Adios Sevilla!

Yesterday we arrived in Cordoba and now Sevilla is but a distant memory. Ok, maybe not so distant. The first two weeks in Sevilla were amazing, and I was a little sad to leave. (I do stress “little”, as I was also really excited to get to Cordoba and start looking for a place to live. It’s no fun living out of a suitcase.) I left very grateful that I chose to spend the extra two weeks in the immersion course for a few different reasons.

One: I’m convinced that the greatest benefit of the immersion course was not the classes. We had nearly 4 hours a day of classes, but this did not help as much as just being here for those two weeks. My difficultly with Spanish had nothing to do with learning the difference between the preterit and imperfect tenses. My greatest hurdle was (and still is to some extent) being so timid about speaking the language (and heaven forbid!) getting something wrong. Folks who know me probably giggle because they know this is true. I don’t want to look like a fool, and doing something wrong that I know I can do right drives me up a wall. Unfortunately, you just can’t wait in line for 15 minutes for helado just because I can’t think of the present-perfect-tense for haber querer immediately. So these last two weeks have been most helpful in just getting me to talk. Whether I say it perfectly or not, I’m saying it and I’m practicing it, and they’ll understand me (eventually).

Two: I loved the people in the program. Given two weeks of being foreigners in a strange country, you get pretty familiar with the people in the group, and I know the same bonds would not have been made during a 4 day orientation/party at a hotel. I was sad to separate from them after the two weeks, but the silver lining (more like platinum lining) is that I now have a group of people all across the south of Spain that I’m totally stoked to go and visit.

Three: It is an invaluable experience to live with a native family and given the opportunity, I will always try a live with someone (as opposed to a hotel) when traveling. I’ve only done a homestay one other time of my life, where I learned a lot. I was most fortunate that this time around I had another good experience and actually learned even more. They were a very kind and generous family and helped me with my speaking and understanding of the language a great deal (did I mention how patient they were!). But even with that, that was not my favorite part of my homestay. For example, the second week of my stay with them, three more girls from Switzerland moved in for the week as they visited Sevilla through a school program. My senoras reactions and comments to these three girls and their behavior was a more enlightening experience than for which I could have even asked. My senora became irritated as the girls kind of stayed to themselves and didn’t really interact much with me or the family. And she was absolutely incensed by the fact that one of the girls was a vegetarian. Not very sympathetic (or maybe was just ignorant to the general guidelines of vegetarianism) she would feed her leftovers of a dish that had been cooked with chicken and pork (just picking out the meat), and at the end she simply fed her the same soup, calamari and everything (I’m not sure if she was hoping that she just wouldn’t notice the obvious fish taste and chewy pieces or she was just left up to picking them out herself). Suffice it to say, being a former vegetarian I had a good feeling that these two weren’t going to make very good impressions on one another, and I was grateful that I had already made the decision to go full-meat eater in Spain. Overall, these differences are the kind of thing one would not really know (or at least fully appreciate) if they had merely stayed at a hotel while visiting Spain. They would also not know that going barefoot in the house is absolutely out of the question, or it’s completely routine to eat dinner at 10:30 in your pajamas. And I am so grateful that I now know about these things.