Greetings from Sevilla!

Okay y'all...here's my blog for my semester in Spain! I'm going to try to keep up with it as much as possible, but I have no idea how much that would be. If you feel like I'm slacking on my amount of posts let me know and bother me about it! I don't want to let this thing go to waste!

I meant to start this blog before I left the States too, but time got away from me and that didn't happen, so I'll do my best to start from the beginning.

This is in the midst of my packing for a semester in Spain. It was pretty challenging...how do you decide what clothes to take with you for four months?

We finally got all my bags packed and it seemed like everything was running smoothly until I realized I forgot something when we were on the way to the airport - my jacket. The main pea coat I planned on bringing for the entire semester and I had left it at home. Needless to say it wasn't the best feeling in the world and only added stress I didn't need, so my parents dropped me off at the airport and, while I checked in and got my bags checked, they ran home to get it for me. I finally had everything I needed, or at least I think so, but anything else I'll just have to buy in Sevilla!

Our flight was delayed for, what ended up being, about an hour due to a "missing passenger," which I thought was somewhat creepy. They did not tell us anything until after we were all boarded on the plane, and then they said we either had to wait for the "missing passener," or wait for the crew to get their luggage off. They never ended up finding the missing person, so they took the luggage off the plane. Once that was done we were Spain bound!

Here's my lovely airplane dinner. It was actually pretty good! Yes, we did have a cool flight attendant (hence the wine that we got for free :) ) They served us this dinner and the movie that was playing was "Eat, Pray, Love." Kelsie and I had never seen it so we were pretty excited, and what better movie to watch than one about a girl who drops everything to go travel the world?
Okay...this is going to be a really long blog post. I'm only half way through!

There were a few people from our study abroad group on our plane, so we all were together before and after the flight. When we finally landed in Madrid we were all walking around trying to figure out where we needed to be, and Kelsie and I were on the hunt for Olivia who was supposed to be somewhere in the Madrid airport waiting on us.

We made it through the passport check, got our baggage (which ended up taking over my life for the next 10 hours), found Olivia and got on the Express Aeropuerto bus that took us to the Atocha-Renfe (train station).

This all of our luggage practically taking up the entire luggage rack on the bus. HA - guess that's what you get when you have three 20-21 year old girls studying abroad for four months.

We made it to the train station and that was when the big adventure really began. Does this country have elevators? Yes, but they're very hard to find and are not always readily accessible when you need them - trust me. The first thing we did was go down an escalator. Attempting to go down the escalator with two bags that were practically as big as me and a huge tote bag/roller was not very successful. I mainly ended up face-planting into the luggage that I pushed on first that then went tumbling down the escalator. I was basically doing the splits on the escalator and attempting to prevent my other piece of luggage from pushing me down the escalator. From then on out we dreaded escalators and THANK GOODNESS we found an elevator (aka ascendor) that would just barely hold all three of us and our luggage.

We found out soon after getting to the train station, at about 1 p.m., that the next available train to Seville wasn't until 6 p.m., so we sat in Atocha-Renfe for FIVE HOURS with absolutely no connection to the world (minus Kelsie's 50 text messages she is allotted each month). People are extremely slow in this country, so it took us a while to eat our lunch. Lunch consisted of some italian food which wasn't too bad, but it wasn't anything exciting. We then spotted a wine bar with some kind of special going on.

Obviously we took advantage of it. Three exhausted and stressed out girls just sat and talked for about four hours.

FINALLY, we took our train to Sevilla. We dreaded taking the escalator down to the platform for an hour beforehand, but then it ended up being a moving ramp which was much better. We each had to take our own taxi from the train station in Sevilla to our hotel...that should prove how much luggage we had.

Here's my first meal in Sevilla! Kels and I walked to a little cafe right across the street from our hotel and had some Italian-like food.

Here's a first little glimpse of cute little Sevilla.

That's about it for now! It's now Thursday morning and we are about to get ready to go explore. The humidity is 100% right now - I can even feel it inside my hotel room (gross). I'll post again soon once I have more to tell!

Adios,

Paige