A Typical Day in the Life of Kerianne and Emily

Here's what a typical day in Sevilla looks like for Emily and I:

8:00 - beep beep beep beep, the alarm goes off. Emily quickly hops out of bed, me on the other...well I take a few minutes to get out of bed. I'll put it at that. Also, I get a little nervous that our Senora (Blanca) is going to bombard me with questions in the morning. Eight in the morning is way to early to speak Spanish.

8:35 - breakfast! Which always (I mean always) consists of orange juice, coffee :) , fruit, and small toast type things that we eat with peanut butter, jam and sometimes nutella. You don't eat much for breakfast here, which makes Emily and I super hungry for lunch later on in the day.

8:48 - This is the latest we can leave to go to school. One day we left around 8:50, but that walk to school wasn't too fun. We're very grateful that we live pretty close to our school though. We've heard some people have to leave at 8:30.

9:00-12:20 - clase! We're both in the intermediate level of classes and they're going quite well. Learning lot of spanish :) After class we either respond to e-mails, check facebook, do our homework, chat with friends or go running. We enjoy running next to the river or in Parque de Principes!

2:00 - finally lunch! We work up quite an appetite so once two hits we are ready to eat! Lunches here are the bigger meal and Blanca is an excellent cook! After lunch sometimes we take naps :). Well not sometimes, quite often, haha! Also, recently we got access to our roof, so we've been enjoying laying out in the sun! We hope to come back with a nice tan! The weather here is starting to get beautiful! We also do our studying in the afternoon and enjoy going to get a cafe con leche!

9:00 - dinner time! We're quite happy we eat at nine (as late as that is). Many others don't eat until 10:30!  Everyone eats lunch and dinner later here, this is something we've definitely had to adjust to. After dinner, sometimes we hang with some new awesome friends or just have a chill night. It all depends on how we're feeling!

There ya have it. What a typical week day looks for us :) This weekend Emily and I are headed to Palma de Mallorca. We don't have classes on Monday or Tuesday so we jumped on this opportunity to travel a bit :) Talk to ya'll later!

Odds and Ends

Hello all!

Wow, this week has absolutely flown by and Kerianne and I have officially been in Spain for over a month! I think we have both hit the stage in our study abroad journey where we are starting to integrate into the culture and make this fantasy Spain world, our real world. These new, crazy things that we have been seeing and experiencing for a month are now becoming more normal and natural. The Spain of our dreams is now our reality, and this is such a good place for us to be in our emotional lives here. I think that it is easy to say that Blanca´s residence (our senora) on Concha Espina Drive is our new temporary home.

We have both had our shares of ups and downs so far on the trip with emotions, language barriers, and feeling totally lost in a country and culture that is not our own. We miss home, friends, and family but are doing our best to take everything in here while we can and live it up! There are so many blessings that God has poured on us already on our trip.

Our Senora is the sweetest woman alive. Kerianne and I laugh and joke around with Blanca at every single meal. She is absolutely histarical and, thankfully, she likes us and thinks we are pretty funny too. :) I don´t know if we can even explain it over the internet, this woman would help us or get us anything that we would ever need... She bought us peanut butter for goodness sakes.

We have also met so many cool people here and are beginning to make really close friendships. We are both in different prayer groups and have begun to make really impacting relationships with the girls in our different groups. It is sometimes hard to make really close relationships with people that you are only going to know for 4 months, but we wanted to set that fact aside, and really get to know people here. So thankfully, God blessed us with some pretty cool people to get to know. :)

And the food really is good (which is sometimes a problem, and the reason that we have started running every day). And there are so many things to do all the time! It is hard to know when to save money and not buy a coffee, and when to just throw money to the wind and get a grande.

Anyways, we just thought we should give you a little update on how we are doing, because it has been a while. Thank you faithful followers of our blog, even when we don´t blog as much as we need to. We will try to give you more updates this week!

P.S. We went to the Carnaval of Cadiz yesterday, which is the third largest carnaval in the world. So stay tuned to hear how it went. And next weekend we are off to the tropical island of Palma with three of our friends!

Grab your bocadillo, we're going to Cordoba!

Folks -

If you're wondering what a bocadillo is...it's a sandwich in a packed lunch! 

Last Friday we had the opportunity to go on our first school field trip in Spain! We felt like little kids again! :) No, we did not ride in a yellow school bus, but we did go with all our classmates to Cordoba! It was about a 2 hour bus ride through the country roads in which Emily and I slept through most of. 

As soon as we got to Cordoba we were graced with this view:

The city of Cordoba is an ancient city that was very important in Spain and it's history. This bridge was constructed by the Romans, a very long time ago. As we walked across the bridge there were three street performers playing instruments. These are the little things that we are beginning to love about Spain! Probably the most important building in Cordoba is the mosque/cathedral/christian church located in the center of the city. This building has been re-made into all three worship centers over the ages and has played an important role the religious history within the city. 

Here is a picture of the bell tower that used to be rung to call the muslims to pray 5 times a day: 

Inside of the mosque/cathedral/church: 

As you can see, the cathedral is outstanding. One of the most beautiful buildings that we have been in. The architecture is mind blowing. There are hundreds of columns within the cathedral, each one of them slightly different because the constructors decided it would be easier to take the columns from places that they conquered. This saved on both time, money and work labor.  

In the afternoon we had some free time to roam around the city. We went with friends to check out the palace where the King and Queen used to stay when they visited Cordoba. Inside the palace there is a beautiful garden, that we unfortunately couldn't see because it costed too much money, but here is the view from the outside. 

It was a wonderful day spent with classmates in Cordoba. We ended the day with another power nap on the way home to our city, Seville :) 

P.S. Our bocadillo was tasty!