I have just passed the two-month point in my program here in Sevilla and it is safe to say I have more or less settled into a routine. I walk the same way to class every morning, I have a schedule of restaurants I shift around, and my friends and I have designated bars or clubs for the varying night of the week.
I am lucky that I recently had the opportunity to shake things up a bit when I got to rediscover this city as a quasi-tour guide for the separate visits of my mom and sister.
My mom, my most recent visitor, was here this past week. We spent our time eating, drinking, sightseeing, and shopping. Basically, perfect. But the most exciting thing was to see the city through someone else’s eyes. I have grown rather used to seeing middle-aged people drinking during their lunch hour and children out at dinner with their parents at 11 pm. But to my mom it was quite surprising, as it was to me when I first arrived here.
We walked around on streets I hadn’t been on since my neighborhood tour my first week here. Those touristy pictures I had avoided taking (me in front of the bull stadium, Christopher Columbus’s tomb) were taken. We went into countless shops selling flamenco costumes or antiques that I would have never set foot in alone. We even passed a plaza, whose location I had lost, where we saw pigeons, hundreds of beer bottles, and people littered on the steps of a church. That’s the Spanish way, apparently.
My sister Anna, who is just a year younger than me, came to visit over her spring break. She was thrown into a much less glamorous view of Sevilla, sleeping in my apartment while we had five other guests as well. Clearly, we tried to spend a lot of time out of the apartment. I took her to see the most notable sights: climbing to the top of the Giralda and playing with peacocks in the Alcazar. As my loving baby sister, she got to listen to me spew out endless facts I’ve acquired about the history of the city through my classes and touring. (I’ve got a thing for trivia.) She put up with it and it was really great to see someone else learn all about the less well-known (and underrated) city in which I live.
The weekend in between my visitors I got the chance to be a tourist in a different Spanish city, Barcelona. It was the number one city I had wanted to see since I came to Spain. It was overwhelming—the size, the number of tourists, and the language. Catalan is extremely different from Spanish, like it was morphed with French. We got away with speaking Castilian Spanish a few places, but most everyone spoke to us in English. (Very English friendly, unlike here!)
Other than the language, there were other things to get accustomed to as well: the prices of drinks (€5 shots and €12 mixed drinks), the metro system (actually very easy), and the huge number of American and other students there.
We got to see Parc Güell and Sagrada Familia, both amazing works of Antoni Gaudí. I’m a sucker for sightseeing and I loved visiting each place, even if it means we trekked for miles around the city. We saw the beach and although it was chilly and windy, the infamous naked man who roams there was still on his daily constitutional. At night we got to go out right near those same beaches.
My program’s staff said during our orientation that each trip we take would make us more and more satisfied with our choice to study in Sevilla. After my several little vacations and getting to show my off own city, I can say that much is true.