Day 42

Mondays are rough, and first days of class are tough. This day, however, was not too terrible for me.

My class schedule for this module is more like what I'm used to: Ethics meets M-Th from 8:30-10:30, and Language and Culture of Spain (LAC) meets M-Th from 10:35-12:35. So it's basically back-to-back morning classes, which is what I always do.

Breakfast at the hostel starts at 8, so Katie and I went down for that with the rest of our class. The breakfast is not so bad: there's different kinds of bread for toast and different spreads to use as well, there's sweet things like mini donuts, there's cereal, and then there's coffee, hot chocolate, juice, and water. I've had better breakfasts at other hostels, but y'all know I can't eat a whole lot in the morning anyway.

Ethics seems like it'll be a chill enough class. My professor, Carlos, is really relaxed, and barely speaks English so he knows he can't expect too much out of us. We had sort of a general "what is ethics" discussion, and then he let us out an hour early. We watch movies every Tuesday, and we're allowed to suggest movies, and pretty much our entire grade is based off of a presentation that we can do on any topic we want and participation. Easy enough!

I heard that our professor for LAC, Carmen, was pretty intimidating (or a harsh grader or something), but so far I really like her. She's basically the Spanish version of my mom's cousin Martha Lynn, so I enjoy that. The course seems like it'll be pretty similar to the City of Rome class, including class trips on Thursdays (and on the two Fridays where we have make-up classes).

It was actually really rainy for the majority of the day, so we really didn't do a whole lot. It was Monday, though, so it was LAUNDRY DAY. And you already know SOMETHING had to happen on my first laundry day in Seville.

Basically, there are three washers and one dryer. I was already planning on not using the dryer, so that was no big deal. The washers, though, were not exactly what I expected. Well, two of them are identical to the ones we had in Rome, but those were both in use. I got stuck with the super old school one that has no timer and would only let you pay with two 1€ coins and one .50€ coin. Of course, I had enough change, but needed one more 1€ coin. I went to the front desk to get change for a five (yes, we can do that here--at least that's nice), but he could only give me a million .50€ coins. Ugh. Thank GOD when I ran back up to the room (clothes currently in the machine unattended) Katie was able to trade me for a 1€ coin. Also thank God that the machine worked, even though I had to guess at how long it took (I wanna say it was 29 minutes). Finding space to hang/lay out everything in my room was a challenge, but luckily I have a lot of space above my bed on the mattressless top bunk.

When the rain let up a bit, Katie and I went to the grocery store to get some snacks (I got apples, Pringles, and gum). At 4, we had our first weekly meeting where we got all the meal tickets that we'll have for our entire time here. It's only 50€ worth, so that kind of sucks, but it's whatever. The food here is cheap. Raúl also told us about all the activities they scheduled for us this week that we could sign up for outside the office after the meeting. It was kind of a hectic process, but I managed to quickly sign up Katie, Gina, and myself for every listed activity (with the exception of a special churro breakfast on Thursday which takes place during my Ethics class). I'd list the activities, but I'd rather just wait and write about them when I actually do them!

I spent quite a lot of the day just chilling, and continued to do so after the meeting until we went down to get dinner in the cafeteria at 8. Dinner was actually decent! There were these spring roll-type things that I actually really liked, and of course I also had fries and salad. I decided to be super European and dip my fries in mayonnaise (and kind of pretended like it was ranch). Eva and Elyse sat with us, and we had some very enjoyable conversations.

Guess where we went after dinner? Mercado Provenzal! I love that place. I can't remember if I said so, but one tinto de verano only costs 1.70€! And a big beer (cerveza extra larga) is only 1.20€! It's crazy. A bunch of other people from school ended up being there too, which was cool, but weirdly enough none of the University of Sevilla students were around like they were on Thursday night. Guess Monday night is study night for them.

We explored the hostel a little more later, mainly checking out the St. John's lounge. I'm going to be taking my online College Jeopardy! test in there, so I wanted to make sure it was legit. It's pretty nice.

So yeah, not a horrible Monday! Not the most exciting, but the end of it was pretty fun.