Ay Ay Ay!!

For our long holiday break, I escaped to Seville in Southern Spain with some other ladies from the school. It felt really nice to get out of Morocco for a while! My Spanish is nothing to brag about, but it is certainly better than my French and Arabic.

We stayed in a cute little apartment in Triana. The city was decorated with Christmas lights and holiday garb everywhere!!! It was wonderful!


We spent our time exploring, shopping, being tourists, eating tapas and churros, and simply relaxing!  Seville has many, many sites to see! We explored the palace, gardens, various plazas and squares, multiple bridges, and even took a carriage ride around the city! We also went in Giralda- the largest Gothic style cathedral in the world. It was overwhelmingly large! The best part was climbing up the bell tower (which was once a minaret for the mosque). The view was amazing!!!

 Our apartment wasn't far from the skyscraper being built...which served as a perfect directional tool for finding home! You can also see a little bit of the bull ring in this picture.

We celebrated Christmas with another family from the school. They came to our apartment for a 'Christmas feast'.  One of the girls has been to Seville a few times and has some friends there. A few of us went to celebrate with his family! They had heaping plates of seafood! I am pretty sure I am not allergic to seafood like half of my family is, but if there was ever something to set that allergy off, it would be a plate like that! I ate 'carne' like the kids :) Watching Kris and Shay try to de-shell, de-tail, and de-head their food was plenty of entertainment!! After lunch we went in the backyard and set off a bunch of fire crackers! We blasted oranges out of the pool, off the ground, even some out of the tree! Someone suggested placing one in the dead palm tree...but we decided that wasn't a good idea! Oh yea, and all of this was in Spanish...so I really only understood about half of everything going on! Still tons of fun!

The New Year tradition in Spain is to eat 12 grapes during the 12 strikes of midnight...if you succeed it's 12 months of good luck. If you can't do it, you have bad luck! So we got our grapes and gathered with Tons of other people in the plaza to ring in the new year!  By the way, eating 12 grapes in seconds is very similar to Chubby Bunny and quite difficult to accomplish! Especially, when the grapes have seeds...that adds an extra surprise and challenge!

Other things we really enjoyed included the Christmas video they projected onto city hall each night. It was the same video but we watched is at least 7 times! It even had fake snow (soap bubbles) that shot out over the audience. It was really cool!

 Churro Time. I don't feel an explanation is necessary for this, but if you haven't had a churro...your life is not complete! Around 5pm (Churro Time) each day a lot of the cafes and bars would fill up with people enjoying hot chocolate and churros! A churro is fried dough- kind of like an elephant ear with out all the sugar on it. So delicious!



Italica. Its a huge area of Roman ruins not too far out of Seville. We walked though the amphitheater, saw where the beasts were kept, tons of mosaics, remains of house, and a few other ruins left to explore. It was really beautiful and amazing to explore.

Flamenco. We went to a flamenco show one night and it was awesome. The dancers have a true talent! I know this because the next day we took Flamenco and Salsa lessons. We did both styles one day and then went back the next day to focus on Flamenco. I lack all rhythm and dance skill, so I was more the comic relief in the class! Moving my hands and feet at the same time was never something I excelled at! ;)  It was really fun though and we had a blast!


I really enjoyed exploring a little bit of Spain and loved my time out of Morocco. It made me excited to travel and see more of Europe! Six more weeks until Winter Break....where should I go then?