Yesterday, our program took us on an excursion to Alcazar. It was a palace that was built many, many, MANY years ago for the Royal Family to live in at the time. Now it is used for tours mostly, but when the Royal Family comes to Seville, the place is closed off and that is where they stay to this day! They have continued to add on to the palace throughout the years, and the rooms are all different because different Kings wanted different designs, so it truly is a mix of old Arabic and more modern design. Pretty amazing architecture, nothing I could truly capture with my fairly lacking photography skills, but here are some pictures!
It's pretty easy to tell which is more modern, but all of these arches that are detailed are the more 'arabic' influenced architecture!
Finally got Britt in front of the camera! Thank goodness this girl is here :-)
Above is the ceiling where the King's throne sits, pretty amazing, picture doesn't do it justice of course!
I love the story attached to the picture below, it's so scandalous, apparently one of the Queens used to use this bath to...uhhhh...."entertain" her other lovers while the King was upstairs!!
So, moving on! Today was a fairly big day for me in Seville! My intensive Spanish class started and the teacher is really entertaining and fun...he is a democrat, but I suppose I can look past that :-) I'm a little nervous because we have to do interviews with random people on the street about why they don't have jobs and what they think about the new smoking laws, and I'm thinking that might be a little awkward!
I also signed up for my regular session classes and got into the ones I wanted. However, the best news is that I can change my homestay! I went in and talked to my advisor about it and she said that it was totally fine to change, people do it all the time. So either tomorrow or Wednesday I get to go and look at to new houses and apparently both families have small children :-) SSOOOO excited. Although I will feel horrible when I have to leave this house because I don't want to offend them as they have been very nice, I just don't feel very comfortable here and I know now that it's not just an adjustment thing as it's been a little while.
Also, last night I was able to watch the Packer game!! It was SO much fun because the bar I was in was really evenly split between Bears fans and Packers fans. In the last ten minutes I think my blood pressure rose a ton...especially since there was an extremely annoying bears fan sitting next to me who also happened to have an incredibly high-pitched scream...not pretty. Nevertheless, as soon as I knew we would win I reserved...yes, you read that right, reserved...my bar stool for the Super Bowl!! I'm heartbroken not to be in Wisconsin for this, especially because throughout the whole game I wanted nothing more than to be sitting on a couch with a big plate of food in front of me with my family and friends!! It was very odd watching this big of a game without seeing my Dad get so upset and wondering if his face could in fact get any more red (it always can) :-) Anyways, I will be more loyal than any of you Packer fans and watch it at 3 in the morning here in Seville from my oh-so-comfortable reserved bar stool!
That's all for now folks, I'll keep you all posted on the homestay although I won't be changing until January 31st as of now anyways!
Hasta luego!
No comments:
Post a Comment