Monday January 14

I finally decided to invest in a wireless internet connection service called Instanet. You only need an electrical outlet to use it, which is great because I don’t have an internet jack or a phone line in my room. I had seen Instanet before at a big department store here called El corte ingles. So I walked there from my apartment in the morning, planning to buy it and have it all set up before the first class meeting of our intensive session today. But the sales girl who works specifically for Instanet wasn’t there. She only works 4-9 p.m., naturally. So that had to wait.

My class met that evening from 6-9 p.m. After about 90 mins in the CIEE building, we went out and walked all over the city together with our professor (adorable short little Spanish guy, Carlos). Specifically, we looked at the ancient Roman ruins of Seville. It’s crazy – we turned down one of the thousands of tiny winding pedestrian streets here and suddenly we were standing next to three humongous marble columns. They stand in between two apartment buildings, and are attached via wires to one building so that they don’t fall over. Carlos said they are believed to have been part of the original Roman forum in Seville. He also said that an apartment building used to exist AROUND the columns; these things used to run vertically through people’s living rooms. Not long ago, the city ousted the residents and demolished the building in order to better preserve the columns. Carlos said this kind of government action (kicking people out of their living space to preserve ancient history of Seville) makes many people keep mum when they begin to build a house in the city and they find precious relics of the past. Not wanting the city to delay the building of their house by months or years or maybe permanently, people often just try to build over them.