Exams, 21st Birthday & the Great Flight Fiasco

Our Unión Europea class jumpstarted finals week by trolling our teacher and impersonating the students from the movie "The Wave."  We had to watch it and write an essay for class, so we thought we might as well go all out.  Anything to spice up studying.

who wore it best, us or the actors? 

At the end of the semester Marie and I also became regulars at the cafe across from our university where they have a breakfast deal of coffee or colocao (hot chocolate) and your choice of tostada (delicious toast with either tomato spread and olive oil, paté, nutella, melted cheese, or many other intriguing options.)  We took to coming here right after our Tres Culturas en la Edad Media class, as the thought of second breakfast greatly helped us cope with two hours of hearing about Fernandos and Alfonsos running around the Iberian Peninsula. After several trips here our ginger waiter gave us loyalty cards, which we kindly left partly completed for Marta's future students as we didn't have time to come 9 times for a free colocao on the 10th visit. 

Exams started a week early when my Gastronomía exam was moved up (meaning I only had two exams on my birthday!) I figured eating Marta's food counted as studying la dieta mediterranea.  The week before our actual exams was the fiesta of December 8th, and a bunch of us went to see a flamenco show at La Carboneria. It's really difficult to study when you're also trying to appreciate your final week in Sevilla. 

It's also hard to study when your 21st birthday falls right in the middle of finals week.  I was definitely feeling a little sorry for myself as I had two exams on my birthday and one the next morning at 9 am. However, beginning with my birthday viber call from Haley at exactly midnight Spain time and continuing with Marie and Marta and all my other friends making the whole day amazing, I really couldn't have asked for a better time and place to turn 21.  Highlights of my birthday included: discovering that Marta had decorated the kitchen with a "Felicidades" banner, presents left on my pillow from Marie, my favorite  brócoli con huevos, champagne, chocolate cake, a super hipster study cafe, a wonderful birthday party on Thursday after exams, finger fútbol and gazpacho from a vending machine.  

they hadn't meant to match

Marta's friend Monica (the mother of the girls that we taught English to) has a brother-in-law who just opened a tiny tapas bar in el centro, and that's where I had my birthday party on my last night in Sevilla (or so I thought.. dun dun dun).  It was an adorable, lime green walled and jamon iberico lined place.  After the little old ladies at the table in the middle finally left we had the place to ourselves to enjoy the cheese and jamón and each other's company.

the ears were Marie's idea

thanks for the cake, friends! 

I had decided that I might as well not sleep on Thursday night because my bus to the airport was at 5 am.  So I drank vending machine gazpacho instead and knocked on Marta's door at 4:45 to wave goodbye. And that was the beginning of the Great Flight Fiasco. 

When I arrived at the airport, I at first thought it was only computers being slow or some other silly reason that they couldn't find my booking.  And then when I had heard from two separate offices that all of my tickets were canceled I began to get worried.  I thought, well, this would be a prime time to have a little chat with my parents, it's a good thing I'm in a foreign country.  I tried to use a pay phone. I couldn't figure it out. I turned on all my iPhone's data. There was no cell service in the airport.  I slumped in a corner, cried for a minute, and then bought wifi and began to viber call my parents.  They didn't pick up because they were sleeping.  Finally Anna answered from Chicago as she was about to go to bed. After finally making contact, my parents told me to go back to Marta's house as there was no hope of me making it out today.  The travel agent had forgotten to finish my booking. That's not annoying or anything. 

So I popped in a taxi, ate most of the sandwich Marta had packed me for my flight, and shuffled back to our apartment as Fernando and Borja were leaving for school, causing a very confused and sleepy Marie to wake up in shock when she heard my voice in the hallway.  Marta gave me a hug and sent me to bed and I got a surprise extra day in Sevilla.  

I was rebooked on a flight the next day two hours before the group flight.  I jokingly told all my friends, while saying goodbye for the second time, that if they saw me in the airport the next morning they would know something was seriously wrong.  And then Lisbon was foggy and my flight was delayed for two hours and I saw all of them.  By the time I arrived at my grandparents' house in Chicago that night, without my luggage I might add, I had been traveling for 24 hours and slept only 8 hours in the last three days combined.  Remember when I went to Barcelona and vowed I wouldn't be that tired again until Dance Marathon 2014?  That was a lie. When I arrived in Aspen very late the next night after more delays in Denver, I basically fell asleep into the birthday cake my mom had made for me. And then I slept for a week. 

