Monday-Friday Feb. 11-15

Today was the first day of classes at the university building, known as the tabacalera. That building is NUTS. It’s straight out of Harry Potter: hundreds of years old, with dark corners and hidden staircases and classrooms with no numbers. CIEE gave us all giant maps of the building, but it’s just so big and nothing is labeled, plus I’m pretty sure the map itself is just incorrect in some spots. I got lost four times and was so late to one class that I missed it entirely; then later a professor failed to show up at all. Not quite how the first day of classes at Georgetown would be, where everyone’s all stressed out about what to take and the professors all show up early to introduce themselves and prepare their first lecture.

Tuesday through Friday I had more classes and much more confusion, at the tabacalera, including getting lost quite a few more times. One of my professors is very sick and her classes have been suspended indefinitely. I’m also starting to see that in some ways, university students here remind me of high schoolers in the US. They all show up to class early, but it’s only to sit or lie on top of the desks and talk, in fever pitch, to all their friends until the professor arrives, usually 5-10 minutes after the class should have begun.

Thursday after leaving class I walked through one of the billion patios in the tabacalera and came upon a Valentine’s Day celebration sort of thing, which actually just consisted of games and surveys about students’ sexual preferences. Friday Beth and I bought tickets to Córdoba for Saturday for the two of us and Sarah and Beth.

Sunday Feb 10

Today we went to a huge park called Ciutadella and then walked along the waterfront all the way to the Christopher Columbus monument and then up Las Ramblas back to our hostel, grabbed our luggage and walked to the bus stop to catch a bus back to El Prat. Cuitadella was really beautiful – tons of open space, lots of grassy areas, paved pathways for bikes and skating, monuments and cool buildings aplenty, plus a cool little pond where you can rent boats and paddle around. Plus there’s a giant zoo attached to the park. There were lots of families and kids out because it was Sunday. If I were a barcelonesa, I’d go there all the time.

Cool pond at Parque Cuitadella:
Statue and fountain surrounded by grass at the park. Palm trees in the background, tons of people with little kids and nothing but open space.
This is a traffic signal that caught my eye while we walked from the park to the waterfront. In Barcelona, bikes get their own symbol.

Even though all you can really see is cars, this is the one waterfront photo I took. If you look pretty closely you can see there are tons of masts and nautical flags. There are a bunch of better photos on Sarah's camera...

Saturday Feb 9, Part 2

After touring every part of the house and even riding its elevator, we walked down Passeig de Gràcia (the street of Casa Batlló) and saw another of Gaudi’s houses, Casa Mila. We only saw this one from the outside, since the entrance fee was pretty steep and we had just paid to see Casa Batlló. Casa Mila was an apartment complex built between 1906 and 1912, with the Mila family living on the bottom floor. Very cool façade. Look:

From Casa Mila we took the Metro to the stop for Sagrada Familia, the massive church designed by Gaudí (it was a Gaudí-heavy day). Construction began on the church in 1882, and the next year Gaudí was appointed project director. He worked on the building from then until his death in 1926 (we was hit by a tram and while wearing shabby clothes and had empty pockets, and cab drivers wouldn’t take him to a hospital because they thought he couldn’t pay the fare. Nobody realized it was Gaudí until the next day). Only eight of the twelve bell towers of the façade have been built, though they’re absolutely amazing at over 100 metres each. The church has three facades, the Passion, the Glory and the Nativity. All the sculpted figures on the façade of the Passion look like cubist style, really chunky and blocky. In contrast, the figures on the façade of the Nativity look almost baroque. The façade of the Glory is smaller than the other two and features tons of animals, like giant snakes and snails. Inside almost everything, from the rose window to the vaulted ceiling, is geometrical, which is a really interesting effect for such a massive building. There are also naturalist elements, specifically that some of the columns resemble trees that Gaudí saw from his workshop window. The ceilings inside are amazing – they’re SO far off the ground it’s dizzying, and the pamphlets about the church all say that the circular flower-looking decorations are modeled on parabolic hyperboloids. Ah, the beauty of a properly executed parabolic hyperboloid.

