First Excursion

Yesterday we went on our first excursion to Itálica. Itálica is an old Roman city that is right out side of Sevilla. It consisted of a bunch of Roman ruins...wasn't nearly as breath-taking as the cathedral was, but it is a huge part of Spain's history and is so cool that we are living right by it.

These two pictures were the beginning area that we were in. There were all different sections of Itálica.

This is an original inscription of the Roman rules. It was written in Latin (so obviously we couldn't read it). There was a Spanish translation to the left of it, but that wasn't very helpful at this point in the semester, either.

The girls in front of some of the ruins. The doorways were tiny! I'm kind of sad I didn't get a picture directly in one so you could tell how small they were in comparison to me.

This was the other main section of Itálica that we were in. This is where the actually city was. There were layouts of houses all over the place, and a lot of them were even covered up by dirt/grass to keep them preserved. All of the floors in the houses were mosaic...I can't imagine how much time JUST that took.

This was an oven! It looks similar to a big pizza oven from today.

I took this picture mainly for my dad - the square in the middle is the God of Wine (and something else that I can't remember). He discovered how to cultivate the grapevine. I had no intention of taking a picture of this until my teacher told me that - it made it much more interesting to me. :)

This is an olive tree. There were tons of them and there were a lot of them planted in rows in fields. I didn't taste one of the olives, but some people did and said they were horribly bitter. There is a whole pickling process that they have to go through after they are picked off of the tree.

This was the Roman theater.

That's about it from Itálica - welcome to my morning yesterday, haha. I forgot to mention my iced tea attack that I had when we went shopping the other day! Oh. My. Gosh. There was a Starbucks in the mall, so I decided I would see if they could make me an unsweet, iced black tea (no water added). Quiero un té negro con no azúcar. Well they didn't really understand. First, they wanted to make it hot. No, quiero un té con hielo (ice). Okay, so then they understood that, but they pulled out what looked like that pink passion fruit tea. I asked if it was JUST black tea and that it WASN'T sweet - "Sí, Sí!" Negative. It was the disgusting sweet/tart pink passion fruit tea, which I'm sure could be really good if I wasn't expecting and needing a bitter, strong BLACK iced tea. Needless to say, it put me in a bad mood for a little while...all I needed was an iced tea, and I regretted even going to Starbucks to try - never again (while in Spain).

That's it for now! Today's just going to be a lazy Sunday at home. :)

Sending my love to Texas,

Paige