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...

Cultural Fusion: Moorish Influence in Spain

  One of my professors at UPO describes Spain as an encrucijada, a crossroads where cultural influences from the Mediterranean, Africa, and Europe collide. To me, one of the most interesting influences is that of the Islamic Conquest  (711-1492) of what is today Spain. This history actually inspired my senior thesis project, which examines the...

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...

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,...