8 Feb:
The first week of classes went pretty well, luckily I got into all the classes I wanted to be in so my schedule I think will work out pretty well even though it’s gonna suck to have to get up so early on Mondays and Wednesdays. I’ve been looking at flights and trying to figure out where I want to travel, which has been a little stressful – there are so many places I want to visit while I’m here but I have limited time and money! but I’m very excited to go to Greece with Jackie! We are going the last weekend in april for 5 days – we are going to spend a day in Athens and then head down to Monemvasia, where my cousin has a lot of family. It looks so beautiful and I’m very excited.
This Thursday night I went out with SJ and Karen – we started at Buddha, a discoteca where we met a lot of the other API students. Then we headed out to try to find a flamenco show but we weren’t having very much luck – the streets were eerily deserted. We finally found a few little bars but nothing too exciting so we decided to start heading back. We took out our map to figure out the fastest way home when this drunken spainard and two of his friends came over, speaking broken English, and dragged us into one of the bars we had just been into. But this time, there was a guitar player and a singer and some spainards dancing. So we talked to a few of them, they were very nice and wanted to practice their English like we wanted to practice our Spanish. A very pretty Spanish girl tried to teach SJ how to dance – how to move our hands and hips and feet - I am still terrible but it was really fun! And there were a lot of cute Spanish boys haha. It was so authentically Spanish – we were the only Americans – and it was so drastically different from the crowded discoteca from earlier, I liked it much better. So we ended up being out very late and I had to get up early the next day to go on a field trip to the roman ruins of Italica, right outside of Sevilla. It was the first major roman city in Spain and has one of the most well preserved amphitheaters in all of Europe! It was very cool to see all the remains of the buildings, especially after so many years have gone by! It was very windy and cold though, I can’t wait until it gets warmer!
12 Feb:
I got a bike! My Sevici (the city bike system) card came in yesterday so I’ve been riding my bike all over the city! There are bike paths everywhere, it’s really nice. The way it works is that there are bike stations scattered around with locked bikes and you put your card into the machine and it lets you take one of the bikes and when you’re done riding it, you just return it to the nearest station. It seems like a pretty good system although it’s a pain when the closest station doesn’t have any bikes left. My legs are sore because I’m not used to riding so much, but I think I will be using this a lot, especially one nice days (it almost hit 70 today!) plus it cuts down my commute to school by a lot. It’s also useful at night because the buses stop running at 11 and my house is very far from everything.
In other big news, I got a job! One of my professors asked if anyone was interested in teaching English to children because one of his colleagues needed someone. I went and met with the man (he works in the ecology lab at the school) and I’m going to be teaching/helping his 10 year old son Pedro with English twice a week. There are also 3 younger girls: Maria (7), Marta (5), and Claudia (3). I might also be playing games in English with them just so they get used to hearing English; I’m only allowed to speak English with them while I’m there. My first day is tomorrow and I’m a little nervous but very excited – I think it’s going to be a lot of fun, plus it will be nice to be making a little money instead of just spending everything I have!
Thanks again for reading my blog, I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for your emails, and feel free to leave comments on here (sorry if the instructions are in Spanish!)
Good luck teaching English tomorrow! You'll be rich in no time.
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