And so ended the Great Flight Fiasco and my time abroad in Sevilla. I figure if traveling home was the only problem I had in the whole four months I am pretty darn lucky.  

Adios, Sevilla. You will be sorely missed. 

Shoutout to Marissa Pederson and Sam Schalop on their 21st birthday today!  I loved spending time with you in Sevilla. 

Twas the Season

On the morning of December 1, the day after my family left Sevilla, we got a surprise visitor in the form of Juan Luis's pint-sized mother from Madrid.  Well, Marie and I knew she was coming but we had forgotten until we heard a strange voice in the hallway and poked our heads out the door wondering why the vegetable delivery person was being so chatty.  Grandma Lola had just arrived on the high-speed AVE train and was staying for the week. The hot topic of discussion in our house for the week preceding had been which twin brother got to sleep on a camp bed in the office / laundry room and which brother had to share the trundle bed with Grandma Lola.

Grandma Lola was a hoot.  She was the chattiest, spunkiest little Grandma that ever came up to the top of my shoulder.  She had thin, painted-on eyebrows that had partly rubbed off by dinner the first night. Luckily Lola had experience with Juan Luis and Marta's American students and she spoke slowly and clearly for us.  Lola was a world traveler, much like both my grandmas (shout out to Jean Hummon and Nancy Stevens!) and she loved to regale us at dinner and lunch with stories of her adventures.  She showed us some tai chi moves at the dinner table while enthusiastically emphasizing her superb health as shown by the fact that she had never taken a pill.

Marta's favorite Christmas song

December had finally arrived, and with it the proximity of the end of our time in Sevilla.  December meant that the absurd amount of time spent listening to Marie's Christmas spotify playlist in our room was legitimized.  Sevilla erupted into a veritable milky way of Christmas lights covering all the streets, the Corte Inglés making a particularly good show.  Our free time was spent canvassing the chinos and other gift shops for our JYS secret santa presents.  Juan Luis pulled out the the anise flavored liqueur that he only drinks at Christmas time and we were all allowed to sample some after lunch.  Instead of her usual soothing classical music in the morning, Marta turned on her favorite Christmas CD while she cooked in the morning, and Marie and I had soon learned all the words while we sat eating our copos de maíz. 

saying goodbye to one of my classes 

December also meant the beginning of the goodbyes.  It was my last week of Tea Time, of volunteering at the Maristas school and Marie and my last week of teaching English to Prado and Monica, Marta's friend's daughters.  My younger classes at the Maristas made me cards, certificates of achievement for being "nice" and "funny" and sang me songs.  The classes ended in mob-like group hugs and it was all I could do not to topple over and land on an unsuspecting youngster.  In my class of 16-year-olds, I gave in to their semester-long pleas for me to speak Spanish and was bombarded with questions about where to study abroad in America.  I left them my email.

On our last day with Prado and Monica we drew Christmas scenes, learned Christmas vocab words and ended visit by transforming the living room into a snowflake factory.  I'm not sure exactly what we were doing wrong, but our snowflakes all turned out square. 

Marie, Monica, me, Prado

December also meant that Marie and I began to get ridiculously excited for December 8, the day of celebration in Spain where everyone puts up all their Christmas decorations.  On the anticipated day, we had planned to go to mass with Marta, but she told us that we were better off going to watch the parade in town because there was a chance that mass would be very long and boring. So we went to Plaza Nueva and watched every marching band in Sevilla pass by.  After lunch, the real fun began.  All the Christmas decorations came out of hiding and Marie and I joined Marta, Juan Luis and Borja in decorating the whole house while Grandma Lola cheered us on from the couch.  The decorations included: an adorable mini Christmas tree, a nativity scene taking up all three of the lowest bookshelves complete with a headless king from when Marta was little, a ceramic niño Jesus in a basket and a moose ornament hanging from our bedroom doorknob. 

Marta always makes pancakes (tortitas americanas) for the afternoon snack on December 8, and I had accidentally volunteered to make my mom's buttermilk pancakes for the family.  However I underestimated the difficulties of making buttermilk pancakes in a country without buttermilk, using an unfamiliar stovetop and keeping the pancakes warm.  Consequentially, though no one complained, some of the pancakes were slightly burned, most were lumpy and not all were warm.  However, full of chocolate chips and covered in whipped cream even experimental pancakes taste good.  I had a hard time eating any of them but only because we had sampled every kind of Sevillan Christmas cookie at lunch.  A great way to kickstart the holidays.

