Spain Study Abroad

Just an FYI ( for your information )

Hello All

Just a quick FYI to let ou know that I will be adding/trying to add more pictures to the blogs I recently added so keep checking back . The internet in Spain seems slower and in internet cafe's even slower so it takes some patience

Comida / Food

Food in Sevilla /Spain in general is the same that you would find in America the same ingredients are used but served differently. Gina de los Santos the housing coordinator sent an email saying so in the beginning but I have found that for the most part there are few dishes that I have been served that I didn’t like.

For breakfast the norm at Carmina’s house is café for me and tea for my sister with toast the spread for the toast could be butter, jam, or a tomato spread that my house mom already taught me how to make.

      Lunch without a doubt starts with bread and a small salad or sometimes soup and a protein of some sort. The heaviest meal of the day it is usually eaten around 2-3 pm and with luck followed by a short siesta. The third meal of the day Dinner is usually around 9pm, is lighter than lunch, and could range from omelets and rice to tortilla de patatas and a filet of grilled meat. Water is drunk with every meal and desert is usually a fruit of some kind.

      In my opinion some dishes that are to me synonymous with Spanish cuisine include pan tomate, jamon iberico, tortilla de patatas, paella and gazpacho. I have convinced my house mother to show me how to make gazpacho, gambas fritas and pan tomate and before I leave I want to learn how to make the tortilla and paella.

  

 

Homesick Who ME !?!?!?!?!

So I have to admit that in my 5^th week in the program  I felt homesick. I think that it was because I had hit that one month. Facebook wasn’t and didn’t help because I was seeing pics of my friends doing things without me. I emailed and called my dad saying that I wanted to come home, I had seen enough of Sevilla and I had travelled to Portugal and I was good and ready to come home. I missed my puppy and my family and the noise that is part and parcel of it all. My dad ever practical said you only have 2 months more to go just stick it through and by the next day I was back in love with Spain.  But I have to admit that yes on my third study abroad experience, after 5weeks in Spain, I was homesick, I never thought that it would be something to happen to me.

My puppy Tiger . He is a malte-huahua . Half Maltese , half Chihuahua. No joke

Santiponce and Cordoba

This last weekend there was an ICS sponsored trip to Italica in Santiponce on Friday and Cordoba on the Saturday.

Friday was a perfect day in Sevilla. There were no clouds in the sky, it wasn’t scorching hot but warm with a fresh breeze. Everyone caught the bus in Plaza de Armas and got to Santiponce without a hitch.

The Roman Ruins of Italica in Santiponce date back to 206 BC and was the birthplace of the emperors Trajano and Hadrian. As a prosperous municipality of Rome, this city housed an ampitheater, bath houses, as well as several larger homes. Excavations of the site began in the 1700s and continue to this day. Many of the mosaic floors are still intact and show the high level of engineering that the Romans cultivated. The sewer system for example still works and is in great condition. The interesting thing is that they only used gravity for it to function. Some points of interest within the Italica are the Casa de Pajaros, the Public baths and the Amphitheatre. The Amphitheatre has a space in the middle where it can be filled with water and water battles could be reenacted. There is also the Greek version of you must be this tall to get on the ride. On a piece of marble they drew feet / shoes and it is believed that you had to have feel larger than the drawing in order to be allowed inside the amphitheatre which I am such had some brutal and gruesome sights in its heyday. After Italica the whole group stopped off for lunch and had “patatas arrugas” or crinkled potatoes with roasted meat and a salsa native to Santiponce that consisted mainly of olive oil, paprika and garlic. 

Santiponce was having the last feria or fair of the season so we walked over to it to explore it. Santiponce is a small town and when we walked in typical Spanish fashion, they just stopped and stared at us. I still haven’t gotten used to that reaction. In the tents they had people dancing Sevillanas a style of Flamenco and me being well me imitated them… and I wasn’t half bad if I do say so myself – lol - . Many ladies in the feria were dressed in typical feria wear – i.e. a flamenco type dress or skirt and top combo and I have every intention of bringing one back with me.

The next day was Cordoba. When my sis and I reached at the designated spot at 8.30 something a.m. we were greeted by other members of the program with ‘the bus already left’, naturally we thought that they were kidding but we quickly realized that they were not. Between the time that we arrived and 8.45 about half the program arrived , they like the rest of us waiting all thought that the bus would be leaving for 9am at the latest. Around 20 people, almost half the program missed the bus to Cordoba. Que barbaridad !! . After hemming and hawing as a group, we decided to get to Cordoba on our own.

In order to save time we decided to share taxi’s to Plaza de Armas which someone assured us would have buses to Cordoba. When we reached Plaza de Armas I asked information for the bus to Cordoba the time schedule etc. that is when I found out that we were at the wrong station. We were supposed to be at the Prado San Sebastian which was walking distance from where we were standing before getting the taxi’s that meant another taxi ride to the Prado cause as we stepped outside the station we saw the bus that would take us over there going round the corner.

So we finally got the ticket to Cordoba on our own and then we almost miss the bus. Our ticket said platform one but the bus was actually at platform 19.

HINT OF THE DAY don’t trust what’s written on your bus ticket – ask people. Always!!!

When we reached Cordoba, we met up with the other half of the program and took the tour with them to Alcazar of Cordoba. After the tour of the Alcazar we toured the Mezquita on our own. Under the rule of Islam, it was built as the second-largest mosque in the world. After the Spanish reconquista it was transformed into a church and honestly they did a pretty bad job of it which I am grateful for. The best way to describe it would be a mosque where they inserted Christian imagery to the sides of the walls. A muslim girl who was with me agreed and said that all that was missing for it to be more like a mosque was the carpets on the floor.

