¡Saludos desde Sevilla!

That's Greetings from Seville! for all of you guiris (foreigners)

I have successfully made it to Seville, Spain, my home for the next 3 1/2 months. Weird. VERY weird. I can already tell that this trip is going to shape me and mold me and I have only been here for one week! In all honesty, I don't know if I can describe all of the emotions that are pulsing through me, even now. It is a crazy mixture of feeling at home and completely comfortable while at the same time feeling like I am in an entirely different world with intracacies that I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams. I guess it really feels like this is a home that I never new existed while at the same time being an completely foreign place, and somehow that makes sense to me.

Before we even left O'Hare I had begun to try to prepare myself for what awaited me at the end of our 8 hour flight to Madrid and then after we arrived in Sevilla. I knew from talking to other people who had been overseas and those who had studied with this program that many things were going to be very different and that I'd just have to jump in and be gung-ho about them in order to really appreciate all of it. In order to do that, I have had to pretty much throw all of my concepts of "normal" out the window and just start from scratch. So far that has worked pretty well...not having expectations means that everything is better than you imagined. That isn't to say that sometimes it isn't difficult to do things that you've always done a certain way differently.

I hope to put up another blog soon that is more anecdotal, but for now this will have to suffice. Here is some pertinent info that explains more of what's going on right now:

We did begin classes on Monday and I love them all and all of the
professors are fabulous. My host family is also fabulous (we have our señora and two other señoras (her good friends whom she just moved in with literally one week before we arrived). But that isn't all of the people in our house. I have two roommies (both of whom I go to school with at JBU) and there are two German students who will be living with us for the next month or so. One of their friends might also join us by the end of the week because her current living situation is subpar. So in a few days
we may become a casita of 9 women. It's bound to be interesting! For
now at least we have tons of fun and our apartment is very large
and sufficiently accomodates all of us.

Well, to end (and I think I'm going to start doing this at the end of all of my blogs), I would like to share a few of the things that are noticibly different here that I am having to adjust to:

• No going barefoot. EVER. Unless you are in your bed or in the bath, there is no reason for you to not be wearing some kind of footwear be in regular shoes, flip flops, or zapatillas (slippers).
  
• On time doesn't really exist. Stuff just happens when it's going to happen and people don't ever show up early.
  
• Meal times. We eat lunch between 2 or 3 and I don't think we've eaten supper before 10.
  
• Living in a city. Sevilla is a bustling city (not huge, but decently sized) and I live on one of the busy streets. It's normal to hear trash trucks coming around at 1am and sirens and horns at all hours of the day or night.
  
• The heat. It's super hot, at least this time of year, and at least this year. People keep telling us that this is uncommon, but it's been steadily warm since we've arrived. Today was the first cloudy day and the high was about 90 degrees Fahrenheit. We rejoiced. And since most buildings/stores/homes don't have airconditioning, you make do with what you've got: changing out of your nice clothes as soon as you get home for siesta, and abanicos (old-school Spanish fans)....I'm definitely going to have to buy one.