Stevenses in Sevilla!

I was fortunate enough to have my family, including my Grandma, come visit me in Sevilla over Thanksgiving! Despite their jet lag they were troupers while I led them all over the city between fabulous meals.  It was a wonderful few days of laughs, skipping class, being touristy again and hanging out in comfy hotel beds.

I was waiting at the incredibly gorgeous Hotel Alfonso when my family pulled up in the taxi from the airport. My parents got my memo because they showed up wearing the exact same outfit as me: jeans, black jackets and black shoes.  The Stevens uniform, apparently.  My mom and sister were nice enough to leave me with some of their winter clothes since some unfamiliar cold weather followed us from Granada and for the past few weeks the 50° F weather had caused me to walk to school in two pairs of socks and sleep bundled up like a present in a sweatshirt, scarf and hat.

my two families! 

The very first night my family arrived, I threw a large, multilingual dinner at them.  We went to dinner with my host parents, Marta and Juan Luis, Marie, Reed and Don. Before dinner I took my parents to calle Luis de Vargas to show them my home of the past few months.  After the Spanish-English
introductions, which mostly consisted of Marie and me talking and everyone else smiling and nodding at each other, we showed them all around the house and then took off up the river to the restaurant.

At dinner I was entrusted with the task of seating everybody, which was rather more important than you might think considering the language barriers.  We enjoyed delicious food (especially salmorejo, which is gazpacho but better), fabulous company and discovering shared interest (e.g. motorcycles for some of the group… shout out to Ewan and Charlie and the Long Way Round).

The next several days reinvigorated my joy in Sevilla as I acted the tour guide and showed my family all of my favorite places, ordered them all of my favorite Sevillan foods (spinach with garbanzos is your favorite, what?) and attempted to showcase my Spanish skills.  Griffin might be turning into a ham after the amount of jamón iberico  that he ate. Here is a selection of my favorite pictures from the week.

the plaza with Grandma

the crew struts along the Guadalquivir

atop the Giralda

hi parents

Although it is possible to become tired of the plethora of European churches and cathedrals, southern Spain adds a whole new aspect to the tourist destinations with the gorgeous Moorish architecture.  I loved being able to explore the Alcázar again, this time not in the boiling heat.  In the Alcázar we stumbled upon a room filled with huge tapestries including a medieval map of the mediterranean world.  It seemed fitting to have found this fascinating map on my second visit to the Alcázar at the end of November after spending my semester exploring this same region.  Many of the tiny stitched cities on the tapestry surrounded by tiny stitched merchant vessels I was able to picture from memory. Sevilla, Lisbon, Marseille, Barcelona, Tangier, Fez - all important cities then and now. 

When I tried to explain to my family that there was a Roman aqueduct in Sevilla, my dad thought that I said there was an "awkward duck."  Which proved to be even more comical when we were tailed through the Alcázar gardens the same day by such a creature.

watch out for Sevilla's awkward duck

Real Alcázar

I have been instructed not to display our better family photos on the internet as one of them will be used in our upcoming holiday card. So if you are lucky (and if Mom and I get our act together enough to address envelopes) you may see the Stevens family's smiling faces in your mailbox someday soon.  For now you're stuck with this one:

that moment when the doorman jumped into our family photo

I could not have asked for a better Thanksgiving.

Passage and Tess in Fez!

Fez from the hillside

I was lucky enough the second-to-last weekend of November to be able to return to Morocco to visit one of my oldest and best friends, Passage, in Morocco, where she has been studying for the semester.  After much discussion, we decided to head to Fez, an ancient city in the north-central part of Morocco.  My first trip to Morocco with Discovery Excursions was fun, but a little too touristy and American for my taste, so I was stoked to have the opportunity to experience Morocco again with Passage as my guide.

The hostel car service (I guess hostels offer car services in Morocco..) picked me up at the Fez airport, and the driver whizzed me through the newer part of the city of Fez right to the outskirts of the ancient medina, where I was met by a tall man in a dark suit with a facial scar that looked like he had been slashed by a sword.  The tall man was there to lead me into the maze of the medina to find our little hidden hostel, Dar Rabha.  I stopped to enter the tiny door and found myself in a small room with a ceiling that stretched up many stories, the walls lined with cushion-filled couches, and a tiny computer and cash register in the corner.  As I was trying to explain that I was meeting a friend here and ask if she had arrived, I heard a shriek of "Tess!" and Passage came flying out of the door next to the computer.  We've been friends since our infant YMCA swimming class, and nothing has changed.

