wandering around Sevilla for a semester: I can’t possibly fit all of my 11 or so topics of the last two weeks into a single blog post.

So I’m starting simple, and as per request and my own general organizational tendencies I will explain for you all just what I’m doing here in Seville besides walking a lot and buying hot milk and chocolate powder packets at cafés for about 2 American dollars a pop.

There are some 300 American students with CIEE here in Seville, about 200 of which are Liberal Arts and under the same supposed language commitment as my group is. More of that in a sec. My group is 17 people (including 2 year-long girls) (and only 1 boy), and we’re Teaching Development, or TDP. We have a special English-teaching practicum of 4 hours a week teaching various ages (I got three year olds!) at rich schools in the city. (We don’t start for another two weeks.) One of our four semester classes is a class designed for the program, with an English grammar review, teaching methods, etc etc; another of our classes must either be Psychology of Learning a Second Language or Methodology of teaching something, of which I chose psychology. Our other two classes are electives; we’ll see whether I get the ones I picked. Most of the students in TDP are education majors. There, basic format.

The commitment is to only speak Spanish in all CIEE activities and in the CIEE building, the palacio.

The fountain in the patio of the palacio.

I’ll say right off that of course no one follows the commitment to the letter, no one I know. I’ll also say that the TDP group has a pretty good level of Spanish, and being a small group probably helps, but we speak more Spanish than I hear liberal arts kids speaking. (Shameless anecdote: last week in the computer lab about five American boys so obviously jocks it was painful to hear came in and were jawing away in English. I take my feeling of superiority where I can get it.)

Where I spent the first week and a half.

Right now we’re in the intensive session, a two-week class 3 hours a day; one week down. We took a placement test, and there are about 15 grammar class groups of varying levels and then 2 Cultural History of Spain groups of the highest level. I write Spanish well and I guess I impressed my oral interviewer with my argument for the institution of marriage, because I placed into the history class. I had really been looking forward to a grammar class as a nice review of everything I’ve forgotten these past 7 months, but alas, Antonio Rodriguez really felt that changing would be a bad decision, so here I remain, learning about mudéjar style and arcs of varying design and the musulmán presence in Spain. I hope Antonio remembers my bravery when I take his syntax class (ojalá).

I’ll cut this off here and move on to another topic in another post… Here are some more pictures.