Around 3pm my sis and I started getting snippy with each other couldn’t decide on where to eat it , so in the end said – eff it and got burger king. When we came out of Burger King, I was accosted by gypsy women. After giving my fries to one with a young child another woman came up to me and looked into my bag saying “give me, you have more” Val a girl who was with me gave her an extra sandwich and the cheeky lady went across the street picked out the meat and threw away the rest of the sandwich. I guess beggars CAN be choosers. After lunch we all walked around the Juderia – the old jewish sector of Cordoba and went to a couple of flea markets. I had 2 Moroccan guys that day introduce themselves while others just watched/stared at me. It could be easy to get a complex here. All in all I returned home tired but happy that I went.

School Vacation and Back 9/28/08 - 10/2/08

Hi  All. As promised, this is one of the blog entries after a bit of an absence. I finally put aside some time today to write because I know that it would be almost impossible to update you on everything that has happened to date. I started writing this blog on 9/26/08. I think it prudent to mention that I don’t have internet where I live in Spain so I need to go to internet cafés to upload my blogs. I usually write my blog entries as word documents and upload them at a later date.

On 9/26  I went to the University of Sevilla orientation. Before Orientation, the other students who were going to be taking classes at the U de S and I met Marisa the student Liaison who showed us where our classes would be. This was a great help because the US was a tobacco factory in a previous life and is huge. To give a comparison one wing of the University is comparison to the whole science block ( SC  wing) at Sacred Heart and I have personally counted at least 8 of these sections. Once she showed us our class room locations we went to a board room within US and we welcomed into the program and then invited to have breakfast. I took some pics and if I can find them, I will put up of the Board Room. After the orientation, I returned home to pack for another weekend in Portugal this time Lagos. As soon as I reached home, I got a call from Discover Sevilla, a great company that works with study abroad schools to organize trips. They found flights to Paris for my sister and myself at a price that was lower than what we were finding on our own. So we rushed down to the centro to book the flights. While there we were looking for another location to go during the long weekend that we have in October and we were lucky enough to get the last 2 seats on their trip to Venice, Italy.

We were home in time for lunch and finished packing. Our house mom Carmina stocked us up on sandwiches, fruit for our journey. We were running late for our bus to Lagos so we took a bus, tram and taxi to get to Plaza de Armas in time for the bus with 7 minutes to spare.

The trip to Largos was long about 6/7 hrs and I felt that once we crossed over into Portugal I felt like they stopped at every town between Huelva and Lagos. When we got off the bus in Lagos it was dark out we walked until got a taxi that dropped us off to the hostel. I was just so exhausted cause of the early and full day, lack of siesta and long journey. Once settled in I just took a shower and went into bed to relax.

My roommates at the hostel were two cool women Nadja ( Nadia) and Devon. Devon is from Canada living in England. She has been travelling between Spain and Portugal for the last 2 months and was leaving that weekend to return to England in order to prepare for her new job in Korea as an ESL teacher. As the Spaniards say Que Guay !!!

Nadja is super duper cool and I was really awed by her. In her early forties from Lichtenstein and She was on her second world pilgrimage. She is also fluent in French, German, Italian, English and the dialect from her country that is a mix of French and German that she suggested that I don’t even bother to try to learn. She is also comfortable speaking Portuguese and Spanish and she never went higher than high school. In the 1990’s she spent 3.5 years walking around Aisa,Africa and Europe and yes I said WALKING !!! and when we met up she had ended her second pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and Fatima. She started from outside her door in Lichtenstein to the Swiss border, took a bus through Switzerland and started walking through Italy, France and Spain. In Spain, she did the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and then continued down to coastline to the second place of pilgrimage to Fatima. After Fatima she walked the coast to Lagos where our lives intersected for a few brief days.

She later emailed my sis letting her know that she planned to walk through Andalucía to take a ferry to Morocco to pass the winter in warmer climes. She has a trunk full of diaries at home and I encouraged her to write a book. Hell I was even ready to offer to write it for her after hearing what little I did of her travels.

          Lagos itself is such a cute town, small and tourist orientated you don’t need to speak Portuguese to be understood here. The beaches are gorgeous and are filled with caves that are amazing to explore. Again pictures will be attached!!

         After the weekend in Lagos school started bright and early Monday. Monday was a relatively easy day for me although I had class until 9pm. The second day of school was harder. I was in 3 classes one after the other with hardly time to breathe between classes. One class would end at 1pm and another start at 1pm ..It was awful I walked out of the 2nd class half way through I was just feeling so overwhelmed and tired and hungry. I went to the school bar got food and tried to relax a bit. Then I went to the next class. Instead of going to my last class of the day, I went to ICS to talk to the director of academic affairs and dropped 3 classes so that from the next week I would not have this experience again.

PICTURE TIME !!!!!!

1. / 2. - Pictures I took when I was in the Orientation. 3. Sis and I in Lagos, Portugal. 4. Me on a cliff in Portugal sporting moda style ( style that's 'in') in Europe . 5./6.7. Are of the Grutas of Lagos 8. Is on this cool statue that was in a park and 9. Is a pic I had a friend take of my first day of School. Just carrying on a tradition that started from Kindergarten .

   

More entries soon.. I promise

Hello All

This is a quick post letting you know that yes I am still alive and to apologize for the lack of posts recently. I am blogging without internet at home here in Spain and with all that I have been doing just haven’t had the time to write any entries. I will be putting up more posts soon.