Our first evening (which turned out to be the only dry day) we spent wandering through the medina.  Luckily enough for me, I had the best guide possible.  Although Passage had only been to Fez once before for only a day, she was familiar with the culture of Morocco, spoke enough Arabic that she could bargain with shopkeepers, direct taxi drivers and ask for directions while I smiled and nodded helpfully and had all kinds of interesting background information from her classes in Rabat.  We bought some delicious dates, which were far plumper than any dates I have ever seen.  (so there, germaphobes, I even ate street food this time and I STILL didn't get sick in Morocco).  When it began to get dark, we paid a little kid 10 dirham (about 1 euro) to lead us to Cafe Clock (shootout to Lauren Sanchez for the recommendation!) a famous cafe hidden in the depths of the medina.  We climbed the winding stairs up to the terrace of the restaurant, where we ate couscous and hummus under the shadow of a beautiful green minaret, listening to the evening call to prayer echo all around us.

The first morning, after a filling breakfast of many different types of Moroccan bread, Passage and I took a taxi up to the Merenid Tombs.  I am usually all about walking everywhere, but our taxi was less than a euro.  LESS. might as well have been free, I would taxi everywhere.  In Morocco they care a little bit less about preserving their ancient historical sites than in Europe.  The picturesque stone archways perched on the hill overlooking Fez were crumpling, and every nook was filled with trash.  Where exactly the "tombs" were was unclear.

We also thought it would be neat to take a stroll through a nearby graveyard.  Passage spoke in Arabic with a kind Moroccan man who said it was fine if we walked through the graveyard, but then the next person who approaches us said we had to pay him to be in the graveyard, so we left. 

Passage & the tombs

The rest of our explorations included an incredibly intricate Koranic school, the odorous tanneries, copious amounts of Moroccan mint tea, getting very wet and bargaining.  I was much more successful at bargaining this time around with Passage as a translator, although I won't say more here because several Christmas presents were purchased.  Despite the medina being a complete maze, we managed to find our way around quite well, thanks to Passage's ability to ask for directions in Arabic.  The weekend was quite the mash-up of languages, because while Passage would ask people questions in Arabic, Moroccans would generally respond in French assuming we were French tourists, which would mean less than nothing to us, so Passage would speak back in English and I would try Spanish. My brain felt like a overwhelmed sponge trying to soak in all the new words.  Because sponges for sure have feelings. My favorite new word? 'Bab' in Arabic means 'door.'

ahh the delicious tagines

good thing they gave us strong smelling mint leaves to
mask the odor of drying animal hides. 

After our wet, whirlwind of a weekend traversing the wonders of Fez, Passage and I headed back on the train to cosmopolitan Rabat, where she led me on an even shorter whirlwind tour of the city that has been her home for three months.  Shoutout to Passage's friend Joy, who I didn't get to meet, for letting me sleep in her bed in their apartment.  Passage - I feel so incredibly lucky to have been able to experience Morocco with you and finally put images to the stories I have been hearing all fall.  I could not have asked for a better travel companion, translator, tour guide or friend.  Wish you could have been with us too, Coral.  

Passage, me, Coral back in the day
90's Maine style was practice for Morocco

Granada & Tess and Marie Teach English to Sevilla

What do you do when you have a book to read, two papers to write and a final exam in a two days? Blog?? Correct!

Granada 

notice the addition of
warm clothes

During the third weekend in November JYS relocated to the magical mountain town of Granada, where we found winter after two and half months of living in the tropics!  Finally!  In fact it was so cold that we all went into shock and found it difficult to leave our (very luxurious) hotel, even with the lure of buy-a-cruzcampo-get-a-free-tapa that is a Granada tradition.

While in Granada we visited the Capilla Real, the Cathedral and the Alhambra.  Whoa that Alhambra!  It is perched on a hillock overlooking the city of Granada and is a whole world unto itself.  Built by the Muslim rulers of Spain more than a thousands years ago, the Alhambra remained the seat of the royalty even after los Reyes Católicos (Isabel and Ferdinand… remember them?)  conducted their Reconquista of the peninsula.  Pictures will never do the Alhambra justice, but here are a few.

