Sorry again for not having written in ages....it's been busy busy busy the past month! Steady stream of visitors every weekend has kept me very occupied..will try and remember the best bits!
Weekend with Ru was awesome, did all the usual tourist stuff as well as having an American Indian themed goodbye party for my Finnish housemates - they made us all an amazing meal of Finnish salmon soup (still have to get the recipe for that!) and pancake for pudding. Lots of flamenco, sightseeing and lapping up the sun (along with plenty of ice cream!). Brilliant :D
The next weekend Mum came to visit, and had booked herself into the gorgeous looking hotel down the road, so I came along and made use of the services for a luxurious couple of days! Air conditioned bedroom and all-you-can-eat breakfasts...yes please!! Had the best 3 nights' sleep I've had since I've been here I think! It was also the last weekend of the Italian guys who live in my house, so we popped round on Friday night to join in some of the goodbye celebrations - thankfully they were suitably relaxed! Was nice to be able to snuggle into a nice cool, quiet bedroom afterwards though - those boys can be pretty damn noisy! Again, lots more sightseeing, flamenco, awesome food and a trip (my second!) to the Arabic baths for a massage and perfect relaxation session after a long day's exploring. :D
This weekend just gone I caught the (expensive but worth it!) train all the way to Madrid - it was the AVE (the high speed train) so it took a mere 2 1/2 hours!! And was of course blissfully air conditioned, with a film each way in either English or Spanish to pass the time, sigh! I went to visit Claire Love, a really good old friend of mine from CHS, but who moved to Cheltenham when we were 16 and we've only since managed to catch up a handful of times, the last being 3 years ago - so was fantastic to see her. She's in a nearby town called Guadalajara doing a work placement in a German company (but whose employees there only speak Spanish) over the summer in an attempt to gain some knowledge of Spanish before she travels to South America in October. Having only a few months' worth of GCSE level Spanish knowledge (from back when she was 13!) she was pretty relieved to speak to a native English speaker, it seemed! We also met up with my Israeli friend Rony, a girl I met out here on my course but who left at the end of July and who I'd become really good friends with. She happened to be in Madrid at the same time that I was there, so it worked out great! She and Claire also got on really well, too :D The Friday night, we got a drink and some food and went to a street party that Rony's friends had introduced her to, that was going on for the whole weekend. Unfortunately the trains back to Guadalajara (about an hour's journey) stopped at 11.40, or so we thought, so we pretty much got a feel for the atmosphere and had to leave - we weren't too upset, as we were both shattered from very long days! So we pushed through the crowds to the nearest metro station - asking along the way, as both of us hardly know the city at all! We caught the train but realised we were cutting it extremely fine on time, but Claire had bought us both tickets earlier that day so it would have been a waste not to go. We managed to get off at the stop before the regional train station, which is usually connected by a passageway, but the door to it was locked! Panicking a little, we jumped back on the train to the next stop and ran to the station. The tickets Claire had bought didn't open the barrier - turns out they expired 2 hours after purchase! So we wrestled with the machine, having discovered there was still a train on the platform and we might make it. I bought us two more tickets (the machine refused to take my €20 once - helpful! It's making me stressed just writing about it haha!) and we dashed through the barrier and scrambled onto the train, a minute before it was due to leave. Phew!! We just collapsed laughing - what a chaotic end to my first night!
The next day we met up with Rony and caught the train to Toledo - a nearby town which used to be the capital of Spain, hundreds of years ago. It's a beautiful place - like Seville in the respect of the old traditional buildings and windy streets, but with plenty of hills and set in an undulating green valley - beautiful. The weather was perfect, too - around 30 degrees at the hottest, about 18 at night! The coldest I've been for a long time! (I know, I'm going to struggle in the UK!) We wandered the streets, were overcharged for a very expensive touristy menu (a trap we all knew we were falling into, but there wasn't much other option!) and lapped up the relaxed atmosphere. We couldn't believe we were only half an hour from Madrid and yet this place was so tranquil.
On Sunday we went to the Reina Sofia art gallery in the capital - Rony had been telling me about it on Friday, about how it has Picasso's Guernica which I was so excited about seeing (I hope to do my Spanish dissertation this year on Catalan artists' work before and during the Spanish Civil War, and Guernica is about as perfect an example of this as you can get!) - it's enormous and so breathtaking. We also saw a few early Dalí pieces, and Miró as well - other artists I hope to study in my work. It was a fantastic gallery, and because it was Sunday it was free to get in! Although they did kick us out at 2.30, but as we got there at 11.30 we had a pretty good amount of time to wander about contemplating the pieces :) I would love to go back though. Other than that, Madrid was pretty underwhelming - it's a relatively interchangeable city, with not much personality that makes it specifically Spanish, which you would assume is why they get so many American tourists (and boy, were there a lot!). It really made me appreciate the authenticity and relaxed, unpretentious beauty of Seville. I'm gonna be so sad to leave! (Which, incidentally, I do on Friday!) Although of course I'm ecstatic to be going back to Quinny, our new flat, my birthday, seeing everyone again....it's going to be fantastic :D I'll never forget my time here, though - I really hope to come back soon.
It's a bank holiday today (well, technically the holiday was yesterday, but when a holiday falls on a Sunday the Spanish take the Monday off as well - a good idea, I feel!!) so nothing is open - I'm going round to Steph's house in a minute for a DVD day to escape the heat and pass the time with friends :) The house here is so empty now - only a Finnish girl and myself are left! So the house owner is now padding about cleaning the place before all the Erasmus students arrive at the end of next week. And so the cycle begins again....I love this house, if its walls could talk it could write books longer than Tolstoy's! I may or may not get time to write again before I head home - have lots of plans for filling up this week before I go! Suffice it to say it has been an incredible summer, I have learnt so much, Spanish or not, and will never forget it. I love you, Sevilla! :D
Hope England is good, eagerly awaiting my return! :p
Loads of love,
Nikki :) xxxxxxxxxxxx
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