Spanish!

Woke up on Monday to my alarm at 9 on Monday morning. Back to reality. My first day back in the ole routine. I also woke up with a goal: to speak almost all Spanish all day. I hadn´t spoken barely any Spanish the previous week, and it also came to my attention that I am not yet fluent. So I need to really get this language immersion cracking. I got up, talked to Maruja in the kitchen a bit (check! starting my day with Spanish=good). I got ready and headed to the gym. Ahhh the gym, how I missed it. And how I needed it. Amsterdam did a number on my body, I tell ya. I worked out for over an hour, had a good talk with Roman, the awesome owner. So another Spanish interaction to start the day...sweet! I soon headed home, showered, got ready, and headed out for Historia del Cine. Class was great because on Mondays we watch movies. We watched an American movie whose name I can´t recall. It´s a film noir flick with some dude and Rita Hayworth. It was pretty good, yet a bit hard to follow since it was dubbed in Spanish and film noir is pretty jumbly as it is. I like Rita Hayworth very much, though, (I really think that I lived in the 40´s in a past life) and enjoyed watching her on screen. I´ve also had the song she sings in the movie, "Put the Blame on Mame" in my head for the past few days. After class I walked home on a gorgeous day (upper 70´s) for lunch. When I arrived, I found María del Mar sitting on the couch! She had gone home to Cádiz for the week, so it was so good to see her. I talked to her for a pretty long time catching up and whatnot. Yay Spanish conversations! I was succeeding on my Spanish mission, and subsequently my Spanish was improving and I could tell. I just need to make Spanish my principal language. Lunch was great, but almost impossible to eat. You see, Maruja made paella with shellfish and veggies. It was delicious, but María del Mar requested a smaller portion so Maruja served me a truckload of paella. On the side we got this amaaaaaaazing salad, probably my favorite that we´ve eaten thus far: it was fresh cut tomatoes (which are so in season right now) and cucumbers in a simple homemade vinaigrette. It reminded me of my mom´s tomato salad (minus the mozzarella and onions). So lunch was very hard to eat because not only did I have a huge portion, but Maruja and María del Mar are food vacuums and they eat faster than anyone I know. I was literally eating heaping forkfuls. It was insane. I ended up finishing my food quite awhile after them despite my best efforts. For dessert we were served a choice between bananas and pears. I really wanted a pear, but since I was so behind and I didn´t want to hold them up, I had to choose the banana. Nevertheless it was quite the tasty banana. After lunch I quickly got my things together and walked to the center for tutoría 4-5. It was good to see my tutor again (I still don´t know his name, haha)! He gave me some handouts to supplement Iconografía and we talked about the different crucificados (crucifixes) throughout the ages: gótica, románica, renacentista, and barroco. I don´t know how to say some of those in English. That´s the thing about my education here: I´m really learning a lot in my classes, especially art history. Unfortunately, the vocab is all in Spanish so I can´t really transfer my new knowledge into English. Although I know it...it´s just in another language. How weird is that? Anyways, tutoría was awesome as usual and the time just flew. My tutor is so smart, I always learn a lot from him. I love art history...I´m such a dork. I also learned some cool little historical facts about the building of my University (former primary tobacco factory of Europe), but I´ll spare you those details. It was just interesting to me, I guess. And I got to speak more Spanish in tutoría! After tutoría I hung around the center, looked at some travel books for Barcelona and Morocco (for my family), went online a bit (the internet at my apt. is still being testy), and then went to Historia del Arte 6-7:30. It was pretty interesting. Our prof. lectured on Islamic art and architecture in Andalucía (that´s my province). So I learned all about the famous buildings that I pass everyday such as the Torre del oro and the Alcazar. We also started learning all about the Alhambra (formerly the Al-Hamra) in Granada. It made me so excited to go back there with my family in June! I had a class pertaining to some ruins I´ve seen near the Torre del oro. I was a bit nervous to ask my professor about it because I get self-conscious about my Spanish with authority figures. But I remembered my goal and approached him to ask. He answered my question very thoroughly, although his accent really throws me off and I didn´t catch everything, honestly. However, I was proud of myself for being super-Spanish, and it also probably looked good to the prof. and showed that I was interested and paying attention. SInce I can´t understand everything that he says I don´t take as many notes as everyone so I worry that he thinks that I´m not paying attention...this proved that I am! I was quite pleased with myself. After class I decided to buy some postcards so I walked down calle Constitución to this one souvenir shop where I picked up some really nice black and white photographed postcards. I then headed into the store to purchase them (the postcards were displayed outside) but was stopped by all of the cool vintage Sevilla posters I could buy. I want to buy a bunch before leaving to decorate my room next year. Suddenly I heard this voice saying, "¿Toro?". I looked over and saw this drop-dead gorgeous 20-something-year-old guy looking at me. I was confused by why he asked me about a bull, so I thought that maybe he said "Todo" (everything/all). But even that confused me so I said, "¿Todo?" then he said, "No, toro," and I still didn´t understand and said "¿Todo?" and he said "Toro. Eh, no importa." (Bull. Eh, it doesn´t matter.). I was embarrassed for sounding like a stupid foreigner. I think that he was trying to sell me a glass bull or something. Then he picked up a mirror and asked, "¿Espejo?" and I said "No, gracias." Then he offered me two for the price of one. I told him no thanks, that I don´t need any mirrors. Then he walked over next to me and pretended to look at some jewelry in a display case. It then dawned on me that