I Tasted an Orange!

Remember the orange trees I mentioned earlier? Well I finally ate a famous Sevillan orange!

Here we are attempting to get oranges off of the orange trees in the cathedral courtyard.

The orange was SO acidic and sour, but it wasn't too bad! I don't need to have another one straight off the tree, but I can now say I tried a fresh Sevillan orange. :)

Yesterday was the day that everyone in our program had to be here by. Our orientation meetings started yesterday afternoon. We went to the TTU Center for the first time. It's an old building from around the 1890s. I haven't gotten a picture of it yet, but I will soon! There's actually a lot more rooms than I expected there to be. There are about 45 students studying at the Texas Tech Center in Sevilla. We will only have class for a few hours each day, and then I will be working for my language internship at a small shop, cafe or book store. I'll find that out a little later this week. Classes start on Tuesday, so we will figure out a lot more about each of our classes after that.

Today we had a FULL day. I am exhausted. It was really the first day that we've gone from morning until night without sleeping in or without a siesta. After breakfast this morning we went on a walking tour around the city. A lot of it was stuff my friends and I had already walked past or seen, but it was cool having our director be a tour guide. We also found SHOPPING! Oh my gosh, we were so excited, but we weren't allowed to stop at the stores and leave the tour. We are all ready to go back tomorrow though!

This is the cathedral bell tower...one of the "picturesque" views on our walking tour.

Jerry Jones came to Sevilla with us! Ha - just kidding. :)

 There are horse carriages everywhere! We really want to take one around town.

This is where the SHOPPING is! Our director of the center looked directly at all the girls I've been with this week and said we couldn't stop to shop today...think we look a bit shopping deprived?

People roller blade ALL over the place here. There is a biking lane next to the sidewalks that is green. This is a picture of it, but you can't tell that well. There are a ton of bicyclers too, but that's much more normal to me than rollerblading. I feel like I should get some just to fit in, but then I would be on my face...so that's not going to happen. Whether they're riding a bicycle or roller blading - you better stay OUT of there way because they will run you over. I also heard it's a fine if you're standing in the bike lane and get hit...ha!

This was right after we walked onto the cathedral grounds for our tour. We're right in front of the orange tree plaza.

Here's El Catedral de Sevilla. It was breathtaking! It is the largest Gothic Cathedral in the world.

It was nothing like anything I've seen before...very humbling to process everything and look at the extreme detail.

The solid gold and silver altar. It was made out of metals from the "New World"

All of the glass in the cathedral is the original glass that was placed there. This is very unusual but it is because Sevilla has not had any battles that would have caused the glass to break.

Christopher Colombus' tomb. His body was actually transferred all over the place, so there are only a couple small pieces of bone left. Recently they used some of Chris' (which I will now refer to him as) son's bones to DNA test and make sure it was actually Chris in the tomb. Good news - it is!

View from the top of the Giralda tower. SEVILLA! Such a pretty town.

Here's the bull fighting arena! We should be going to a bull fight here later in the semester.

Here's a view of the river. I haven't been there yet, but I plan on going soon. Some of my friends have gone and said it's really cool.

Another picture of the cathedral and orange trees. I obviously took a ton of pictures today, so sorry if I'm overloading with pics.

Last one - promise! This was supposed to be a cool picture because of the way the orange trees "frame" the Giralda Tower. I'm not much of a photog though, so this probably isn't what it should look like...but I did my best.

After the cathedral tour we went back to The Center (Sidenote: when I refer to The Center I'm talking about our school). We had another orientation meeting and learned about our host families a little more. Kelsie and I are living with a family that we think is a family one of our friends lived with a year ago. We are moving out of the hotel and in with our host families tomorrow morning.

I'm actually kind of sad to move out of the hotel. It's been like living in the dorms again. We all leave our doors open and go in and out of each others rooms. It's been so much fun the past few days. We've made our own little Sevilla "family." Living with the host family is going to be quite an experience. I have a feeling there won't be too much speaking the first few days.

I'm sure I'll have a lot of stories to tell once I'm living with the host family and working for my internship. Ha - we'll see!

Tomorrow we're going to have a pretty free day after we get to our host family. I can't wait to see what our tiny room is like...between Kelsie and I, and are four HUGE suitcases, it should be interesting. After that I think we're planning on going to get cell phones and do a little shopping - I'm having withdrawals.

Now I'm about to pack up my suitcases and give the hotel a bittersweet goodbye tomorrow morning. Here's to continuing my Sevilla adventure...the fun has only begun!

Abrazos,

Paige