This is the facade of the Passion. Ahhhhhhhhh sooo tall, it's amazing. Keep in mind a lot of the ground is cut out of this shot.

The facade of the Nativity. So ornate it looks like it's made of lace, and the spires are almost as tall as the ones on the facade of the Passion; I'm just so close to the building here that you can't tell.

The facade of the Glory. If you click on this photo it should enlarge and if you look closely at the line where the sunlight meets the shadow, you can see some of the animals like the giant snakes and snails. I think there's an alligator too.

A shot inside the cathedral, looking up at the ceiling. Parabolic hyperboloids aplenty. Sooo tall. This shot had less scaffolding than most...the whole structure has been under construction since 1882, obviously.

Saturday Feb 9, Part 1

Today we went to Antoni Gaudí’s most famous house, called Casa Batlló. It was built in 1877 and remodeled by Gaudí in the modernist and arte nuveau styles between 1905 and 1907. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves, because the place is phenomenal. I’ve wanted to see Gaudí’s houses for such a long time…they were worth the wait. All I’ll say before the photos is that in my opinion, almost all of Gaudí’s works look like they’re alive in some way. Especially in the case of Casa Batlló, everything inside and out (staircases, roof, door frames, etc.) seems to have been designed to look like the joints, scales and bones of a giant slumbering animal of some kind. The audio tour is really good and you can walk through 6 floors of the house (it’s HUGE), plus the patio and the roof, the roof and chimneys being some of the coolest parts of all. It is also worth adding that Gaudí was a genius archietect as well as an austere Catholic, which explains the huge ceramic crosses that tend to top his houses, including this one. Enjoy the photos. The house is amazing.


Here, the front of the house looks like it has eyes and noses. Again with the mosaics - they create the change in color that you see as your eye moves up and down the front.A mushroom-shaped seating area, intended to provide enough room for a young lady and her escort on one side, and another person on the other.
A much-photographed hallway. I might add that all the hallways and many of the upper rooms in the house look like this - not a straight line in sight, and completely white walls.
Awesome, famous chimney with 4 smokestacks. Behind the chimney is the amazing roof, which is covered with what look like green joints or vertebrae. Next to the roof ridge is the huge white ceramic cross.
A wall of the patio, covered with mosaics tiles. I think the little cup-shaped things are meant to hold flowers.

Friday Feb 8, Part 2

The three of us on a bench in Parc Guell.Detail of the bench mosaic.

Mosaic on the ceiling below the park.
Posing with Gaudi's famous mosaic lizard, which is part of a fountain and staircase at one entrance of the park.
Another pabellon. This one looks like it's alive and moving.

Friday Feb 8, Part 1

Woke up pretty early this morning to go to the Picasso Museum. On the way there we stopped at a little breakfast place near the Cathedral of Barcelona, which should look like this: Instead, it looked like this, because we all need to know that Telefónica is helping to pay for the restoration of the cathedral:
The museum was really good, with not only many original works by Picasso (lots of his more famous works are in the Picasso Museum in Paris) but also much of the artwork in his personal collection and many photos of him at work and him arranging paintings and sculptures in his workshop. We had to check our bags there so none of us had cameras, which I think is the sneaky intention of the museum. After the museum it was on to Parc Güell, a park designed by the artist Antoni Gaudí and built between 1900 and 1914. Originally intended to be a housing complex for the city’s wealthiest residents, only two of the 60 initially planned houses were ever built. It’s located WAY up high on a crazy huge hilltop, a lot like the hills in San Francisco. Look at the hill we climbed to get there (there were 5 or 6 outdoor escalators to help us out):
He designed a huge public plaza area that looks out over the whole city, plus little pabellones (pavilions) and two houses (one for him, one for Eusebi Güell, who owned the park property) on the park site. Gaudí went overboard on the mosaics here, and they’re amazing, from the upright parts of the benches to the awesome iconic lizard that straddles a fountain to the round mosaics embedded in the ceilings…they’re mesmerizing. Here are photos of the whole plaza, the view from the plaza, the mosaics, the underneath areas which include an area of columns and mosaics and an area that looks like a cave, the interior of Gaudí’s own home, the pabellones, the lizard, and more. Here's a view from the entrance to the park:
These are two of the pavellones by Gaudi. All his stuff looks so fantastical...:

Thursday Feb 7

I know this doesn't seem that great, but it's a sight for sore eyes and tired feet.
Also, you can buy books from a vending machine in the Barcelona Metro. The sign basically says, "All your books are here."