this beautiful specimen had been flirting with me and I was just so jumbled up in the language barrier that I couldn´t flirt back. Ugh. And he is probably the most handsome Sevillano I´ve met (besides Jorge, of course). So I acted like an idiot girl and wandered around the store aimlessly hoping that he´d come talk to me again. But alas. So I finally went up to the counter and bought my postcards. I struck up a conversation with the girl at the register hoping the guy would overhear and not think I was a complete American idiot, and also to keep up with my Spanish goal. We talked about 90´s music (it was playing on the radio). Yay for that. I then walked home beating myself up for not chatting it up with hot store boy. So I vowed to come back around 7:45pm the next day and buy something...but only if he was there. I am determined to catch myself a cute Spaniard. I got home, talked to María del Mar a bit, finally finished my Amsterdam blog on Word (still had editing to do, thought), then ate dinner. Dinner was interesting; we had really good cauliflower cooked in olive oil (the best she´s ever made it) and then bacalao with plain old tomato sauce. Maybe Maruja´s running out of creative dishes, who knows. It was strange, yet not bad and pretty satisfying. For dessert I had a pear which turned out to be pretty bland. I was so stuffed after that meal, though. Then I went to the room and did some things online (then internet was working), such as drafting my daily blogs to publish after I finished Amsterdam blogs. Blogging has been crazy lately, I tell ya. I waited for a text from Melissa because we had made plans to meet up in Plaza de Cuba at 10:40 to walk to Carbonería and meet up with Jessica, Courtney, and Courtney´s cousin. I usually wouldn´t go out on a Monday night, but Courtney´s cousin who´s a senior in high school was here on a school trip for a day, and she wanted us all to hang out with her. So I obliged. I didn´t get a message, but around 10:20 Stacey told me that she had talked to Melissa who said that she planned on meeting me. So I guess Melissa just didn´t want to waste minutes on her phone (understandable), so I started walking over, called Melissa just to double check (affirmative), we met up and walked to Carbonería. It was both of our first times getting to Carbonería by foot, but we found it in around 20 minutes with little problems. We were quite proud of ourselves. When we got to Carbonería it was packed...I guess that it´s the only happening place on Monday nights. We found Jessica, Courtney, and Courtney´s cousin, met her cousin, and then Courtney and her cousin left. Her cousin had a curfew of 11pm to be back at her hotel, but she got it extended to 11:30 that night so she could spend time with her cousin. Well, Melissa and I got there at 11:15 so Courtney had to walk her cousin back right away. It´s too bad because she didn´t even get to see the flamenco show. So we stuck around, got a jar of sangria and split it between all of us. The show started and it was my favorite flamenco show that I´ve seen at Carbonería. It was a late-50´s-year-old man who sang, a 40-something guitar player, and a 40 or 50-something dancer who was actually English. They were all more adament about keeping the place quiet and no smoking during the performance, more adament than other performers I have seen. The dancer wasn´t that great (probably since she ain´t Spanish), but the guitar player was good, and the singer was AMAZING! He had a pretty good voice, nothing phenomenal, but he was so theatrical. He got so into it, he stood up, interacted with the audience, it was awesome. I loved him. And it´s the first time I actually understood the lyrics! He was so great--I wish he had a CD cuz I would buy it. The sangria, however, was kinda gross. I only drank one glass and barely had a buzz. I didn´t want to get drunk, though, so that was part of the reason. After the performance we stuck around and hung out. Sam from our program just happened to be there with his Greek friends with whom he went to Morocco earlier in the month. We met Penny, the girl he´s crushing on who´s 27 but only considers him a friend. It´s kind of silly. But she´s really nice and cool. Sam smokes now, too. A few people on our program have picked up smoking because they´re into being European or something. I don´t really get it. They all say it´s a Europe thing but I think that that´s a stupid excuse. It´s like they started smoking because everyone else was doing it. No excuse. I also learned that Sarah from our program got robbed at knife point in a park while studying. She´s okay, and the cops got the culprits, but still that is so scary. It´s weird because the crime rate here is exceptionally low compared to the states, but it´s all just robbery. And it happens, especially to foreigners because we just look like walking money machines. Ugh. That makes me even more nervous and paranoid than I already had been. Anyways, it was really hot and uncomfortable at Carbonería and I was tired and kind of wanted to leave right after the performance. But everyone wanted to stick around so we were there until 2am. Blah. We then all walked home...thankfully it was a gorgeous night. On the walk home the silliest thing happens (of course, only in Spain). At Carbonería I had collected a small pile of free postcards. While walking them I dropped them on the ground in front of a café that had people sitting in the outdoor seating. I bent down to pick them up when suddenly this random Spanish dude rushes over from one of the table and rushes to pick them up. But he was weird about it, I mean, really eager to pick up the postcards for me. So eager that although I had grabbed most of the postcards he pulled them out of my hand while I was bent down. I stood back up and he handed them to me. He had this eager look on his face like, "Where´s my reward?" kind of thing. It was so weird and silly. Um...thanks? I gave a hesitant "gracias" and we walked away laughing our asses off wondering what just occurred. It was just so random...and absurd. And you know me and the random/absurd...always a fan. So all in all it was funny, silly, weird, and fantastic in its weirdness. Oh, Spain, always full of surprises. I didn´t get home until 2:30 and wasn´t in bed until 3am. Oh well, it was worth it for the good flamenco show.