Wednesday January 9

This morning at breakfast I had my first taste of jamón cerrano, which is a specialty of this region, and it’s delicious. After breakfast all 32 of the students in the Advanced Liberal Arts program (12 of whom are from Georgetown) had an academic orientation before leaving the hotel to walk to the University of Seville, where we will all take classes this semester. The piropos started as soon as we left the hotel, especially for girls with blonde or red hair and light colored eyes.

The university is awesome – a 500 + year-old tobacco factory-turned-university, called the fábrica de tabacos or the tabalacera. It’s huge and sprawling and beautiful. It has a café, a school supply store, etc. plus lots of big plazas with fountains and open ceilings. It even had its own jail many years ago – the jail building is still right next to the main building, and now it serves as office space for the history department, if I remember right. After a tour of the university and a briefing about academic information and expectations, we went out for tapas for lunch. We ate at a place on la Calle Huelva called El refugio, where we ate tapas like shrimp and cucumber on a skewer, jamón cerrano with mushrooms, anchovies on toast (that one’s for you, mom) and bacalao (salty raw fish on bread). Writing that, they don’t sound very good, but they were delicious. We washed it all down with sangria and wine.

After lunch we walked to CIEE’s “palacio” (study center downtown), which is a beautiful old building with a courtyard and a fountain under an open sky, tile walls, and a very rustic overall look. We’ll use the palacio a lot – many of us will have a class there and we can all use its desktop computers, wifi internet and printing room. Later we had to take a quick speaking exam – nobody knows exactly why. After a safety briefing and dinner back at the hotel, we went to a traditional flamenco show.

There were about 50 or 60 audience members sitting around an open courtyard with a tiny wooden stage. The singer and guitar player did one or two songs before the dancer entered the courtyard. The music is really pretty, and the singing is REALLY loud and very sad. All three (singer, guitarist and dancer) dressed in black, and performed two or three songs together. Then the dancer changed into a polka dot dress and the show went on. In the photo, you can see the singer to the right of the dancer. He's WAILING. Also, check out the little video that I took of the dancer in action. Sorry, I can't figure out how to flip it so the video is upright.