Sevilla Week Six

Or The Week I Discover That the Rain in Spain Does Not Stay Mainly in the Plain. It just goes wherever it wants to. Just to spite everyone and everything.

So yeah. It’s been wetter than Portland here. Thus the whole city basically shut down because it’s built for sun and there’s very little to do without it. It was kind of a good week for it though. We had two tests and they were not easy. It was a slow and sort of boring week but still enjoyable. I can’t even break down the days because they were just full of classes and laying out my clothes on chairs close to a heater and climbing into bed shivering.

In Portland we don’t believe in paraguas (umbrellas). Rain is a fact of life and so we just tough it out like the badasses we are. You just don’t use an umbrella in Portland. But the rain there is continual and drizzly and goes on for days and days. Here it just dumps in torrential sheets. Also I think it might have it out for me because everytime I step outdoors it likes to say hi. With this kind of rain, rain jackets just don’t cut it. My walk to school is about 15 minutes and by the time I would get home I was utterly soaked. Like wringing out my pants and jacket and taking a towel to my hair soaked. After days of modeling through (I don’t know why I just felt like a Tyra quote wouldn’t go amiss there) I finally broke down and bought a super cheap umbrella. Who knew umbrellas were so cool? I certainly didn’t. We Sevilla L&C kids are starting a rebellion when we get home and are using umbrellas. They are great.

Anyway… On Wednesday we had an art history exam. This is definitely the most difficult of our classes and there is a scary amount of material. It’s a full on art history class with gobs and gobs of vocab and ALL IN SPANISH. I now know how to describe the ramparts on the top of a dodecagonal tower that is separate from the defensive wall from the twelfth century in the Almohade Muslim style. It’s pretty awesome actually. I thoroughly love this class and I intend to take another art history class at L&C if I have the chance. The funny thing is that I don’t know the English equivalents to all these technical terms. I couldn’t tell you the first thing about the Cathedral of Sevilla in English but I could write three pages about it in Spanish (and I did). The test consisted of ten photos of buildings or parts of buildings and we had to write everything about it from the style, date, name, regime, types of arcs, building materials, decorations, reasons for designs, historical significance, ect. Then we wrote an essay about the characteristics of Gothic painting. Nerdy Haley came out in that hour and a half because I actually enjoyed writing those identifications.

Thursday we had an exam in Contemporary Issues in Spain about Franco, the Spanish Civil War, and the 60’s and 70’s economic turn around. Did you know that Franco could have won the Civil war after only one year of fighting but instead of taking Madrid and ending the war when he had the chance, he took Toledo instead in order to prolong the fighting? He added two years to the horrible war just to secure his place in power. Franco was one bloody-minded political genius. For someone who abhors modern history, I am enjoying this class. I think it’s because our professor, José Grillo, is an awesome and hilarious teacher and I want to be him one day. I think I did well in both tests and I celebrated by staying in on Thursday night to watch my drenched pants drip onto the flood echoing the rain outside.

Friday night a bunch of us met up with the same Spanish women that we went to the fancy club with the week before at a cute little bar in los remedios for 40 cent beers. There were a good twenty of us there with us the intercambios, Cade’s brother Jake, and Gabbi’s boyfriend Matty. It was super fun and we had a wonderful time chatting. We then split up and us L&C kids went to our friend David’s apartment for one of his housemate’s birthday. The place was so full of German kids (the birthday boy is from Germany) that we ended up calling the living room Alemania (Germany). I love going to David’s place because there are always new people I haven’t met from all sorts of different countries. That night I spent a good three hours talking with a few French girls on the porch about languages, living abroad, Spanish culture, ect. The two I spoke to the most speak fluent French, excellent Spanish, and pretty good English. In order to practice our weak points, I spoke only in Spanish and they responded only in English. It would have been fun to watch. This week definitely marked my “click” moment, as Lorena calls it, when I officially feel like I can hold a conversation in Spanish with very few mistakes or pauses. I now know that I can become fluent in this language. It won’t happen anytime soon but I’m on my way. Anyway my conversation partners were super fun and we’re going to hang out again soon. One of the girls lives about a block away from me in Triana and so we walked together on our way home in the rain. I had my super cheap umbrella and it was so windy it kept blowing inside out. We had so much fun laughing our butts off clutching the umbrella dodging puddles. The streets were running with water and we kept pointing out “ríos” or “lagos” (rivers or lakes) as we picked our way through the streets in the torrential downpour (at this point we were rattling away in Spanish). All in all Friday was one of my favorite nights in Sevilla so far. I don’t think I spoke a word of English from 11pm to 4:30am.

Saturday I took it easy, read, updated tons of photos, and went to bed at midnight because I was to wake up at 7 on Sunday to drive to Salamanca.

To be continued…