After my CIEE class today I left for Barcelona. I took a bus from the Prado (nearby bus station) to the airport in Seville for a 7 pm flight, which ended up leaving about an hour late. The flight was only about an hour and 20 minutes, and then there I was, at Prat airport in Barcelona. Right away I started to notice how different Catalan is, both spoken and written, from Castilian Spanish. Beth knows WAY more about this than Sarah or I do, but Catalan looks and sounds like it has a heavy French influence, which makes sense given its proximity to France. Overall it was really confusing to read and listen to Catalan this weekend, right after being launched into an experience where one of the most important things we can do to assimilate in Seville is to speak Spanish. Fortunately for me (but a major point of contention for residents of Catalonia), everyone seems to speak very good Spanish, or at the very least they will understand Spanish and respond in a mix of Catalan and Spanish. From the Prat I took a Renfe train to the nearest Metro station and then took the Metro to Liceu, a stop on Las Ramblas (a.k.a. La Rambla and Les Rambles; official name Rambla dels Caputxins), the street where our hostel was. It was SOOO good to be on a Metro again, moving efficiently through a city of 1.6 million people. Barcelona’s public transportation – for that matter, its Metro alone, which has over 20 different lines – is light years ahead of Seville, where your best bet is walking or maybe getting a SEVici (public bike subscription) unless you really like taking buses in big looping circles. Barcelona’s Metro is HUGE and always expanding, the avenues are huge and wide and many of them are strictly for pedestrian use, whereas in Seville we regularly have to jump out of the way of motorcycles and cars that go zooming down streets where the sidewalks are about 8 inches wide. And Las Ramblas is a huge open street with sidewalks down both sides and a big wide pedestrian walkway in the middle, with 2 lanes of car traffic going down the sides, so everybody’s happy. On the weekends there’s a market held on Las Ramblas, and as we discovered, the first week of February features lots of children’s parades down the big avenue. So cool. We went to dinner (it was almost 11 pm when I arrived) and went out for drinks later.

Monday-Wednesday February 4-6

Nothing too exciting these few days. Monday I slept in and ran errands. Tuesday was the first day of the one CIEE class that I’ll be taking this semester – all four of the others have to be at the university. I think the class is going to be interesting; it studies Christians, Jews and Muslims in Spain’s history. Then on Wednesday Beth and Sarah and I planned a trip during the beginning of Semana Santa (March 14-19) to Amsterdam and Brussels. We found some good airfare and bought our tickets. Really looking forward to that…

Saturday February 2/Sunday February 3

Just to give an idea of the kind of crowds that were there.
Group shot.
'Nother group shot.

Went costume-shopping Saturday with Beth and Sarah. This city has a bunch of costume shops, where you can buy damn near any costume you could ever want, many of which are not politically correct. A small sampling of some of the options (and I'm talking whole pre-sewn costumes which come with masks and endless accessories): cat, Tinkerbell, cow, fairy, witch, flapper girl, Renaissance people, princess, cowboy, bullfighter, pirate...and then there are the less politically correct choices such as "Thai girl" and "Chinese girl". Oh, Spain. I opted for a pink/green feathery mask, gold necklaces and belt, a green feather boa and black tunic and purple leggings. I think I was the G-rated spirit of Mardi Gras.


