Novias

A bride and groom having their wedding photos taken at the Alcázar in Sevilla

In Spain, I think about Candice (my sister-in-law) often because the city has numerous bridal boutiques and I often see brides getting pictures taken at picturesque spots here. (Candice is getting married this summer.) One Sevilla plaza in particular is fittingly filled with both bridal boutiques and children’s clothing stores. Check out this shop window:

They often have a mother-of-the-bride dress next to the bridal gown on display – Charlene, have you found yours yet?

We also often see decked-out wedding guests, shiny cars decorated for the newlyweds, etc., because we visit little pueblos on Saturdays, and the cathedral is typically the most important site to visit in a Spanish town.

A wedding taking place inside the cathedral in Cadiz

On our Saturday afternoon in Cadiz, we planted ourselves at a cafe across the plaza from the beautiful cathedral. In the time it took us to drink a few glasses of sangria, we saw 3 separate weddings get underway.

On the steps of the cathedral

Candice, I can’t wait to celebrate your wedding day!

No Aprendiendo la Lengua

Even in Spain, sometimes I have bad days. There are those rare days when I can only see the ugly—I only smell cigarette smoke and car exhaust, I only hear the noisy engines of mopeds whizzing by, I step in dog poop on the sidewalk and everyone seems to be scowling.
Current mood: sad (and fragile)

The bad days tend to coincide with my bad days in Spanish class. I have now taken 4 weeks of intensive Spanish and I feel very frustrated. Today we had a test and I bombed it. I still don’t know which verb tense to use when and the irregular verbs are killing me. Last night I had to confess to Brad that I didn’t actually know how to say “to be” in Spanish. Embarrassing.

It is impossible to acquire a new language in mere weeks – even months. But . . . that means I have to work at this for years??? (Sigh) Even geniuses like Brad need years to become fluent in a language, but I’ve always had the feeling that I’m not the brightest crayon in the language acquisition box. Learning Spanish is important to me because language and culture are always completely intertwined.

I am more than happy to be prayed for, if anyone wishes to do so. We don’t have a faith community over here yet and that makes it tough. However, my psychic partner, Mom, always knows how to cheer me on. Just today (just in time) I received a letter from Mom and a West African saying is written on the card: Not to know is bad . . . but not to wish to know is worse.

El Fin de Semana

As I mentioned in an earlier post, our friend Pavel is staying with us for a few days. His ankle is on the mend from a soccer injury, so we had an excuse to finally try out the city bikes.

In September, Sevilla implemented a bike sharing system. Throughout the city, you see little stations with bikes locked up. For a few euros, you can get a 7-day pass (or a year-long pass) and check the bikes in and out. We have a little bike station on our corner. So, we just grab a bike, cruise over to the Plaza Nueva, river, cathedral, etc. and park the bike at the stations there.

B on his bici
On Friday we went out for tapas in Santa Cruz (old Jewish barrio.)

Pavel, Brad and Rob at Las Teresas, a tapas bar in Santa Cruz – the calamares and croquettas here are to die for! (Those are cured hams hanging from the ceiling)

Saturday, we decided to take our day trip to Cadiz. From Sevilla, it’s a 2-hour bus ride. We saw the beach – and most of town – from the top of an open-air “turibus.” Cadiz is a town on a teeny peninsula that sticks out into the Atlantic. Needless to say, it has historically been a valuable port. Most notably, Cadiz is . . . drum roll please . . . the oldest city in Europe!

Cadiz . . .
La playaLa cathedral

We only spent a few hours there, and we hope to return. We heard about a night train that goes from Sevilla to Cadiz during Carnival. Cadiz during Carnival is like New Orleans Mardi Gras – crazy fun and crazy expensive to stay in a hotel.

To finish out our weekend, on Sunday, we three went to the Festival of Nations – a temporary festival at the Parque Maria Luisa (beautiful city park.) We had gyros for lunch from the Egypt tent. We then set out for the soccer stadium – Betis was playing Real Satander (those are soccer teams for those of you don’t already know.)

Betis player

As we neared the stadium, everyone who passed us was wearing green and white (Betis colors) and most of them were yelling and/or drinking. I was getting so excited. We squeezed through the crowds outside the stadium to get up to the ticket counter . . . And the cheapest seats were just too expensive for us. We didn't go to the game. Muy triste! We felt a bit defeated and extremely hot. Man, it is still hot in Andalucia!

Anyway, that’s life. I bet the bullfights are cheaper anyway. Soccer here is like U.S. football and bullfights are like baseball. That’s my inexpert opinion.

