hbate

Those of you that know me, know that I'm Catholic. However, those that know me well know that I'm not a practicing Catholic. Regardless, a group of us decided to check out the mass at the cathedral in Sevilla tonight for Ash Wednesday. Didn't understand a thing they said, but it was a typical Catholic mass. I'm still able to appreciate everything that Catholicism has to offer, even if I don't accept the bread and blood of Christ, or participate in other traditions while I'm there. Now I can say I've been to a Catholic mass in Spain, pretty cool. The cathedral is beautiful inside, it was my first time inside since I've been here. Here, they put the ashes on the very top of your head (so now it's all over my hair) instead of ... read more

Friday our program took us all to Malaga for the day. I've uploaded pictures on facebook that you can check out. It's a beautiful city and the beach was amazing! Much cleaner than Sevilla right now, which was a nice break. We started with a walking tour of the city and checked out the cathedral there. It's beautiful inside, I can't believe how they built places like these. Eventually I'll start to get sick of looking at cathedrals, and remembering the specifics and differences between them, but they're always going to be beautiful to look at. Then we went to the Picasso Museum. Picasso was born in Malaga and then traveled to Madrid and Paris and a few other places throughout Europe. This museum has 250 pieces of his work, all the originals. I'm not an ... read more

First day of school! We all talked about how we felt like freshmen again, lost in this huge school and speaking terrible Spanish. We'll get the hang of it soon, I hope. I went to 3 classes today, 2 of which I have decided not to take haha. One was not interesting and the other was too basic of a level of class for me. I'm going to try a few new classes tomorrow and then I think I'll have my schedule pretty much set for the rest of the week! It won't be official for another week or so though. All of my professors were very nice and not very intimidating, like I expected. I have alot of people from my program in my classes so we can study together which will be nice! This ... read more

Sevilla is 7 hours southwest of Madrid. We took a bus and left the hotel around 10 this morning, got to our families around 6:30pm. I met my family, a woman in her 50's name Paola, an older man in his upper 50's named Jose, a 14 year old boy named Sergio, and a 10 year old girl name Claudia. We had to roll our luggage a few blocks and I ran straight into a pole when I was talking with my host mom. It was pretty embarrassing but it seems to be happening a lot on this trip... When we first came to the house the family showed us around and let us unpack in our room for a while. Its pretty small, but bigger than the UW dorms in Madison. We have a large ... read more

Well today was the longest day ever. I don't even really remember where it began but I've only slept about 6 hours in the last 48, so I'm heading to bed soon. We did a lot of exploring today. I met a nice group of girls, one is from New Jersey, another from Washington, two are from north/south Cali, one from Michigan, and another from Missouri. We drank espresso con leche, sangria, and ate pizza vegetal for lunch. Then we walked around a little bit and explored the train station, called Atocha in Madrid. We also had a panoramic bus tour of the city with the group, but I fell asleep, it hit me like a brick wall at that point. They suggested that we shouldn't sleep until bedtime so we can get one a schedule, ... read more