My new home?

Yesterday, we finally arrived in Sevilla, after a grueling 7.5 hour bus ride (including our stop for lunch). The drive honestly reminded me of driving through south eastern Washington, with its dry weather and tumble weeds. Needless to say, by the time we got into city limits, the nervousness on the bus spiked tenfold. Everyone seemed excited to be looking out at our new home, but we were also on the lookout for where our bus would end up stopping. When we did stop, a large group of people were standing around waiting for us to get off the bus. And you could definitely tell that no one wanted to be first. Finally, we started to get off, and finding our luggage proved to be fairly difficult considering there was only about 32 of us.

Anyways, then we had to stand around until our name was called, and then we learned who our host parents would be. I’m not sure how Emily, my roommate, felt, but I was definitely apprehensive to raise my hand just cause I was so nervous. Our host mom’s name is Maria, and she is about 55 years old. After we shoved all our bags into her car (which almost didn’t fit), we did what we were taught as kids never to do: go home with a complete stranger. Man oh man was it a long ride. And I don’t mean distance wise cause it was actually pretty close to where we had been dropped off. Our mom just started going off in Spanish, wanting to know how our trip was, if we actually spoke Spanish, and a ton of other information. Thankfully, between Emily and I, I think we got it down.

At our house, we also have a grandma. We have yet to be told her actual name, but she’s a sweet 81 year old lady who likes to water her plants on the patio and watch Spanish soaps on the TV. I can’t tell if she is deaf, or just doesn’t understand our Spanish, but communicating with her is kind of difficult, especially because she talks way too fast for the two of us. Our host mom also has three children. One lives in Madrid but is apparently on a business trip in Japan. Another lives in New York. And then the third lives here, but is currently working (?) in Germany. It’s pretty cool because her oldest son is so smart and had such good grades that when he graduated with his Industrial Engineering degree, the King of Spain himself gave him a certificate of merit. I wish I could do something like that.

So, Emily and myself are in a room that is probably eight feet by twelve feet. It consists of two win beds (which are smaller than back home), a small round table with two chairs (where I am currently residing), a wardrobe, and a chest of drawers with shelves on top. And then we each had to find room to shove our two suitcases a piece into, which was really difficult. I just hope I get a chance to buy more hangers because that would make my life SO much easier. As it is right now, we only have like 7 each, so we had to fold most of our stuff and put them in the little amount of drawer space that we were left with.

Today, we got a tour of the ISA office and the building that we will be doing our studies in for the next two weeks. We also walked to where our actual studies will be once the semester starts. Once our planned tour was over, a bunch of us girls ended up walking down to the river. It is really pretty, but the water was really green, and definitely not like the water at home. My favorite part of the day was definitely going to take a quick look at the Plaza de España. It was used in Star Wars for the government building of Planet Naboo, which I find completely awesome. It is also full of amazing hand painted tiles that adorn much of the inside and quite a bit of the railing along the moat. I just can’t wait until we have more time to go back and properly explore it later, but we had to come home in time for lunch instead.