carmen!

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Last night for a class activity we saw the flamenco version of the opera “Carmen”. It was really cool to say the least. There was no singing besides the flamenco version of singing every once in a while (it´s a mix of bad opera and whining..) There was a band of about 20 with trumpets and drums and everything and that was really awesome. In the middle of the play a white stallion was on stage, tapping its hooves to the flamenco. There is a famous song that you would all recognize from Carmen, I´m posting a link to a youtube video of the song with the post!

This weekend I am staying in Sevilla Friday night. My friends are seeing the Whales (the original Whales was Bob Marley´s band) who are playing in Sevilla on Friday night. On Saturday about 10 of us are taking a 45 minutes bus ride to a beach very close to Sevilla. The bus leaves at 8 am so we will be there before 9 and have all day at the beach and depending on how much fun we´re having and the availability of hostels, we may be staying the night. If we end up coming home on Saturday, the plan is to go to the amusement park in Sevilla on Sunday.

We had our first test on Wednesday of this week. I did pretty well considering the class. My teacher only speaks Spanish (opposed to a PSU professor who speaks English and Spanish … very helpful!) It is so difficult to learn from someone who doesn’t know your language at all. If we have a question that we don´t know how to phrase in Spanish, he can´t answer it. If we don´t know what a word means, he can only explain what the word means in Spanish which sometimes does no good! He is still a great teacher and we all love him. There´s only nine of us in the class so a lot of the class isn´t too much learning but simply practicing. We talk about Spanish foreign policy (mostly just ask questions, but using our Spanish), the differences between Spain and America, movies we´ve seen, things we´ve done so far in spain, what we´re doing tonight, what we did last night. Basically all topics of interest to us, just in Spanish. We only have class next week Monday through Wednesday, we´re off Thursday for Corpus Cristi (I´m excited for it! It´s a pretty big holiday here in spain. They have had a procession marching through the streets of Sevilla since I got here with bulls pulling the different and decorated religious parts of the parade. Apparently, corpus cristi here will be really cool to see!) And then we just have our final on Friday. I CAN´T BELIEVE I´M ALMOST HALF WAY DONE WITH MY STUDY ABROAD! It´s way crazy how fast this is going, I´ve made such good friends .. I already can´t imagine having to say goodbye.

skip to the middle ... that is the song you will recognize and flamenco too!

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