Aprendiendo la Lengua

Yesterday, I needed to exchange a light bulb at the store because I’d purchased one earlier that day, and the base was too large for my new lamp. And, I explained this situation to the store clerk entirely in Spanish. Ta da!

It’s important to revel in the small language victories. For example, when a Spaniard asks me a question and I understand what they say, it’s a victory. When I know the correct preposition or adjective to use in a sentence, it’s a victory. When I can compose a sentence in my head, it’s a victory.

This person is probably at the same language level as me

My classes have been extremely helpful. We are now learning the 2nd out of 4 past verb tenses. Yippee! I can say, “I lived in New Orleans.” Vivé en Nueva Orleans. It’s really annoying to say “I live in New Orleans 2 years past.” “I live in South Carolina, but now I live in Los Angeles.”

Because I am fully committed to learning the language, I am committed to watching TV. Cooking shows are especially helpful. The host of the show tells you what he’s doing as he’s doing it: “Now, I take the 5 raw anchovies and place them on the roasted red peppers and onions. Next, I pour approximately 100 grams of olive oil on the fish and garnish with 3 french fries.”

One of my favorite shows

Spain shows tons of American shows and movies – C.S.I., Grey’s Anatomy, The Simpsons, etc. But, they dub everything into Spanish. Sometimes it’s really annoying, but I actually like The Simpsons better in Spanish. When the little Spanish voice for Marge says "Oh, Homie!" it's so cute.

Remember that movie, Witness, with Harrison Ford about the Amish kid who witnesses a murder? (It came out in the 80s.) Anyway, EVERYONE in Spain saw Witness. But, there’s no Spanish word for Amish, so in the movie, Amish was dubbed as Mormon. Years ago, when Mormon missionaries would try to mission in Spain, the Spaniards said “But, I don’t want to give up electricity!” Because they had seen Witness. Seriously.


Anyone will tell you that the most important part of learning a language is just getting out there and speaking it with natives. My Aunt Susan encourages me to simply strike up a conversation with the old woman next to me in the market while buying bread . . . I haven’t gotten to this level quite yet.

However, Brad, Rob and I went out for tapas recently with Paulina – a Mexican girl about our age who is researching at the School of Latin American Studies here. I practiced my cumbersome Spanish with her and she was quite courteous (typical Mexican.) She’s here until December, so I’ll definitely have to use her for practice -er- go out with her again. And, we have a friend, Pavel, staying with us this weekend who is also Mexican. Pavel is married to one of Brad’s UCLA amigas. I get to show him Sevilla in Spanish!

Next step: intercambios. An intercambio is simply 2 people getting together to practice speaking a new language. Through my program, I can get the name of a Spaniard who is learning English and I simply call them and say, “Hola, quieres . . .” Okay, I don’t know the Spanish word for “to meet.” As soon as I learn that word, I’ll get an intercambio partner and we’ll go for coffee.

Día de la Hispanidad

We celebrated our first Spanish national holiday this past weekend: el Día de la Hispanidad. Every October 12, Spain has a 2-in-1 holiday. They celebrate the day of the Virgin Pilar, who is the patron virgin of Spain, and they celebrate the day Columbus discovered the Americas. I didn’t really know what to expect on our day off – other than our supermarket being closed.

Brad and I had a visitor, Cathleen, stay with us for the holiday weekend. (Cathleen has a Fulbright to teach school in Madrid this year, and we met her during the orientation week there.) As we were preparing our apartment for lunch on Friday with Cathleen and Rob (Rob is Brad’s fellow researcher), we heard loud drumming outside our building. We rushed downstairs and found a parade passing right in front of our building at that very moment.

The small parade was led by the Virgin of Pilar – a sculpted virgin clothed in beautiful fabric, and surrounded by white flowers – on top of a wooden platform. Behind the virgin was a brass band playing a melancholy, but rhythmic tune. Watching the parade slowly pass by for those few minutes was quite magical.

The parade was heading to this church, just 2 blocks away from our apartment; where the virgin resides when she’s not leading parades.

Close up of the Madonna on this church; I especially like this one because Mary is crouching down with Jesus

Having our first visitor in Sevilla was a good excuse for us to finally see 2 of the biggest sights in the city: the cathedral/Giralda (tower) and the Real Alcázar (royal fortress).

Cathleen, Brad and Rob in front of the cathedral

The cathedral was first built as a mosque in the 12th century and just a few decades later it was consecrated as a cathedral. It has been added to, embellished and generally "duded up" for centuries. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: that cathedral is freaking huge.

Sevilla is flat. So, climbing to the top of the Giralda in the cathedral is a nice way to see the entire city from up high.

