Blog Day 5

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Looking Inward

Since the last update, we took a bus trip to Seville for a couple days and Córdoba for another and returned to our host families for Wednesday. In Seville, we had many walking tours in the hot sun and were very tired as the mini trip went on. In this situation I had to find in myself the ability to just keep walking and keep up and stay with the group. It is very easy to allow small things to exhaust you and ruin a trip, but I was determined to now allow that to happen, so I kept my head up and just looked on the bright side to keep going.

The Relational Level

After the events in Seville and Cordoba, we came back to the homestay, which was very refreshing, and relaxed until we had a dinner with the family. For whatever reason, we were all very talkative this dinner and sharing stories and joking around and making fun of Spanish for certain things and English for other things and it was just overall a very fun meal where I felt as though we built some very good relationships with both Rosa, our host mom, and the other students that live in the homestay with us. As the Culture Smart book says on page 104 in the section about meals, meals are an active time for socialization in the household and there is lots of talking and gossip that occurs over meals. This was truly prevalent in our dinner that night and was a nice comfort zone expansion that I felt needed to happen eventually.

The Social Side

Though it did not happen to me personally, the biggest thing that stuck out to me looking back at the trip to Seville was the restaurant we had the meals at and some of the things that occurred there. It was very apparent that the waiter was being very friendly and arguable flirtatious to many of the girls which started to make them uncomfortable especially with how many times we were there to eat. Rereading through the Insight Guides: Spain book, page 191 in the chapter on Seville gives good reason to the social setting and why that type of behavior occurred. The chapter explains that people in Seville are naturally flirtatious and overly friendly, so this was probably just culture to the waiter, but uncomfortable for others.

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