Not a Place

  This weekend I got to see an old and very good friend. We were talking about the places where we live and the places we've been to or want to go, and I commented that I wish I were back in Spain instead of in the US at least once a day. Every single day....

La Semana Santa (Holy Week)

La Semana Santa, Holy Week, is an important holiday throughout Spain, but most of all in Andalucía. Thousands of people flock to Sevilla for the festivities, which is one of the reasons I took most of that week to travel to Portugal. However, I returned late Thursday before Good Friday and was in Sevilla through...

Madrid: A Capital Experience

(Terrible pun intended. Puns are always intended.) I apologize to family and friends for falling behind in my blogging (sorry, Grandma!). I've been busy traveling and studying and living Sevilla! I just got back from a week in Portugal and I also want to share a bit about Semana Santa, but first I'll catch up on the rest of...

Toledo, Spain: Off the Beaten Track

My family has been bugging me to write about my most recent trip for a couple weeks, but mid-terms studying and a lot of reading for my literature class kept me more than occupied. At long last mid-terms are complete! 5 tests, 4 of which were in Spanish and all of which were straight memorization, opposite of...

Odds and Ends

This weekend I took a break from traveling so I could enjoy spending time in my host city. There is so much to see in Sevilla, and I love discovering new things about my Spanish home every day. Here are a few of the fun, random, crazy, weird, exciting things I’ve encountered recently: Remember when...

Córdoba: Lessons in Train Travel, the Inevitability of Getting Lost, and the Kindness of Spaniards

Thursday afternoon, two of my roommates, Alayna and Courtney, and I decided that we wanted to take a day trip this weekend after all, despite our original plan of using this weekend to get settled with school, rest from an exhausting two days of classes (which isn’t that bad, except that operating completely in a...

Seeing the Sights

Being a tourist is not the same as being a traveler or a member of a community. I will not be able to say that I know Paris after I’ve snapped photos of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. I am not living in Sevilla to check off a list of important buildings,...

First Impressions

After months and months of saying, “Is this Spain trip real?” I am finally discovering that it is indeed real. It’s been a week since I left for Sevilla, and what a ride it has been so far. The journey from St. Louis to Sevilla took a relatively easy 15 hours. Maybe I’ll be over...

A playlist for adventure

(Posting this a day late because airport Wi-fi is not exactly the best.) Well, I am finally off to Spain!  I am overwhelmed with excitement right now and have been riding this high since last night.  This morning I made a playlist feeding off of that high (because all major life events require music, yes?),...

Courage.

This morning I woke up and looked at my phone. December 15. And it suddenly hit me that exactly one month from today, I will be boarding a plane to Seville. That's a realization filled with way too many emotions for 7 AM, especially when I had two finals to focus on today. All the...