The Arrival of the Internet

Hello all! Sorry I have been a little slow in posting this time around but I’ll try to have some rapid-fire posts to make up for it. So I finally have internet in my house, which is incredible! Mati and Luiqui had mentioned on the first day that we arrived that they had just bought the internet, so Maureen and I were very excited because it is a rarity in homestays to have internet. We waited for the internet for a week, but nothing happened and we started to become concerned that we had misunderstood. Finally, when we were at the point of exploring options of renting internet for three months, Duña and Eduardo, the daughter and son-in-law of Mati and Luiqui, arrived and brought the internet with them! It was quite an exciting day overall because it was also the first day we had lunch by ourselves. Mati and Luiqui went to the countryside and Mati gave instructions to Maureen on how to prepare lunch. We had pasta and the mainstays of gazpacho and melon, but also prepackaged flan, which seemed weird since we usually only have melon as our dessert at lunch. The flan was delicious and we didn’t think anything of it until dinnertime when Mati comes over and asks us, “What happened with the flan?” We said that we ate it and then she responded with a look of consternation, “that was supposed to be for after dinner not lunch!” Maureen and I looked at each other and just had to laugh since something was bound to be lost in translation by this point in time. Maureen explained that she thought Mati had said the flan was for dinner and Mati laughed and said, “well no flan for you tonight, only for Duña and Eduardo!” But of course, she was joking and ended up giving us more flan even though we were pretty stuffed. It was great getting to talk to Eduardo and Duña because they are a lot easier to understand and are a little more relatable since they know more about American culture. Luiqui once told Maureen that California was the poorest state in the US because it only grows potatoes, but Duña and Eduardo watch shows like True Blood and we just seem to have a little more in common with them. They just got back from vacation in the Canaries and then Eduardo left for Zaragoza, where they are going to live, on Tuesday, while Duña will stay here until October and then move to Zaragoza as well. I think Eduardo must be a genius because he works in hotels but somehow figured out how to figure out the problems Maureen and I were having with accessing the internet on our computers (which was very stressful at first because our computers weren’t working and the internet was flaky but now the internet has been working really well and I can’t tell you how amazing that is.) He also speaks 6 languages, including perfect English, which is nice because we could ask him how to say certain words in English and he could tell us the translation. We had a great dinner talking about places they have visited and how it’s hard even for them to understand certain Spanish accents, like in movies from Argentina or even sometimes Spaniards from certain places in the North of Spain. That made me feel a little better about having a little trouble with the strong Sevillano accent. Of course, after dinner we abused the internet a little bit the first night, but I’m trying to not spend too much time just sitting in my room on the computer (unless I’m writing my blog, of course!) because I don’t want to waste all my time here on the internet.


our room

the kitchen - where the magical food happens

the living room

On Monday we visited the Cathedral of Seville, which is in the center of town and is absolutely gorgeous. I had seen it from the outside many times, but since I knew we were going with the program, I hadn’t checked out the interior. Before you even enter the building, there is a patio with rows of orange trees (right now the oranges look like limes but in a little while they will ripen and I have heard that they taste amazing.) You have a great view of La Giralda, the tower that used to be a minaret when the Cathedral was a mosque. It is very common in Spain to have a cathedral on top of a mosque on top of a roman temple since the conquering religion would use the foundation of the previous religion’s holy building to build their own. We were given a tour by one of the program staff, Pepe. He explained about the history of the building and different aspects of the architecture and art inside of the Cathedral. The interior is ridiculous – it is so ornate and large (actually the third largest church in the world.) There is tons of marble, stained glass, and carved wood and you can’t possibly take in half of what there is to see in one visit. There are two organs inside and they are making a third organ in the Netherlands. There is also a central chapel that houses the tombs of three kings of Spain, but can only be entered for mass. Allegedly Christopher Columbus’s remains are also in the Cathedral – there is a huge box that holds bones that were scientifically tested and definitely belong to someone in Christopher Columbus’s family but Pepe seems to think that they are not actually Columbus’s bones and I would agree with him. There are also tons of small chapels around the edge of the central room that were paid for by nobles and house some amazing artwork. They have a fairly large “custodia” – the place where they hold the bread for Communion – that is decorated in ornate silver and tons of other treasure in the side rooms. Pepe told us about some special masses that are held in the Cathedral throughout the year, including one in November where the army comes, and I definitely think I’ll check out some sort of mass during the semester. After the tour, we could stay in the building and we decided to climb to the top of the Giralda. The tower only has ramps because when it was a minaret the muezzin would have to climb it five times a day for the call to prayer so he would ride up on a donkey. I can’t decide whether it is easier to walk up ramps or stairs, but either way, after 34 ramps my legs were feeling the burn. It was definitely worth the walk though because the views from the top were spectacular! You could see so far out onto Seville and see some of the landmarks, such as the Plaza de España and the Jardines de Maria Luisa, as well as a great view of the nearby barrio Santa Cruz – the touristy but adorable old neighborhood. After a while the view could no longer distract us from our grumbling stomachs and we returned home for a lunch of “arroz con carne” (rice with meat) which is what they call paella here and a lot more authentic than what they serve in restaurants here that advertise “we have paella” (wonder what clientele they’re trying to attract…) which was of course delicious. For dinner (yup, skipping right to the next meal!) Maureen and I had pizza, which Mati makes using a store bought crust and some sort of yummy cheese, tomato sauce, and chorizo. It tastes very different from pizza in the US more actually like this Armenian type of pizza (I don’t know how to spell the name so I won’t try) we used to eat at home because it has lots of herbs. It was really interesting because Mati, Luiqui, Eduardo, and Duña all had dinner together because Eduardo was leaving the next day, which means it is a special dinner because usually Mati doesn’t eat and Luiqui has something very small for dinner and it’s not really a “sitdown meal.” But even though it was a special dinner, the TV was still on and they half-watched and half-talked. I can’t imagine having a goodbye dinner with the TV on, but to them it’s normal.