One view from the Giralda; you can see just a snippet of the river in the background

The Real Alcázar was extraordinary! The palace and gardens are so expansive that I didn’t even try to see everything. When I get my residency card, I can go there for free and I plan to do so often. The Real Alcázar is another example of a Spanish structure that’s been around since the Moors. As you can see, the Moorish architecture is striking.


Muslims do not depict humans or animals in art, so the entire Moorish part of the palace is covered in countless intricate wood carvings and colorful mosaic designs. If you stare at those designs long enough, you really go to another level . . . like . . . mentally . . .

Taken during hour 3 of Neely's mosaic trance . . .

At the Real Alcázar, you wander into a different room and suddenly you've gone from 12th century Moorish Spain to Christian/Gothic Spain. These ballrooms are painted yellow with white trim, a gilded Madonna is hanging on the wall and incredibly detailed tapestries of Spain’s discovery of the Americas are on display. And then there’s a random cross-eyed merman.

Merman

Our weekend with Cathleen also involved lots of delicious local cuisine, wandering around Santa Cruz and Triana, and lengthy discussions on peculiarities in Spain. It starts to feel like home when you get to show your first visitor around your new city.

Plaza de los Niños

“Is there any country in the world where children are so well cared for, so well dressed and groomed?”
from In Spain by Ted Walker

Whenever I wander around Sevilla, I see beautiful young children and babies in beautiful clothes. Children all over the world are beautiful, but the caretakers of children in Spain seem to truly cherish and indulge their children by allowing them to be children.

One of the countless children's clothing shops in Sevilla – check out these fall fashions!
The name of this shoe store is Little Blue Horse

As I mentioned in an earlier post, children get to stay up late here. A group of 6 or 7-year-olds children may be kicking around a soccer ball as you are enjoying your 2nd glass of wine, sitting outside a cafe, in one of the countless little plazas here. And, you tend to see children with pacifiers or in strollers and think, “Isn’t she a bit too old for that?” Not in Spain.

Children are also indulged by their relatives. A typical Spaniard stays close to home his entire life, so many families live in the same city or town as their grandparents and aunts and uncles. I often see what looks like 3 generations – a baby, her mother and her grandmother strolling around town together.

Inside a cafe

Speaking of strolling, the baby carriages are even souped up here. Most strollers and baby buggies have a soft, plush cushion tied into the seat, to cradle baby or toddler.

The stereotypical frumpy mom (split ends, no makeup and wearing an Old Navy track suit) does not exist in Spain. Look how fierce this mom is - she is working it!

In one of the plazas closest to our apartment, there is a small play area which gets very popular around 7 or 8 p.m. every night. I call this plaza “Plaza de los Niños” (The Children’s Plaza.) Watching children play at this plaza is a delight for me. A large plaza in the center of town called Plaza Nueva is also full of children playing every night.


Seeing very young and very old people together is quite common in Spain. When walking around our little neighborhood at night, we may see a group of 5 old friends – in their 80s – chatting on a bench in a plaza, a couple of middle-aged women meeting for an after-work drink in a neighborhood bar, a small herd of teenagers passing by – destination unknown, and a family of 5 – with their baby buggy leading the crew across a cobblestoned street.

I love it when I’m heading home, it’s late and I’m tired; I look into a bar as I pass by, and I see a lively family gathering with the baby in his stroller parked right next to the table. He doesn't have to miss out on all the fun just because he's 18 mo.s old.

Nuestro Barrio

Map of Sevilla; we live in the San Vicente area (sunburned flesh color)

For those of you who remember the meaning of “baño” from your high school Spanish classes, you may think we live on “Bathroom Street.” It’s actually “Baths Street.” And when in Spain, don’t ask where the baño is (like I did for 2 weeks) . . . they say “aseos” or “servicios.”

A street sign

Some inquiring minds may want to know more about our little home in Sevilla – specifically what we see out of our windows. Apparently the first photos I posted of our piso led readers to believe that we have no windows and perhaps live in an old Moorish wine cellar. We actually have 4 windows and lots of natural light. This is our view:

Our courtyard: it’s not sexy, but we just leave home if we need to see some excitement

So it’s not a view of the cathedral or the river, but it’s fine. Having interior courtyard views means that we do not live over the street and listen to traffic and tipsy hoodlums all night. Our little street (and I mean little – it’s one-way and I’ve almost had my hand taken off by the side mirror on a car speeding by) gets very busy, but I like it. Some scenes from our street:

A produce store

The cafe bar next door to our building

The plaza closest to our apartment

The streets in Sevilla are mostly tiny and windy. As you wander down the little cobblestoned streets around the city, you might see a stray dog, an old man looking out his window, a mother escorting two children in their school uniforms and a catholic church squeezed in between the other 3 or 4-story buildings that line the street.