We got to Cadiz just before midnight and things were in full swing. Never - NEVER - have I seen an entire city party together, but that's exactly what happens in Cadiz. The whole town parties together for a whole week (only at night, of course, but "night" in Cadiz means like 11 pm until 7 am). Aside from being a phenomenon in that it's a party which a whole town (plus tons of other Spaniards) attends, Carnaval de Cadiz was just so uninhibited. It was amazing. Georgetown on Halloween is fun and all, but most girls dress up as a sleazy something - sleazy nurse, sleazy student, whatever. Not at Cadiz. The girls there want to party just like the guys - for example a ton of girls were chickens in Cadiz. Nothing sexy going on with the chickens. Just a good time. Also, TONS of guys at Cadiz were dressed in drag. Hm. There were fireworks, crowds everywhere, people climbing trees and light poles, etc. Things really hadn't calmed down at all when we left at 5 am. Such a memorable night. I'd love to go back to Cadiz to go to the beach when the weather gets warmer.

We got back just after 7 am Sunday morning, and then commenced the roughest walk home of my life. All I wanted to do was sleep. I got home and fell asleep before 8, and I didn't wake up until 5:30 pm Sunday. Yikes. My host brothers heard my bedroom door open and all looked at me like I was crazy, because they thought I was still gone, because who sleeps until 5:30? Me, I guess.

Thursday January 31/Friday February 1

Today in class we watched the famous movie Días Contados by director Imanol Uribe, supposedly about some of the terrorists in ETA but really just an excuse to watch a really explicit movie. It was good, though.

On Friday I went to the public library to study for my test, which went from about 6 till 7:30. Then I got snacks and a drink with Beth and Amanda and headed home, not feeling too great. I stayed in Friday night to get a loooong night of sleep, in preparation to be awake all Saturday night at Cadiz...

Tuesday January 29/Wednesday January 30

The "pantheon" of tombs for members of the Ribera family.
A cool outdoor structure at the monastery, built for the sole purpose of having snacks in the garden.
Contemporary art sculpture.
More contemporary art.

For class Tuesday we met at the Monasterio de la Cartuja, a monastery in the northwest part of the city in an area called La Cartuja. The 13^th-century monastery is small but pretty, with lots of original stone, vaulted ceilings, and burial rooms for some of the members of the super-wealthy Ribera family, to whom the Casa de Pilatos belongs (see January 22 post). In fact, their burial room is referred to as “el panteón” (the pantheon). The monastery is connected to the Andalucian Contemporary Art Center, which we visited afterwards. The art center has lots of artwork from 1957 and some films by Mark Lewis. Overall, the combination of a monastery from the 13^th century with contemporary art was sort of strange. Then our class walked north, farther into La Cartuja, to see some of the buildings that were constructed for the Universal Exposition of 1992. Over 100 countries participated in that exposition, and some of the pabellones (pavilions) built for it, like the one for Marocco and the Vatican, are cool.

Wednesday I woke up feeling sick and had to cancel a date to meet my intercambio for the first time. The whole intercambio system links a student whose first language is English with a student whose first language is Spanish so that the two can meet and talk and improve their speaking skills. My intercambio, Isabel, and I will have to try to get together another day. Later I met Beth for chocolate con churros before heading to class at 6.

Sunday January 27/ Monday January 28

Sunday I slept in and relaxed all morning and studied a little bit for the test on Friday. Nothing too notable.

Monday for class we went to Parque María Luisa and the Plaza de España. What a beautiful quarter of the city. The park has TONS and tons of green space and the Plaza de España is soooooo big, it’s hard to believe. No wonder it’s on tons of postcards. The plaza has little sort of “stations” in alphabetical order for every region in Spain, except Sevilla is #1, naturally. The plaza also has an enormous fountain in the center and a moat that goes all the way around it where you used to be able to rent a little boat and paddle around. Sadly, for the last ten years or so the moat hasn’t had any water in it. The Plaza de América is cool too, with more giant buildings and gardens. The whole perimeter of the park is full of pabellones (pavilions) from Spain, Portugal, their colonies and Latin American countries. The entire park and plazas were built for the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929, which was basically intended to celebrate the Ibero-American culture. The whole thing was economically a giant flop and now the state government owns the buildings because Seville couldn’t pay for them.

