Day 39

Sleeping in was MARVELOUS, and was made possible by the fact that this room actually has really good curtains! The sun crept in every morning in Rome and bothered me, even through my sleeping mask. But I don't have that problem here!

I guess I was under the impression that breakfast lasted until 10 am, but when Katie and I went down around 9:35, it was already over. On our way back up to the room, we ran into Gina, who was just about to find out that she missed breakfast, too. The three of us ended up going out to find our own breakfast.

The dining scene here is much more difficult to navigate as a tourist than it was in Rome. Meal times are super late and weird, places are even less predictable about days and hours that they're open, and so on. We looked in a couple places before finding some cheap, AMAZING chocolate pastries at one little bakery. They were soooooooooooooo good. After, we went to another place where Katie and Gina chugged some coffee (because we had orientation and were running late).

Our orientation session was really chill, and only about 45 minutes long. After, Raúl took us on a walking tour down our main street, which was pretty helpful. 

At some point in the morning, Katie and I had brought down our door handle to show the guy at the front desk that we needed maintenance. Apparently this problem was fixed right away, but not without hiccups. You see, after the walking tour, when we tried to get back into our room, the door was totally stuck. Our keys went in and turned and everything, but the door just would not budge at all. The front desk lady and the maintenance guy insisted on trying every key possible before finally realizing they needed to drill the door open and replace the lock and handle completely. So after about an hour and a half of all this nonsense, we were finally allowed back into our room with new keys, only so that we could finally head out to explore some with Gina.

We had lunch at a cute place down our main street. I had a "crepe" (more like a tortilla) with cheese and spinach that had caramelized onions on top. It was delicious! The Spanish are MUCH better at cooking spinach than the Italians are. They actually use seasoning here.

We didn't have much time before our orientation Spanish class, so we just walked up a little ways to Plaza Americana, where there are about a million pigeons (but at least it's in a pretty park).

We were divided into two different Spanish classes; Gina was in mine, but Katie was in the other class. Our teacher was really funny, and taught us some good info about life in Seville. He explained that the fake sangria we drank the night before is actually called tinto de verano, and is very popular among the locals, while real sangria is hardly had by them at all. 

All this talk about tinto de verano made Gina and me really want one, so once we got out of class, we fetched Katie and went to Mercado Provenzal once again (just for one glass this time). We wanted to see more of the city center, so then we walked up that direction for probably an hour and a half or so, occasionally stopping to take pictures or to pop into stores.

The bullfighting arena!

We had a nice, long walk back to our area where we got a fabulous dinner of fried fish (really should be called assorted fried seafood) and French fries. Oh, AND a pitcher of real sangria! So good. We were kind of freaking out over the fish that still had heads and scales and stuff, but we ripped them apart and ate them anyway. Also, I ate octopus for the first time and really liked it! There was one thing that I think was like fried grouper with lemon-garlic sauce that we were all completely obsessed with. We will most definitely be going back for that alone.

Fish are friends, AND food

So other than the stressful door incident in the middle of the day, Day 39 turned out to be perfectly lovely. I really, really like Seville a lot already.