Más Económica

Alan may have lucked out on the getting the senora with air conditioning, but I lucked out by getting a roommate and a shower. Our group of CIEE teachers and I thought that the mental image of Alan sitting down, taking a bath, and scrubbing himself clean was hilarious.

Speaking of senoras - I am told constantly reminded on how to save money on utilities. Let me be brief, and just give you a few examples of how we save money around here. As well as a few stupid rules from my senora.

• I went to bed last night with the fan on high, and when I woke up it was mysteriously turned off. So while I was in a deep sleep, my senora opened my door sometime during the night, turned my fan off, as if I wasn’t going to sweat for the rest of the night.
• Speaking of fans, my ceiling fan is from the 1800s. So, I asked her if she minded if I went to El Corte Ingles and bought a personal small fan for sleeping. Nope, not allowed. – “no mas ventiladores, mas economica”.
• I normally leave either my cell phone, iPad, or laptop plugged in to charge when I go run errands. Every time I return, my things are unplugged.
• She unplugs the WiFi internet at nighttime as if it costs a tremendous amount of money to keep the router turned on. There’s not a set time that she turns it on and off, so we never know when we will have an internet signal. This causes problems for a serious college football fan.
• There is no hot water in the house, so my showers are quite cold. Sometimes this is good, because a cold shower will at least let me quit sweating for 15-20 minutes.
• After our meals, we try to help clean the kitchen. Put dishes in the dishwasher and put away items that need to be refrigerated. Senora told us today that she didn't want us to put things in the refrigerator anymore because we put fingerprints on her metallic finish and she had to clean them off. This new rule just about took me over the edge! 

Alan lives across the river in the part of town called Triana. I live in the center of Sevilla on Calle Feria. The weather is finally starting to cool down now that we’re moving into September. We started our 4-week immersion course with Spanish classes from 9am-1pm. Following our classes, each of us will normally head home to eat the lunch that our senora has prepared. It’s common for Spaniards to eat lunch between 2-3pm and make it their biggest meal of the day, which is followed by a light dinner. Both of our senoras essentially force-feed us. They prepare twice as much food than we would normally eat in America and expect us to eat everything. Then, there lies a serious problem when we don’t particularly like the meal. Overall, the food prepared for us has been descent. Some dishes are great, some are terrible. We’re both trying to keep an open mind and try everything.

The menu of foods that our senoras cook seems to be pretty similar. Here’s an example:

Breakfast: 4 pieces of toast and jelly, juice

Lunch: Gazpacho, Meat, vegetable or starch, fruit or yogurt

Dinner: Meat, Vegetable or starch, fruit or yogurt

So, we’ve been here for about two and a half weeks now. We’ve taken advantage of our first two weekends by traveling to some of the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever seen. The slideshows of pictures are posted on the blog, or you can just click this link to view to Steven's Picasa Web Albums.

During our first weekend in Sevilla, a large group of us went to Cadiz on the Atlantic coast of Spain. It was a beautiful beach with tooons of people. The beach was chaos because it was the end of August, also known as the end of the summer. The second weekend, we went to Marbella with 5 guys. It was a much more elegant beach with a more relaxed atmosphere. It’s a town with more of a tourist attraction. We stayed at Hostal del Pilar and paid €15/night. We really enjoyed staying at the Hostal as the owners were Scottish and extremely accommodating.