Play, Soccer, Birthday

For the first time since I have been here, the entire family was at home. The mother and the 5 youngest kids came home from the beach on Monday afternoon. We ate dinner in shifts because one of the two tables in the dinning room was full of clean laundry. We don’t all fit at one table. We had lunch with 11 people today, the most so far. I love the mom, she cleaned for hours on Monday, the kitchen and bathroom had gotten really messy while just the oldest kids were living at home. Everything is neat and organized and she shops once or twice a day so there is tons of food. She is also a really good cook and feeds me a ton. They always do. When the table is set they always point me to the seat with a plate with twice as much food as everyone else.

My class went to see a play on Tuesday night. It was during the Real Betis – Liverpool soccer game. Quite a few Liverpool fans were in town to go to the game. Unfortunately, I had to go see the play and we had an exam on it the next day. Jesus text messaged me an update on the game. Betis played poorly to start and fell into a 2-0 deficit. They played much better in the second half, but lost 2-1 in the end. Anyways, the play was Llanto, based on a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca. The poem (and subsequently the play) is about a matador in the 1920s that Lorca fell in love with (he was gay) and then the matador was gored by a bull and died. We read the poem earlier that day and the play was a very dramatized interpretation of it. There was beautiful singing and the first half of the play was really good, it was simple and the music carried the play. The second half was full of women dancing horizontally on a wall, held up by rope and harness, men with shaven heads danced around and the dead bullfighter was hanging on a cross, he was glorified as a god. It got kinda weird. The theater was unbelievable. It was in the city's old port building, though it is several blocks from the river. It was built in the 12th century so maybe the river ran a different course back then. It was largely ignored for years until arqueology students began working on it recently and uncovered more and more. It is the port that Christopher Columbus embarked from on his second and third trips to the New World. It’s a huge, empty stone building, only a little of the original roof is left. A small stage covered in sand, some light fixtures and a set of bleachers is all that’s in there now, along with a few displays on the history of the building.

After the play, which started at 10 pm, we went to a nearby bodega (a tapas bar that specializes in wine) and drank moscatel wine. It’s a really sweet wine made in a small town nearby. The wine was brown-colored, it looked like brandy and it tasted like caramel, it was really sweet. I thought it was gross. There are many world renowned sweet wines and vino fino (sherry wine) made Andalucia. I’ll try to sample a little taste of everything, there are so many different wines here, but it might take me awhile to start to really like wine.

I watched a lot of soccer this week. The first round of the European Champions League was this week. Barcelona won 2-0. Real Madrid lost 3-0. I also played soccer at a place with a ton of dirt fields at the edge of the city. There were about 12 americans and 12 sevillanos. Some of them were really good and I was covered in dust after playing for almost two hours.

At Plaza Alfalfa on Wednesday night our favorite bar ran out of Cruzcampo beer. I met some more cool people, some guys from Barcelona this time.

In class on Thursday we learned about phone etiquette and phone language and then simulated phone calls. That was really helpful. We also did an exercise where the professor read numbers out loud and we tried to write them all down. It was surprisingly hard, but I also realized that just a little bit of practice can make a huge difference with things like numbers. Seisenta (60) and setenta (70) are really hard to distinguish when spoken quickly. You gradually develop an ear for spanish pronunciation and every syllable starts to stand out.

We celebrated Jesus’ 25th birthday today at lunch today with none other than some fine spanish ham. We bought a smoked pig’s leg for his birthday. I also gave him the University of Wisconsin coffee mug that I brought – he loved it. I discovered a ham store the other day with hundreds of pig’s legs; I want to take a picture of it sometime. The fried bread at lunch was really good too. I had ice cream for the first time at home too. I also had some really good banana gelato with fudge and walnuts the other day. The italian gelato is really good here. Friday night I am going out with Jesus and his friends, he’s been waiting to take me out for a long time. I had regular sliced bread for the first time here at dinner. We had grilled ham and cheese sandwiches. I eat lots of bread at every single meal, its always baguettes and rolls. We had ice cream cake, Jesus received gifts from the family and we I took a few pictures of the whole family. Everyone but the oldest daughter, Alicia was there.