Friday January 25/Saturday January 26

The view from our seats...at least you can see how full the stadium was.
The Osasuna fans right next to us lit a red smoke bomb, the inhalation of which will probably take about 2 years off my life.
Me and one of the Beths at the game.

Before class on Friday I went to the post office and sent in the paperwork to get a SEVici card – a little card that will let me use the public bike system here in Seville. The name stands for Sevilla bici (bici being the word for bike) and you can either pay 5 Euro for a week or 10 Euro for a year – so I went for the better deal, the yearlong subscription. I can’t wait to get the card and start taking the bikes all over the city – if you use one for less than 30 minutes then it’s free; 30-90 minutes is 50 cents and anything over that is 1 Euro per hour or something like that. There’s a station on a street pretty close to where my host family lives. It should save me A LOT of time walking…

On Saturday I went to a market in la Cartuja (northwestern part of the city) with Jillian and Lauren. I didn’t buy anything but they have everything from shoes and belts and bags to bootleg DVDs, sunglasses and puppies for sale. Later I got dinner with Beth, Beth (yes, both Beths) and Sarah at a place on Constitución called Cervecería 100 Montaditos. A montadito is a little sandwich (very tiny), and this place has 100 to choose from! You can have chicken, turkey, tuna, lamb, shrimp, veggies, cheese and there are even chocolate sandwiches. So tasty. Then a bunch of us (about ten in all) went to a Sevilla vs. Osasuna fútbol game! We had pretty bad seats (all of ten rows from the very top of the stadium) considering the tickets were 35 Euro each, and we sat right next to a bunch of Osasuna fans but it was still really fun. I’ve never seen a crowd so decked out in their red scarves, but they’re not like US sports fans – no face or body paint, not belligerent, not even drunk (they only sell non-alcoholic beer at the games). Sevilla won, of course.

Wednesday January 23/Thursday January 24

Studied Wednesday until our exam at 6 p.m. Then had drinks in the old Jewish quarter of the city, called Santa Cruz, at Levies bar.

On Thursday for class we met at the Museo de Bellas Artes (Museum of Fine Arts) in the morning. The museum building used to be a convent of the Merced order – it was built during the 17^th century. Following the policy of desamortización (state seizure of Catholic Church properties to sell them during the 1830s and 1850s), the state found that it had a lot of art on its hands – mostly religious art. Hm, wonder why. The convent was converted into a museum (complete with a redone façade) during the early 19^th century. It has a beautiful claustro (covered patio area, very common in old buildings here) and tons of beautiful art. There is work by artists including El Greco, Murillo, Leal, Francisco Pacheco and (I think) Velazquez. A popular theme is that of the immaculate conception, a theory which Seville has always traditionally defended, even before the Church did. My favorite was a GIANT painting of women at work rolling cigarettes in the Real Fábrica de Tabacos (Royal Tabacco Factory) – which is now the main building of the Universidad de Sevilla.

Later that night Jillian and I walked to Nervión, an area in the eastern part of the city, to see the big mall and ice rink there. We got there right as all the stores were closing…oops.

Tuesday January 22

This statue is the bust of a man who killed someone on the street in front of the Casa de Pilatos. There was a witness who identified the murderer but since he was never caught, they decided to make a bust of him and they "trapped" the bust in high up in one of the walls of this house.
Part of the courtyard.
A view of one of the many gardens.

Studied with Beth today for our test tomorrow. Class at 4:30 today was at the Casa de Pilatos – a really beautiful building that has always belonged (and still belongs) to really wealthy families in Seville. The church literally next door to the house used to be the property of the family but I think the church is now city property. Today the house is known for being the starting point for the Stations of the Cross. Anyway, the house has Islamic, Christian, Greek and Roman architecture/artwork, huge rooms with tile-covered walls and arched windows, big gardens (one even has a grotto) and a whole part of the house that’s been preserved with original Spanish artwork (there’s a painting by Goya, among other artists). There’s a giant room where frescoes by a Spanish artist cover all four walls, and lots of ancient Roman and Greek artifacts in the gardens. We were only allowed to take photos in the outdoor areas.