Comprando una tele y otras actividades esenciales (Buying a Phone and Other Essential Activities)

Ok, there's no time to make this a fancy blog post, so the pictures will come first.

My life packed up for the year. Taken in my room at home before I left.

The first picture of me and Liliana in Sevilla. And I'm sure there will be many more to come (Angie, note the shirt)!

I'm hesitant to put this picture on my blog because it doesn't do the place justice, but it's the best photo I have for now. I'll have to go on a photo excursion at some point with my nice camera. This was taken at dusk.

Plaza de toros (bullfighting). It's a landmark in Sevilla. I have walked by it each day to get from the hotel to el centro.

Ok, and now for the writing part that will be totally disjointed:
ahem:

Today there isn’t too much to report. I don’t have the same urge to recount everything detail after detail like I did for China. I think it’s because European culture is, in many ways, much closer to America than China is (duh—we’re both western!).

This week our schedule has been class, break, class, lunch (at 2pm, which is early for Sevilla), massive siesta (literally the entire city shuts down until 5pm), then more free time. Starting next week (once we get put in our home stays), the schedule will change to class, go home for lunch and siesta, class in the early evening, and then a free evening. People here stay out and about until the late hours every night. They aren’t cavorting around drunk or anything like that; because it’s so hot here, people rest during the day and spend the evenings out socializing. Last night Liliana and I ate around 10pm at a little café outside on a cobblestone street. There was a guy playing an accordion across the street. He was a totally legit accordion player, too—he wasn’t there for tourist entertainment. Oh, and our table was in between two orange trees. It doesn’t get much more picturesque than that.

Today the main extra thing that Liliana, me, and two other boys (one from Cornell and one from Michigan) did was get a cell phone. It was a decent amount of work, but we chatted with two different sellers at two different places. We each had some amount of dialogue with the salespeople to get our questions answered. We read all the fine print, compared prices, etc. Finally we each ended up with a pay-as-you-go plan on Vodafone. Pretty sweet. I can get international calls for free, so if any of you feel motivated to get a calling card, we can chat that way.

Side note: internet is going to be irregular until things get settled. We have a pledge to only speak in Spanish in el centro, so I’m not sure if we’re allowed to skype from the center. That doesn’t make things impossible, but it does mean that I’ll have to scout out an internet café that’s reasonable and make that a regular thing. Just one more routine to settle into.

It will be nice once I settle into my routines, that’s for sure.

Oh: today I also had my interview with Luisa, one of the MCP staff, about my housing preferences. It went well… I didn’t have much to say except explain my vegetarianism and my preference for no smoking. She asked me if I have a certain neighborhood I prefer and whether I want a roommate or not. I gave pretty un-opinionated answers for the most part. I feel like what’s important is how my family is and where I am placed relative to the friends that I will make here, so where I’m placed in my home stay is kind of just a luck-of-the-draw sort of thing.

Anyway, so yes, all in all I am one step closer to living with a family and I am now also the proud owner of a Spanish cell. Today gave me more confidence that I can indeed function in Spanish. I’m actually doing a lot better than I thought I would.