Typical street in Sevilla

I especially like to look into the open doors of apartment buildings or homes. I will almost always see a beautifully tiled entryway opening to a beautiful interior courtyard. Typical Spanish architecture. The front of a home may be shuttered up and seemingly impenetrable, but inside is a courtyard, open to the sky, that all the rooms open onto. I’m reminded of the huge homes in the French Quarter of New Orleans that have the same ingenious design.

Example of the ubiquitous tiles you see all over Sevilla

Archivo General de Indias

Hey folks, Brad here. I know y’all are all asking yourselves, “what is it exactly that Brad is doing again?” Sometimes I ask myself that very question.

El Archivo General de Indias (AGI), or the General Archive of the Indies, is the official repository of all documentation in Spain relating to the colonial administration of Spain’s American colonies: from Cuba to Chile, Mexico to the Philippines (yes, the Philippines were part of Spain’s “American” colonies).

The Archive is housed, as Neely has mentioned, right next door to Seville’s Cathedral in the 16th-century Casa Lonja ("LONE-ha"), the old merchant exchange. Spain’s King Carlos III, in 1785, established the archive here because Seville had been the point of departure for the Americas in the early colonial years and was the homebase of the Spanish colonial enterprise.



Today, the AGI houses one of the most important collections of colonial documents in the world. Here you can read letters from Cortés, Columbus, and even George Washington. But I am mostly interested in looking at things that give me a better idea of what was going on in the city of Tetzcoco, Mexico, in the earliest years of colonialism.

Cortés and Malinche are greeted by a group of indigenous rulers in a scene from the Lienzo of Tlaxcala.

I’ve really only just started to dig through the documents, but I’ve already found a very interesting case. It’s from the year 1537, which is earlier than anything I’ve seen in Mexico (the Spanish climate is a little easier on 500-year old paper), and it’s about 290 pages long. It’s a lawsuit brought by a group of indigenous leaders from one town against the indigenous leaders of my city of Tetzcoco.

The coat of arms of the city of Tetzcoco.

From this document, one gets a sense of the kinds of things that were happening in this very early period—only 15 years after the fall of the Aztec capital to Cortés! Mostly, I see that early colonialism was a period when people were trying to figure things out. In this particular case, they test the Spanish legal system to see what it can do for them. “Will the Spaniards really give us these lands if we hire a lawyer and sue for them?” “Will they find out that they’re not really ours?”

If it weren’t for the handwriting, this would be a quick read. But as it is, it’s taken me about two weeks to get through half of it. Whew!

Here are some examples of the types of handwriting that I find in the archive (click for larger image):

Otra Boda

We are thinking of Kate and Fredo today! They are getting married in South Bend, IN tonight and we will definitely be there in spirit. Kate was in Brad's cohort at Tulane. We wish her and Fredo all the best!

En Mi Clase

On Monday, I began Spanish classes! A friend suggested that I check out a great program in the center of Sevilla. The program director tests you and places you in the appropriate level. Students may take classes for as many weeks as they wish (or as many as they can afford in my case.)

Happily, I was placed in the perfect level for me – and it wasn’t the complete beginner level! I already knew the alphabet, how to count to 100, how to say my name, age, and where I’m from. No beginner here!

This is our textbook. Just kidding – it’s actually the textbook of my dreams. Yummm . . . tacos!

In my class, I have 5 Dutch kids who just graduated from high school, a middle-aged Danish woman, 3 Germans and Korean. Guess what? All of them speak fluent English! Wow. Talk about feeling like the typical dumb American; I’m a one-lingual “Yanqui.” (That’s the nickname over here for Americans – it’s pronounced yankee.)

My class meets for 4 hours each morning – and by morning, I mean before 2 p.m. The class is very informal and enjoyable. In the first few days of class, José, our teacher, pointed out several oddities in my Spanish. I took a crash course in Spanish from a Peruvian in L.A. The Latin American Spanish I learned sounds pretty provincial to a Spaniard. Glad we’re starting to clear things up!

It seems like I'm jumping into classes so soon after we moved to Sevilla. But, I get so frustrated when I cannot communicate anything beyond, "Una botella de agua, por favor." I often understand what someone asks me, but I simply don't have the words to answer them. Just like anyone, I have a need to discuss meaningful things with other people. Yes, Brad and I converse, but poor Brad should not have to be the sole recipient of my chatter.

I have to admit that it's nice to chat with the students in my class (in English) just to talk to someone. Soon I hope to have a bar or cafe where I'm a regular. I hear that's a great way to get to know Spaniards. Maybe the bartender at my chosen hangout will teach me a new phrase each night. Como se dice "dry martini?"