outside of the Cathedral

La Giralda

Bells in la Giralda

On Wednesday, we went to the Museum of Fine Arts and had another tour with Pepe. Even though Pepe does a great job of explaining the art and history, I don’t love taking tours in museums because I prefer to look at art at my own pace – some pieces we pass by I would like to look at for longer and others that we spend a lot of time at I could walk right by. The building and grounds are beautiful, but the time period of most of the art in the building is not my favorite. I like modern art a lot better and the majority of the work in this museum is from the 15th to 19th centuries. It is still definitely interesting to see, but just not my style. After the tour we decided to take the bus for the first time because we were pretty far away from our house. It took a while to find the bus stop, but after that it was an uneventful ride – Seville definitely has public transportation down. They have a brand new metro that I haven’t taken yet, a really good bus system, and an awesome bike share program (more on that later.) For lunch we had a stew of potatoes and calamari. Squid is not my favorite, so I sort of ate around the squid, since the rest was delicious, but I don’t think Mati was very happy with the fact that I didn’t eat the squid. She made fun of me for saying at first that I like everything even though now I don’t like tuna or squid. Maureen ended up eating my calamari since she liked it a lot, which is good since Mati once said that she is scared of throwing out food. Mati has the most interesting sense of humor – it’s very dry and deadpan and very difficult to tell if she is joking or not. She told us that some of her previous students told the program director that they didn’t like her jokes because they are mean but I love her sense of humor. When Maureen and I were sitting in the living on Sunday enjoying the first minutes of wifi (pronounced wee-fee here, by the way) Mati walked by and rubbed her thumb and fingers together in the sign for money and asked us, “when are you going to pay?” At first I was a little worried because I couldn’t tell if she was kidding, but then she smiled and we all laughed. On Thursday, Maureen and I had our first bocadillo (sandwich) from Mati instead of going home for lunch because we had thought we were going on a long tour and wouldn’t be able to make it back in time. Even though the sandwich was still good (chorizo and cheese) it was sad to miss out on an amazing Mati lunch, especially since it turned out that the tour was really short and we would have made it home with plenty of time. I put the time to good use trying to find classes to take at the university (which is a lot harder than at Penn) and also investigating taking an art class while I’m here. Turns out that there are only art schools not art centers for people like me who just want to do art as a hobby. The place I was going to take a class has a test to get into the classes, which also happened to be at the same time as my class at the program center, so I couldn’t end up doing it (not that I was in love with the idea of taking a test for an art class anyway). I’ll certainly find something else to keep myself busy but it would have been interesting to take printmaking in Spanish. That night we decided to go to a movie at the outdoor movie theater near our house. They were playing Burn after Reading (Quemar despues de Leer in Spanish) dubbed into Spanish. I had never seen it before, so it was a little difficult to follow the details of the dialogue since the mouths don’t match the audio, but I still got the gist of the plot and found Brad Pitt as a personal trainer pretty ridiculous. It was sort of like a drive-in movie theater except everyone was seated in rows of lawn chairs instead of cars and a few cats walked by during the movie. Not the most comfortable after two hours, but definitely fun and worth doing once.

organ in the Cathedral

ceiling in the Museum of Fine Arts