I am. So. EXHAUSTED!! I left at 9:30 this morning to go to class and was out all day till just now (6:45pm), and I have to leave again in 15 minutes. Since we walk everywhere, it takes a long time to go everywhere and on my way home, my feet are always killing me! It doesn’t help either that the sidewalks are not paved. I love Sevilla though, I’m already starting to get a sense of the city, and sometimes I can go home without getting lost!! Haha, it sounds bad, but that’s actually kind of impressive. This city is just so crazy because there are no straight streets and clear-cut intersections. You can’t really say “take the second left and then the first right” because there are probably 3 lefts and 2 rights spread out over a plaza. Also, their street signs are written on buildings rather than on posts at intersections like ours; they are typically at the ends of streets so if your intersection hits the middle of a street, sometimes you can’t even tell what street it is. Before I came here, I thought I had a good sense of direction, but boy is this place hard to navigate.

           We had a tour of the Catedral and Giralda today and the view of Sevilla was so beautiful from La Giralda (the famous tower of the cathedral). The Catedral in Sevilla is the 3rd largest cathedral in the world and it took 400 years to build so there are all sorts of architectural styles inside, it’s really cool. From the top of the tower, you can see the whole city. The main part of Sevilla (El Centro) really isn’t that big, you can probably walk from one side to the other within 45 minutes. Last summer, I thought that I walked a lot in Tokyo, but we also took the the train a lot to different parts of the city. Here however, we literally walk everywhere.

          After the Catedral, Ginny and I went to the Universidad de Sevilla to interview some Spanish students for our Spanish class and it was so much fun! I was apprehensive at first, but all the students were really friendly and I loved talking to them! I was also really impressed with myself that I could actually understand most of what they were saying! Then on the way home Ginny and I talked completely in Spanish. I have improved so immensely in just the past few days, it’s amazing. I really hope that I can become almost fluent by the time I go home! And it’s SO much fun to talk in Spanish!

La Giralda

Inside La Catedral

View from the tower

Catedral from the outside

Location: Sevilla, Spain