This all transpired on our weekend trip to Sevilla, which is about a three-hour bus ride southwest from Granada. We had wonderful weather, we got our first taste of what it takes to plan weekend trips on your own, and we found peanut butter!! That was a glorious hilight of the trip, but more on that later. Sevilla is much more modern than Granada, in that there is a Starbucks on every corner, but it´s still very historic and culturally interesting. In fact, it´s home to own of the largest cathedrals in all of Europe! We not only saw the inside of it, gorgeous, ornate, the whole she-bang, but Kevin, Devin & I camped outside of it on our first night and feasted on bread, deli-style sliced chicken, and jam. Yeah, we got some looks. And yeah, probably didn´t help our American reputations, but the other two Must-A-eaters and myself (like 3 muskateers? get it?) were famished, to put it lightly. In the middle of our street-side feast, my mom called and we just told her we were ¨having dinner¨--well that was the joke for the rest of the weekend. Had I told her I was sitting in a curb like a gypsy dipping chicken into strawberry jam, I think she might have started to worry.
Afterwards, full and happy, we all split some cheap (and by cheap I mean 3 € a bottle, cheap) and then went to Club Catedral, a discoteca there. Not quite as fun as the following night, when we went to a disco called Budda, but I think that´s because I was without my asian twin Justine at Club Catedral. Kaye met a ¨tennis player from Barcelona¨(c´mon Kaye, I tell everyone I am a professional swedish sunbather--you cannot believe what people tell you when you´re out, haha), and I whacked some creepo in the eye with my ponytail. He acted like a pirate for about 5 minutes (meaning he kept covering his eye with one hand, he didn´t have a nub or anything like that), trying to get me to apologize, and I more or less told him it was his own fault for getting so close to the Hurricane.
The next day I ghetto-showered: in my socks, and then attempted to dry off with a scrap of a towel I stole from the front desk (They make you PAY for towels there!!). Literally, I think I could have stolen a blanket from a blind man in jail that was bigger than that towel. Later, we toured around, saw Chris Columbus´tomb, saw Sevilla´s islamic version of our Alhambra, and went paddleboating on the river. Well, to be fair, the boys really are the only ones who actually paddled-- Justine, Katie & I sat in the back drinking Starbucks and watching the sunset. Would have been romantic, except that it was the 5 of us in a little boat, trying not to get run down by the Norwegian rowers that happened to be practicing at that time. Their little trainers were cute, though, scampering along the river on bikes with megaphones shouting at them ¨Öy heys nos frusghurgito!¨(Did I become so worldly that I also speak Swedish, you may ask? No. I made that up. Just so you can imagine what it sounded like). That night for dinner, instead of eating on the street again, we bought a bunch of bread, peanut butta, lunch meat, fruit and nutella and ate that at our hostal. It was like a flashback to summercmap, with all of us and our little sammies (sandwiches, for you proper people) and a room filled with bunkbeds. One of the most memorable parts of that weekend was getting churros con chocolate at 5:30 am after a night at Budda. We need some of these in Champaign, stat.
Throughout the rest of last week, not a whole lot happened other than that I nearly burned down my senora´s house because I left for class and completely left hot water on the stove when I was making tea. Good thing Lina has such a great sense of humor... I probably should buy her a new pot, though...and let me just say burning metal smells rancid!! I also learned how to eat a kiwi with the skin on..this happened because I wanted to eat that tasty lil´guy and was sadly without spoon or knife. It´s really not that bad, though! Like eating a peach that has a little five o´clock shadow maybe. And maybe you cough up little hairs all day. No big.
So then this past weekend we went to Morocco on a program put together by school. I´m not going to go into every detail but the short and long of it is this: Morocco´s definitley not a family-destination spot, it´s dirty, it´s an extremely poor country, some parts are indescribably beautiful, the people there will haggle you to death to buy their trinkets, and when all else fails, have faith that in a country that can barely scrape together running water, there´s got to be a McDonald´s somewhere. During our freetime in Tanger, Justine and I opted to wander off in search a Mickey D´s instead of stay in the medina, or marketplace, when it was dark out. Probably not the wisest idea in hindsight, but we were careful and I have a very good internal compass. And by ïnternal compass¨ I am referring to my staunch ability to seek out edible food in foreign lands when the hunger calls. After watching the Moroccan version of Sarah Palin´s turkey pardoning (beheaded chickens with blood and feathers and jugulars all hangin´out were all over the street), I got the best McFlurry I´d ever had and fries.
When I got home from my Moroccan adventures, our hot water heater broke, so showering was out of the question. The last ice bath I took was so cold, it literally gave me a headache. Alos, I found out Lina had accidentally dropped my underwear off the balcony while she was doing laundry (they hang all their clothes outside to dry here). Some poor little espanola below us is probably shaking her head, wondering why she has underwear that say Ï love summer¨and ¨I sacked the quarterback¨ on her balcony and in the shrubs below us...unless I can figure out how to explain that THAT in spanish, I guess it´s sayonara to those little guys. And on that note, I am out.