During our stay in Granada we enjoyed three ridiculously large and delicious buffet meals at our hostel (JYS, you shouldn't have!) ventured to a local discoteca that looked like the inside of a tape player where Serena had a dance-off with a random Spaniard, shivered a lot and daydreamed about skiing (maybe that was just me.)  I wish we had had more time to explore this fabulous city.

in the Alhambra gardens with Anna and Marie

Teaching English

Marta has been acting as our agent and has gotten Marie and me two English teaching jobs. In addition to teaching her best friend Monika's kids English, we are also guest teachers at the Technical English Center (TEC) in Nervión where Marta's brother-in-law works.  Paid jobs hollaa.  We have also been interning at a local bilingual Catholic grade school and helping out with their English and science classes.  Being American has never been such a marketable skill.

Monika's hijos: After the first couple times that I reported on way back in October, we realized the unfeasibility of imparting our English skills to baby Enrique.  Luckily his mother apparently realized this as well and we were instructed to only work with the girls, Marie with the older one and me with adorable little Prado, who can speak Spanish a mile a minute, but not so much English.  Our 2 hour sessions consist of me speaking English and her responding in Spanish.  Marie and I sometimes come up with funnish things to do such as: Halloween bingo boards, watch "Jessica's Daily Affirmation" (look it up on YouTube if you don't know what that is), dance to "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes," eat pumpkin seeds (did you know in Spain they don't eat the outside? Spit it out like a baseball player), and play that game where you fold paper over and each draw parts of a body.  All in English, so hey it counts.

TEC: We were hired to conduct evening Tea Times, which are basically an hour of chatting with English language learners.  Marie does Mondays and I do Tuesdays.  Tea Time is lovely.  From 8-9 pm I sit and chat with my two Tea Time students, Margarita the young stylish marketing woman and Luis the local doctor dad.  They both speak enough English to make interesting conversations possible with gentle prompting and topic suggestions from yours truly.  Although I ask them each time to please tell if they have any questions or if they have a topic of special interest that they want to talk about, they both usually just shrug and smile shyly, which means that usually our conversations start with what I have been doing lately, and usually lead into them giving me advice on the prompts of my Unión Europea papers.  I am continually impressed by their openness to having their grammar corrected by a 20-year-old study abroad student.

Maristas:  For the past two months I have been volunteering at Colegio Marista San Fernando in Triana where I once more offer my English services up.  I encountered this opportunity by accident when I happened to run into Lissa after class as she was on her way to a meeting with the program director.  Lucky that I did, because JYS has been sadly lacking in regards to communication about extracurriculars.  I have been helping out in four classes of varying ages and English-speaking levels.

2° Primaria (6-7 yrs old):  This class is absolutely adorable, though it is questionable whether or not they understand anything I say in English.  I have found that controlling crowds of Spanish-speaking youngsters is made more difficult by the fact that I have no grasp of the vosotros command form (vosotros is used in Spain for the plural informal "you" but all my Spanish teachers since always never bothered to teach it to us.)  Pictionary on the board was a huge hit.  Norton the Parrot is the main character in their English book and I had a fun time illustrating him on the board and was then asked by many small tugs on my elbows if I could please help them get the wings right to copy into their books.

3° Primaria (7-8 yrs old): In Spain they learn British English, which made it a little bit tricky when the class was learning the names of clothes and they were using words like "trousers" "jumper"  and "trainers."They stumped me at first, but thankfully I have read enough Harry Potter to know most British clothing terms.  All the kids carved jack-o-lanterns for Halloween and we told ghost stories, which was a nice little flashback to my own elementary school years.

5° Primaria (10 ish yrs old): The teacher in this class likes me to teach science lessons in English, insisting that the kids understand more than they seem to.  So far I have drawn and illustrated all the parts of a flower, photosynthesis, types of trees and tried to explain ferns, which is more difficult than it seems.  Shoutout to Ian Chittenden and all my other Waldorf teachers for inspiring me to do elaborate drawings on the board.

