Las chinas, las bolsas, y los cines (The Chinese, Bags, and Movie Theaters)

Bueno.

This week, my semester-long class through el centro started. It's taught by a UMich professor, Juli Highfill (each year, the program cycles between the three universities and brings in a professor to teach one class each semester). The class is on daily life under Franco, which is really interesting to me. She teaches the same class at UMich, too, and it's a 400 level there. It's definitely going to be more work than some of the other classes I could have taken through el centro, but I think it will be really interesting. We meet 3 times a week, not 2, because we watch a movie every week to add to our discussion. Yesterday we watched Pan's Labyrinth (completely in Spanish, of course) and today I think we're going to talk about the allegories and other magical elements that the movie has that relates to Spanish history, etc. There are just 5 of us in the class, which makes it pretty intimate. It should be good.

On Tuesday, I wandered our barrio (neighborhood) more than I had previously. I know a lot of what's between my apartment and the center of Sevilla, but not much about what's past the apartment, out from the center of Sevilla. I liked my walk a lot. Lots of big apartment buildings, definitely, but some of the streets were really small and cute, and it definitely has an authentic "this-is-how-it-really-is" feel that I don't get when I'm in the center of Sevilla, which has plenty of tourists, etc. I like our barrio. There's a decent amount of good stuff near us, too, like cafes and grocery stores. My best find, though, were the two "bazaars" just around the corner from us. "Bazaar" is just the name of the store (it's not in the middle of the street or anything), but it is fantastic. The Bazaars, someone told me, are pretty much exclusively run by Chinese people. The stores are packed to the brim with cheap stuff. It's kind of like a dollar store, only slightly more chaotic, slightly better quality, and slightly more expensive. They were a golden find. I plan to get most of my school stuff there--it's way cheaper than going to el Corte Ingles (main department store) and paying out the ears.

The one slightly sad note about the bazaars? When I came to Sevilla in high school, I got a bag at one of the tourist shops that I absolutely love. I still use it a decent bit (at home, that is). I saw it here in the bazaar. For cheap. So it turns out I got ripped off big time, oh, 4 years ago...

I don't think I have taken the time to write about the quality of the bread here. It's fantastic. Ok, maybe not as good as Zingerman's or really top quality bread, but the normal supermarket bread is a million times better than what the US has. We almost always have baguette, and the crust is all about crispiness and crunchiness. It's delicious. Mayte has been to the US a few times because she has a sibling there, and she told us that she thinks the bread in the US is horrible and Spain's bread is far superior. I think, overall, she's right. Here, bread is always served with every meal. It's a constant, and I think generally the Spanish people take pride in it.

Remember how a few weeks ago I went to go see Wall-E in the theater here? Remember the fantastic "hello-I-am-a-foreigner-I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing" experience we had? Well, a group of us went back to the same theater last night to see the movie about Che. We were all ready. We had our ISIC IDs out and knew how many were in our group so that we could order together and be totally on top of our game. We get to the counter, and the lady kind of just smirks at us. Again! ...turns out on Wednesdays, everyone gets in for the student price. So we didn't need our cards (after we got our tickets, we looked up and there was an enormous sign telling us so). And, because it was a Wednesday and there were no people there, the seats were not assigned, so there was no need for us to order together (when we told her we were 8, we just got another smirk). We didn't understand what she was saying because of the muffled microphone effect, but when we were walking away we were examining our tickets to find our assigned seats and realized that there weren't any... and then it all clicked. We had been the stupid foreigners, once again! This time it was more funny than anything. It is my goal to walk into that movie theater knowing exactly what I am doing and getting it all exactly right by the end of the year. I think it's doable. Anyway, the movie went well--I understood about 70 or 75% of it, which isn't bad.

The XV Bienal Flamenco in Sevilla (http://www.bienal-flamenco.org/web2008/index.asp) is going on now. It's a big deal--basically there are shows of various sorts every night for a month of all kinds of Flamenco. It is supposed to be the best collection of Flamenco in the world, and it only happens every other year. I wasn't planning to go because I thought it would be expensive, but I found a performance that looks great for tomorrow night, and the cheaper tickets (balcony) were only 20 Euro. I recruited 2 friends to come with me, so it should be great! I'm excited.