Day 13: And Scool Begins!

This week was my first full week of classes here in Spain at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide, I’m only taking 12 hours this semester but all of them are in spanish. Universidad Pablo de Olavide (UPO) is a university located outside of the city limits, I take the metro everyday and I really love that. Public transportation can be such a learning experience even in the United States, you get to see the local dress, learn some of the more colloquial phrases, and meet all kinds of people. Sevilla has a very nice and economical public transportation featuring buses, trams, and the metro. It’s also a semi-major hub for buses and trains that will take you wherever you’d want to go within Spain and beyond. The metro system here is still very new and clean, it’s a single line so it’s direct and simple to use, and there is a stop very close to my house that takes me to straight to school in about 15 minutes. 

     The school itself is nothing special really, it’s a place for studies and there isn’t much of an on-campus life. Unfortunately, the international students are kind of sequestered in a few class rooms found in the upper part of the library. We have yet to meet any spanish students since we’re exiled into our own corner, but once their exams are over I’m sure we’ll have more opportunities to run into the regular students.

        I have 3 classes on Mondays and Wednesdays starting at 9am lasting til 1:30pm. My day starts with a class called Fonética y Fonología (Phonetics and Phonology) with a professor named Manuel Mejías, it’s a fairly cut-and-dry kind of class, we study the accentuation, pronuciation, and intonation of letters/words, it’s the study of the basic building blocks of a language. Next class is Pragmáticas y Comunicación (Pragmatics and Communications) and this one will probably be my favorite when things are all said and done, if not for the subject matter then definitely for the professor. Enrique, my professor, is a very excited and flamboyant spaniard, there isn’t a moment that he isn’t moving around and he loves interacting with his students. He also loves country music, s’mores, and is always telling jokes. The subject matter of the class, pragmatics, is almost as interesting as Enrique, it’s a field study found within linguists that studies how context contributes to meaning, and how extra-lingual aspects contribute language, . My other class on those days is Lectura y Redacción (Reading and Writing) and we’ll be doing just as the name describes, we’ve been assigned novel that seems fairly easy and short, but I hope it will prove to be interesting. 

     On Tuesdays and Thursdays I only have one class, but I have a feeling that it will be to be my most challenging one. It’s a class called Relaciones Políticos entre los Estados Unidos y América Latina (Political Relations between the U.S. and Latin America), so far it’s extremely interesting. The real challenge will be that I have to learn an entirely new spanish vocabulary of complex words used in political and historical studies in order to come across as coherent and to build a semi-intelligent/well-informed argument. The professor is very well informed and enthusiastic about the subject, he’s spent time all over latin america. His thick accent, which is a strange mixture of andalusian and caribbean spanish, through me for a loop the first class.

     I have a nice school schedule, I have classes in the morning and I get to be home in time for lunch. After lunch, I usually either take advantage of the time-honored tradition of siesta or I do one of my new favorite activities: getting lost in the city. 

     Walking is by far my favorite means of getting around, not only is it free, but I get to really experience the city; the sights, the sounds, the smells. Siesta hours are the perfect time to go walking because the streets are fairly quiet, but there is still enough of the city out and about to keep me entertained. I’ve attached some photos of some of my excursions. Last week I stuck to the small back-streets found within el Centro, starting behind el Catedral, but my first week I took my time winding the streets of Los Remedios (my neighborhood) and Triana (very old section of town, neighbor of my neighborhood). These tiny streets are laid out in a very old-fashioned way with no real grid system, more a maze of unmarked road that criss-crosses and folds back on itself. A maze that can be quite disorienting when you aren’t getting lost for fun, but one that keeps my feet moving and allows my mind to wander rather than it having to focus on getting from point A to B. 

     Here is where I should interject that Sevilla is a very safe city. All of my wandering goes on in populated areas during daylight hours, and I promise that I keep my wits about me at all times (despite my wandering mind). My host mother, a seasoned host of many years, says that her students have never run into any trouble during their stay here aside from a few disappearing purses at clubs and maybe the occasional pickpocket. (Also an important interjection: she did caution us to remain weary and aware no matter how comfortable we get, wise advice that should be heeded by everyone, no matter your location in the world).