1° Bachillerato (16 yrs old):  Thirty 16-year-olds was very intimidating at first, especially because many of them are much bigger than me.  On my first day I spent an hour answering all kinds of  questions about the United States, from what the drinking age is to where they should study abroad, to what Americans think of Spain.  It was all actually really fun and interesting. I hope they like me, the verdict is still out.  Although sometimes the kid that sits next to the door winks at me when I leave.  And once I saw one of them in the parking lot outside the public library having a cozy moment with a girl, but he stopped to say hi to me when I walked by.

You may wonder what is the point of doing an English-speaking internship in Sevilla; am I learning any Spanish at all? The answer would be yes, because although the classes are supposedly in English, the little kids only ever ask questions in Spanish and without being able to speak Spanish I would be useless. Plus I would do it anyway because its fun. This week is my last weekend with the Maristas kids and I can't help but feel a little bit sad. The goodbyes are commencing.

Marseille & a Kindly Old Man

Oops I haven't written in an even longer time than usual… which you should take to mean that I am having way too much fun here to have time to write blog posts.  Now will commence the backdating.

Marseille
The second weekend in November I spent enjoying the beauty of the south of France!  I flew to Marseille with my friends Nora and Stacey, two girls that don't go to NU (yay making new friends!) Marseille was a seemingly random choice for a weekend trip, but it ended up being absolutely perfect.  It was wonderful to go to a place where the entire weekend wasn't jam-packed with site-seeing.  However, I did realize that French is one of those languages that you can't just pick up easily.  I spent the whole weekend hand signaling waiters and grossly mispronouncing street names.

told you it happened

When we checked into our hostel we were alone in our 6-person mixed room (score! we thought) but when we came back from wandering we discovered a new addition to our room: Jack the twenty-something struggling British musician.  We bridged the awkward few minutes of cohabitation by making some forced small talk and then realized that he was a pretty chill guy.  Just doing that solo hosteling thing.  We decided to join the 5€ organic pesto pasta hostel dinner cooked by hippie chef Dan.  It turned out to be a delicious choice, with the added bonus of some cheese melted onto the pasta with a blowtorch.

We spent one fabulous day exploring the Calanques National Park about a 40 minute bus ride outside the city.  Americans (or at least me) have a bad habit of condensing France to Paris, when in reality there is so much of the country left to explore!   Spending the day in the Calanques was like a deep breath of fresh air in the midst of 50 jumping jacks.  That was a weird simile.  What I mean to say is that I have been going non-stop for a while with school, host family, volunteering, Sevilla exploring  and new cities and meandering along a road on the coast of France was exactly what I needed.  The pace was casual, the company was grand, and the language barrier meant that we didn't really know what was going on or where we were going… in a good way.  Our day was refreshing, relaxing and reinvigorating all in one gush of sea breeze to the face.

Because every French restaurant we passed seemed to only have meals for about 17€ and we are all about that cheap student life, we opted for Asian food in the semi-sketchy immigrant section of the city.  But don't worry, nervous parents, we had Jack-the-struggling-British-musician to protect us!  And also Tina-who-studies-in-Madrid.  We were feeling really friendly before dinner and decided to take the solo-travelers under our wings.  Which ended up working out pretty well when Jack the Brit was the only one who talked to the French waitresses all night.

On Sunday our return flight wasn't until late so we wandered on over to the other side of the port to explore the new Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée, which is far too difficult to even try pronouncing, but luckily this is a blog so you won't have to. Unless you are reading my blog aloud to a crowd of avid listeners in which case I hope you speak French.  It was great, the highlight being that it was inside the ancient fortress #historymajor.  Although we had to cross some high pedestrian bridges to get there which slightly unnerved the one that's scared of heights (me) especially when the sunny morning turned into a wind tunnel of an afternoon.

Really, the only blip in our perfect, relaxing weekend was that on the way back our flight was delayed and the airport was an icebox.  Which was mostly made better when I discovered the hot chocolate machine in the corner.  A wonderful weekend in a new city with new friends.

Post Script: Marissa and I went and hunted down "El Rinconcillo" the oldest bar in Sevilla one afternoon. Within the half hour of us standing at the counter and drinking our house wine and munching our sheep cheese (yeah I've never heard of that either) we were given flowers and a handwritten note from an adorable 80-90 year old man in a perfect suit.  He came over from his spot in the corner where he comes every day between 6 and 9 (we asked) to deliver his gifts and then quietly returned to drink his cruzcampo.  We are "the flowers of his Sevilla." 15 minutes later he brought us more flowers and another note.  To the lovely old gentleman - thanks for the pick-me-up.  Made my day.


