness.) Drinks are about the same cost in America if you convert everything. Like I said: the exchange rate kind of sucks.

Afterwards, we wandered through the streets of Sevilla. Up every tiny alleyway there were closed shops and happy sports fanatics. The city really wakes up starting about 10 pm (yea, I'm surprised that wasn't a cliché either.) Everyone likes to go to plazas and grab a drink. We finally ended up at la Plaza Salvador (I’m pretty sure.) We talked to quite a few locals. A couple recommended “tinto de verano” to us. It’s wine mixed with some kind of sparkling lemonade. It was good, and it was cheap. And everyone in our program has been obsessed ever since. While it's usually a faux pas to drink anything else but wine with wine, Spainards add juice, ice, Fanta even. 

At about midnight, everyone moves from plazas to discotecas and it really starts turning into a huge club scene. But for the night, we just decided to head for the hotel. Didn't have my camera so no pics. Sorry, use your imaginación.

Next morning, we met our señoras/host families. 

Straight out an Ikea catalogue.

I live with my roommate, Jordan. Our señora is absolutely brillante. She’s a Biology teacher who lives with her son (who has yet to wake up.) Her apartment is nicely decorated, modern, great - better than some homes in the States. We have our own little room and bathroom. There’s central air conditioning, and it’s about an eight minute walk to school. She welcomed us with huge arms (well not huge like fat, but you know what I mean), and she seems awesome to put it simply.

Sala

The view.

Got the hook up on some phones at Vodafone (don't they have that in VN?): two-fer-one. Feel like I'm in sixth grade again. You know when you first get cell phones? You don't have that many texts, and your parents told you to use it as little as possible? Pre-paid kind of sucks. Well we threaded our way through blocks and blocks of small streets, through la Universidad de Sevilla and finally through a plaza (read: mall) in blazing 100+ degree heat. 

The room and roomie

(I didn't bring Brian!)

Definitely wanna go back and go shopping at La Plaza Nervión sometime though. My bank account best prepare itself for warfare. (Males can stop reading here:) Our señora told us there's sales for the next two months here for almost no reason. Prices are completely slashed, and the clothes are actually stylish. No wonder Europeans and Spanish girls here are always stylish. Where we only have H&M and f21, they have at least seven equivalents. Heaven.

Cocinera, señora y segunda mamá

American things here:

Family Guy (dubbed)

Simpsons (dubbed)

Twilight (dubbed - at least in the commercial the announcer is Spanish)

Every American movie that's currently out

Mr. Clean (a.k.a. Don limpio)

McDonalds (of course)

(Lots of) Starbucks

Harry Potter's Dean Thomas actor (Read interesting tangent below.)

[The first night we were out, we were at la Plaza Salvador, getting drinks and chillin'. One of the girls in the program saw a guy and being as outgoing as Americans can be, walked up to him and asked if they had met before, because he looked familiar. He said he didn't recognize her and that he was British. The next day at the hotel we realized it was, because he was Dean Thomas from Harry Potter.]

Ugh. I look tanner. Hopefully, it's just the lights in this room. (And yes, it's a quasi-narcissistic self-taken webcam pic, but I feel like I haven't taken any pictures with me in them.)

Same same but different

Just the short, the down and the dirty.

More to come.