End of monthlong post

The following weekend I stayed in Sevilla. On Friday, it dawned on me how little time I have left here, so Kai and I committed to doing touristy stuff, and visited the Torre de Oro that we walk by every day. Later that afternoon, I went to get a haircut. Carmen had recommended a haircut academy right near our house that’s super cheap, because the workers are students. She assured me that they do a good job. This was disastrous. I’m sure they do a good job on traditional Spanish haircuts, but my hair was completely foreign. I know that I explained things well, but a haircut is still not something I recommend doing in one’s second language. The student kept calling over her teachers for help. The teachers were fine, but the second they left her she kept screwing up. She ended up chopping off one side of hair, and completely forgetting the other side. I pointed this out, and she did a little, but it is still completely asymmetrical. This was a completely traumatic experience, and luckily, Kai was able to comfort me after.

On Saturday morning Sasha and I went to Aracena with the program. We stopped along the way to tour a mine alongside the “Rio de Tinto” (river of wine). There was, in fact, a red lake. We proceeded to Aracena, a tiny town that I had definitely seen before (I think we hiked through it the first Senderismo). It was really nice to have time with Sasha, and we spent the morning walking through the town in search of ice cream. Later on, our group visited the “Gruta de las Maravillas,” which translates to “Cave of Wonders.” This was incredible. It’s this massive cave underground that has been augmented with stairs, railings, and lights to make it walkable. It was filled with glowing green lakes and stalactites galore. I highly recommend looking up pictures online, as photography was not allowed. Saturday night Sasha and I finally saw, and loved, “Slumdog Millionaire.” It was nice to just watch a movie, a favorite activity of mine that has been removed from my routine since coming here. We saw it in the original language movie theater, which, as it turned out, meant that it was not dubbed. However, there were still subtitles in Spanish and not in English. This meant that for most of it, when English was not spoken, we were viewing the movie in Spanish. This was totally fine for both of us, but it was strange when the movie switched to English. Sasha and I confirmed after that we had both continued reading the Spanish and ignored the English, because we were used to it. I was proud that we were able to understand all of it in Spanish.

I woke up sick Sunday morning. I hadn’t been that sick in awhile, and I was surprised that I contracted something due to my massive amount of sleep the week before and my daily orange consumption. This was especially bad timing because I had midterms the week that followed. I decided to go to the doctor, something that Kai had done the week before. There is one office that’s very helpful to American students, and I dragged myself out of bed and over there. The doctor complimented my Spanish as I described my symptoms and even managed to joke with him. I remembered the unit in seventh grade Spanish where we learned sick terms and practiced doctor’s appointments in class. I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve used this vocabulary since then. Ms. Morehouse should immediately get some professional development points for effective teaching, since the necessary words came to mind after an eight-year hiatus. He prescribed me some stuff, and my host family luckily had their tub of Vick’s VapoRub, pronounced in Andalusia “BeebahpoRRROO.” Somehow, I survived through exam week. I had my Flamenco exam Wednesday night, my Tres Culturas and grammar exams back to back on Thursday, and my art history exam Monday morning. I realized that these were my first content exams in Spanish. Everything’s graded on a ten-point scale, and so far I’ve only heard back from Flamenco (8’9, as it was written, with a “Bien” after my essays!).

Totally unrelated: I looked up the Spanish word “polo” in my bilingual dictionary the other day. Here is what I found:
polo m 1 pole. 2 polo. 3 ice lolly.

I liked that.

I wrote the bulk of this while falling asleep in bed last night, intending to go back and edit and delete the boring details before posting it. However, it’s raining and I’m sleepy and sick of writing, so I’m just going to post it as is, oh well.

Mom--you were wondering how to comment; you can do it right under every post!!