Shoutout to Jackie Edelson on her 21st birthday!!! Hope you're livin' large in New Zealand.

Halloween & Morocco

Today I was very hungry on my way home from wandering around town, so I popped into my favorite market and found that all I wanted was a jar of mini pickles.  So I bought said jar of pickles and proceeded to eat them at home dipped in pesto that I had left over from my trip to France this weekend. The moral of this story is lacking.

They tell us in writing classes to grab your reader with an interesting lead in sentence but this is all I could come up with. Sorry folks. Since I appear to be unable to blog in a timely fashion I am again left with no choice but to condense all my adventure of the past few weeks into a potpourri post.  Meaning random stories = smelly flower petals; and this post = small bowl in your bathroom full of smelly flower petals.

Halloween: 

Marta made us wear Borja and Fernando's goalie sweatshirts
because she thought we would be too cold. Love her. 

First, I can't not mention Halloween in Sevilla (oops double negative.. try not to be too confused.)  Marie and I dressed up as Cruzcampo cans, which is basically the only beer sold here.  We were going to be diet coke cans and then we decided we needed to be more Spanish sooo.. Our host dad Juan Luis thought it was so funny that he took this picture to tweet at the Cruzcampo twitter account.  Halloween is not really a thing in Spain; I was continually told at the school where I volunteer that they only talk about Halloween in English class so as not to let the kids forget their own tradition of Día de Todos los Santos.  The people our age that dressed up were all wearing terrifying face paint.  Apparently here they take the whole "scary" part of Halloween seriously.  Which meant that the two cans got some weird looks.  Definitely worth it.


Morocco (take 1):
The first weekend of November a bunch of kids in my program peaced out to Morocco for the weekend.  We went with a program that takes students (basically all Americans) to Morocco for weekend trips frequently.  So no, it was not an especially authentic experience, but hey, Morocco is Morocco so no complaints.  The program took us to Chefchaoun, the incredible blue city in the northern mountains of Morocco, where we were given a tour and then set loose upon the aggressive and tourist-savvy vendors.  I tried to haggle for a scarf and proceeded to be severely routed by the sassy storeowner when he didn't fall for my bluff that I would NOT spend 8 euros on that scarf.  In reality I most definitely would pay 8 euros, and would have taken it for 10.  But once I had asked for 7 and not a penny more and been refused, I awkwardly shuffled outside, face red and feeling fooled. After a moment of thought I stamped on my pride and went back in to buy the scarf for his price.  I don't like haggling.

Day number two we all piled back into the buses and drove to Asilah, making stops to visit the Cave of Hercules and ride some camels.  Whenever we were in the buses they popped in a movie, as if we were overactive toddlers that needed a distraction so we wouldn't start banging our water bottles on each other's heads.  Although really I shouldn't complain about that either because I did get to see Grease and Catch Me if You Can for the first time.  The Cave of Hercules looked like it was once a neat little wave-formed cave, and once it had a tourist value it was chiseled into a large cavern.  So that was sort of anti-climactic.  The camel-riding was equal parts exciting, hilarious and sad. Exciting because camels are pretty cool, and when in my life am I going to get to ride on again? Hilarious because of their TWO KNEE JOINTS which was one of the weirdest things that I've ever seen.  And sad in the same way that I get depressed when I go to a zoo or an aquarium and I always think about watching that documentary The Cove in high school.

We had been seriously warned (with stories of puke-filled 6-hour bus rides home) of not drinking the water or eating any fruits / vegetables that might have been washed in the water.  However the first night the salad looked really good and then I accidentally ran my toothbrush under the sink and after that I decided it was pointless to resist.  However my stomach pulled through and no sickness happened. So there, germaphobes.

On the way back we almost had some stowaways when a bunch of young hooligans jumped on the back of our moving bus.  Unclear on whether they were just having a fun time (..?) or trying to run away to Spain.  Because apparently that's a thing that happens.

Overall, despite my snarky comments about how touristy the trip was, I had a great time.  Now I really can't wait to head to Fez in two weeks to visit Passage!!  21st birthday celebration, Moroccan style.

Note : I have a lot of other fun things to write about but Friday night activities call and I am going to have to update more later.  Maybe someday I will write things on time.  But its unlikely. Shoutout to everyone at NU - yell loudly at the Michigan game tomorrow!!